I’ve just finished reading Britain’s Slave Traders, a new book by William A. Pettigrew. It’s about the people who took part in the African slave trade as investors, organisers, and supporters. (It is not a history of the experiences of trafficked Africans.)

The author aims to rebalance the common understanding of English and British* participation in the trafficking of African people. Traditionally, we have tended to prioritise the end of the trade when talking about this crime against humanity. The beginning and the middle are less widely understood. Pettigrew traces this “national amnesia” back to the self-congratulatory discourse surrounding the abolition movement itself.

My history education left me with the impression that slave trading was the responsibility of merchants and ships’ captains. Surprisingly to me, this is how the trade was framed in abolitionist discourse.

I didn’t know that it was also encouraged and cultivated by the monarchy, parliament, the aristocracy, major institutions, leading figures in intellectual, cultural, and scientific history, and thousands of investors across the country.

I didn’t know that discussions about the slave trade were tied in with conversations about economics, monopolies, English freedom, the prospering of English society, and international rivalries. I also wasn’t aware of how closely famous historical figures such as Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Charles II, Samuel Pepys, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Sir Godfrey Kneller, John Arbuthnot (inventor of the John Bull character), and Voltaire were entwined in the story. Or of the connections between the slave trade and art, the growth of the stock market, and regional development (e.g. Liverpool).

Certain things run through long periods of English history like threads through a tapestry. If you don’t look at them, you don’t really see the full picture of England.

The break with Rome, subsequent persecution of Catholics, fear of invasion by Catholic powers, and national self-definition as Protestant-not–Catholic is an example of this kind of thread. For centuries, numerous things were said and done because of it. If we don’t look at the attitudes to Roman Catholics across those years, we’re left with a huge hole in our understanding of English history.

England’s callous role in the African slave trade is another such thread. It lasted for more than two centuries. When we don’t understand the extent of English complicity in the trade, we don’t truly understand the period. It touched many people’s lives in multiple ways. As Pettigrew explains, the profits of human trafficking helped to reshape British society.

Not understanding also affects our ability to think about the past’s continuing impact on the present.

I think Pettigrew’s book will help British readers have better global, national, and local conversations about the trafficking of African people.

I also think it should be on the reading list of every person interested in the England of the 16th to 18th centuries, whatever their main scholarly interest.

I suspect that people who aren’t genuinely interested in history probably won’t read the whole book. At times, it reads like a London-focused political and economic history, which is not to everyone’s taste.

But I don’t think that’s a problem. If Pettigrew’s research seeps into the national general knowledge over the next few years and becomes part of our commonly held story, the book will have done its job.

Before reading Britain’s Slave Traders, I wondered if it would change how I felt about the UK’s past. I think it has, but on a sliding scale.

My view of Elizabeth I (reigned 1558 to 1603) and her courtiers hasn’t really changed. The Tudors were brutal monarchs living in a bloody age.

Reading about Charles II and the aristocrats who encouraged the slave trade, I started to think seriously about the case for reparations. The Crown owes its current existence to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Therefore, I’d argue that the Crown’s past involvement with slavery is still relevant to the Crown today. In a metaphysical sense, the Crown is an ancient institution – far older than whoever is monarch at the time.

The book has changed my view of the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment. By this point, society was drawing closer to our modern way of thinking. The evidence of slavery’s brutality was available, but its supporters developed and embraced ideas that dehumanised Africans to justify their continued profit-seeking. Sir Hans Sloane witnessed the brutality of slavery firsthand, but pioneered influential racist theories that excused it in the minds of his contemporaries. I’m disgusted by him.

I had expected better of the 18th century because I was distracted by the sensibility, elegance, and sophistication of its cultural and intellectual life. It is especially galling that liberty was part of the national image at a time when increasing numbers of Britons were taking away the freedom of Africans.

I also wonder how much eyewitness information passed around by word of mouth among the general population, at all levels. The people who worked directly with slave traders and their ships had friends and families. How many stories circulated and what did the average person think?

* I’ve deliberately not mentioned Scotland and Wales in this blog post as Pettigrew’s book largely focuses on England. It does, however, mention the significance of slavery to Welsh copper, as well as to Scotland and the Act of Union.