Black and British: A Forgotten History, by David Olusoga. Reviewed by Tom Devine

Macmillan, £25

Review by Tom Devine

DAVID OLUSOGA begins his history of black people in Britain from the earliest times to today with an evocative description of Bance Island which lies about 20 miles upriver from Freetown, the capital of the African state of Sierra Leone. On it lies the crumbling ruin of a slave fortress built in the 17th century and extended in the 18th. There African captives, still traumatised by the slave raids on their native villages, were divided with no concern for family connections into suitable batches by age, physique and gender for transportation across the Atlantic to undergo a lifetime of unrelenting toil on the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of the British Caribbean islands and North American colonies.

The mouldering remains of the slave castle are grim reminders of the many years of black exploitation, cruelty and suffering between the mid 17th and early 19th centuries when Britain was by far the dominant nation in the North Atlantic slave trade, shipping to the Americas more of the enslaved than all other European countries combined. Until the abolition of the nefarious commerce in 1807, ships of the British empire carried over 3.4 million Africans to a life of miserable servitude on the plantations or an early death beforehand during the horrors of the Middle Passage.

Olusoga, however, fails to mention that in the period in the 18th century when most slaves were ‘processed’, Bance Island was a Scottish-owned enterprise, with its own two-hole golf course, which shipped over 13,000 Africans to the West Indies between the late 1740s and early 1780s. This is not a minor omission but regrettably typical of a volume which purports to be a history of black people in Britain but in essence almost exclusively focuses on their story in England. The famous court case in Edinburgh which freed Joseph Knight in 1778 merits a short paragraph and there is also a reference to so-called ‘race riots’ in Glasgow in 1919. These instances apart, the Scottish experience is ignored. There is no entry for Scotland in the index and the recent range of publications on the role of Scots in the slave system and its economic impact on the history of the country finds no place in the bibliography. Ireland and Wales fare even worse. A four nations history of black people in Britain this is not. The book is a companion volume to a forthcoming BBC TV series which is to be screened in the New Year. Let us hope that it manages to plug some of the yawning gaps in the coverage of the current volume.

This myopic anglocentric approach is a great pity because Olusoga’s prose is lucid and accessible and within its regional limitations the story he tells is remarkable and often moving. He is entirely correct not to confine the book to people of African descent who lived in England but to project the scope of the book to the global diaspora of black people, thus enabling him to deal at length with the fundamentally vital issue of British involvement in slavery and how that has influenced racial views down to the present. Among the topics which especially intrigued this reviewer were attitudes to races of colour in early modern England, the ‘trophy’ young black pages, ornately dressed and presented, which adorn so many portraits of the elites in the 18th century, the treatment of American black serviceman by the host society during the Second World War and the origins of immigration controls on ‘New Commonwealth’ citizens in the later 20th century. All of these subjects and others reveal how black history has impacted strongly on England’s story, not simply during the post-1960 decades of mass Afro-Caribbean immigration, but for centuries before that.

Sometimes, however, the judgements do not convince. The author laments at one point what he calls “the whitewashing of British history and the wilful forgetting of slavery which has now lasted almost as long as slavery itself”. This he asserts amounts to a cultural blind spot which has prevented a proper discussion of the role of black people in the national story. That is certainly a correct analysis for the century or more after the abolition of slavery within the British empire in 1833, not least in Scotland, which has suffered from a serious case of historical amnesia about such matters until the very recent past. For England, however, the judgement is manifestly unfair. Since the 1950s a number of distinguished scholars have demonstrated in rich detail the scale of English involvement in slavery and its effects. Indeed, and ironically, Olusoga himself relies to a considerable extent on their works to write his own book. In addition, important museums on the subject are now well-established in Liverpool, Bristol and London, conveying to their many visitors the full horror of the age of slavery.

Olusoga is on much firmer ground when he tries to deal with the historical origins of racism. Here his discussion is rendered even more potent as a result of his own life experience. Growing up in the north east of England in the 1970s and 1980s, the racial tensions were so grievous as to make him him feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain. He writes eloquently that, “Almost every black or mixed race person of my generation has a story of racial violence to tell. These stories range from humiliation to hospitalisation. They are raw, visceral, highly personal and rarely shared beyond family circles.”

It is entirely appropriate then that the factors which have created such hatreds merit close examination. Too easily they have been blamed mainly on the impact of mass black and ethnic minority immigration since the 1950s. This may well have added fuel to the proverbial fire but it is clear that the latent prejudices were already long in place. This is confirmed inter alia by the treatment of black soldiers by the British state during and after the Great War. Unlike their French counterparts from North Africa, they were not allowed to take part in combat. Disgracefully, despite many of them having fallen on the field of battle when carrying out other roles, black soldiers were not even permitted to take part in the great victory parade in Whitehall after the end of hostilities.

Until the 17th century attitudes to black people in England seem to have been at worst ambiguous but certainly devoid of the kind of malicious racism which has scarred parts of British society in the last half century. The legacy of slavery, a world in which black men and women were seen either as racially inferior to whites or often as scarcely human at all, was very influential, even after the slave system passed into history. During the great abolitionist campaigns of Victorian times, enslaved blacks were depicted under God as the brothers of white people. Yet, despite the inordinate national pride in the achievement of abolition, racial stigma endured and indeed was fortified as Britain’s imperial rule expanded across the world during the Victorian era. Black skin remained a powerful signifier of “the other”.

In parallel, the ideas of social Darwinism and a new pseudo-scientific racism started to become fashionable. These categorised humans into different racial types and located blacks at the very bottom of the hierarchy as indolent, feckless and immoral. One of the leading lights of these beliefs (though rarely mentioned today by his admirers ) was “the Scottish sage”, Thomas Carlyle, who once referred to black people as “two legged cattle”, whose freedom from enslavement after 1833 he condemned as having ruptured the critical natural relationship between higher and lower human breeds.

So it was that ideas of race emerged to full robustness over centuries, as millions of people came to see the world in terms of racial supremacy and inferiority. Even the intellectual demolition of race theories in more recent times has not entirely removed such ideas from the human mind. When the full enormity of the Holocaust was revealed after 1945 it might have been expected that racist thinking would speedily have been consigned to history. Sadly, as David Olusoga’s childhood memories confirm, that did not happen.