In Our Time - The Zong Massacre

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious events off Jamaica in 1781 and their background. The British slave ship Zong, having sailed across the Atlantic towards Jamaica, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown. Even for a slave ship, the Zong was overcrowded; those murdered were worth more to the ship dead than alive. The crew said there was not enough drinking water to go round and they had no choice, which meant they could claim for the deaths on insurance. The main reason we know of this atrocity now is that the owners took their claim to court in London, and the insurers were at first told to pay up as if the dead slaves were any other lost goods, not people. Abolitionists in Britain were scandalised: if courts treated mass murder in the slave trade as just another business transaction and not a moral wrong, the souls of the nation would be damned. But nobody was ever prosecuted.The image above is of sailors throwing slaves overboard, from Torrey's 'American Slave Trade', 1822WithVincent Brown Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard UniversityBronwen Everill Class of 1973 Lecturer in History and Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of CambridgeAnd Jake Subryan Richards Assistant Professor of History at the London School of EconomicsStudio production: Hannah Sander Producer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in 1781, the British slave ship, Zon, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown, so that their value could be claimed back on insurance.

The main reason we know of this atrocity now is that the owners took their claim to court in London and the insurers were at first told to pay up treating the slaves as goods, not people. Abolitionists in Britain were scandalised if courts treated mass murder in the slave trade as just another business transaction and not a moral wrong,

the souls of the nation will be damned but nobody was ever prosecuted. We need to discuss the Zong Massacre are Bronwyn-Averill class of 1973 lecturer in history and fellow at Goneville and Keys College University of Cambridge, Jake Sir Brian Richards, assistant professor of history at the London School of Economics, and Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Vincent Brown, how well developed was a transatlantic slave trade at this point around 1781?

Well, the Transatlantic trade trade was extremely well developed for the British Empire by the late 18th century. The British, or I should say the English first got involved with transatlantic slaving from Africa in the 1560s with the voyages of Japtain John Hawkins, following in the wake of the Portuguese explorations of Atlantic Africa in the 15th century and the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century, the British got involved fairly late. And they really didn't get down to the serious business of slave trading until the 17th century when they formed a series of trading companies with royal charters, the Guinea Company in 1651, the Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa in 1663, and the Royal African Company, most famously,

in 1672. By 1698, they had opened the trade to private businessmen, and through the 18th century, the British emerged as the preeminent slave traders in the world, even as they were competing with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danish, and the French. During the peak years in the 1760s, the British embarked, I think, more than 42,000 captives a year. And over the entire course of the English and British Atlantic slave trade, they embarked about three million captive Africans in slave ships. It was a triangular trade, as I understand it.

Boats set off for England, carrying small arms and other things to Africa, the way they collected slaves, who themselves had been collected by the Africans, and took them to the West India's principally Jamaica, and then they took sugar back to England. So that was the triangular trade. Is that right? So that's right. The slave traders were quite opportunistic businessmen. And what they did was they look for places where slaves are widely available and they tried to facilitate the trade with their trade goods. Chief among those goods were European firearms. And so one of the things they would try to do was sell as many firearms as they could, which increased the scale of African warfare. And any time those African

policies went to war, oftentimes people would be captured, enslaved, sold to the Europeans. They came out to the Americas where they built up the fortunes of the plantations. And in fact, the slave plantations in the Caribbean were the most profitable colonies, the most profitable territories in the British Empire. And that would facilitate greater investments in the slave trade itself. At the time we're talking about, were the growing and significant objections in America and Britain to the slave trade? I mean, people would say things now and then, but were the significant objections? Yeah, so, I mean, the objections to slavery were continuous, obviously, mostly among people who were enslaved, who staged slave revolts throughout the entire period of the Transatlac

slave trade and slavery through the Americas. And slavery was distasteful, known to be distasteful, by anybody, including the people who were enslavers. And they sought to reserve enslavement for enemies and aliens. But it wasn't really until the mid-18th century that you had sustained objections coalescing into social movements. Bronwynne-Abrough, how did people in West Africa come to be sold to the traders? The trade ships tended to stay in the sea off the coast and slaves were brought to them. Half of the slaves, I'm told, where we read, were captives from wars.

But how did the people of West Africa come to be involved in it? The majority of people traded into Atlantic captivity had been trafficked to these ports on the coast, largely as war captives. So people seized in expansionary raids by sort of states that are developing. Or, you know, states that have been facilitated by the arrival of the guns that Vincent mentioned. Or in some cases, they've been household slaves who are sold to cover debts or sold times of famine. But by the end of the 18th century, this trade had far exceeded anything like this sort of scale or capacity of slavery and slave trading that had previously existed in West Africa.

So we're talking about a trade that grew from about 500 people a year being exported from West Africa in the early 16th century to about 80,000 per year in the last quarter of the 18th century. How did this trade affect society in West Africa? Can you give us one or two bullet points on that, please. Oh, bullets probably too appropriate word. But still, anyway, can you give us some points on that please? The slave trade eventually reorients coastal West Africa

towards an Atlantic commercial and political system and puts the slave traders in positions of growing political and commercial power. So it reshapes the power away from the sort of interior centers along the various rivers like the Niger or

the Gambia or the Senegal River towards the coast and gives the the middlemen who are operating the slave trade on the coast, a sort of increasing share of political power as well as commercial power. And it also helps to reshape consumption patterns. So people are accessing a wide variety of Atlantic and global goods through the slave trade. And the power that they gain through the control of the increasingly profitable trade ends

of reshaping politics and society in the region because of the sort of nature. Well, because the states that are responsible for guiding the trade have access to these Atlantic and global goods and therefore can manage the sort of distribution of those goods. Thank you very much. Jake Richards. The Zong was a Dutch ship originally. How did it come to be owned by British businessman? Yes, that's exactly right. So the Zong started life really in the crucible of Atlantic warfare. and it started as a Dutch slave ship called the Zorg, which ironically means care in Dutch. And in December 1780, the British declare war on the Dutch Republic. The reason why is that the Dutch have been supplying the American revolutionaries in North America and the French, against whom the British are at war for much of the 18th century,

with the equipment to build their own ships, what are called Baltic Stores. So in December 1780, the British really object to the Dutch, who have remained neutral, but are basically supplying their enemies with the stuff to make war. And so in December 1780, they declare war. They recall the British recall their ambassador from the Hague. And what they do then is send out letters of Mark to various private ships in the Atlantic world. A letter of Mark is basically an authorization to a private ship to capture enemy warships and receive money from the British state to do so.

And in December 1780, the Bristol ship alert gets one of these letters of Mark and it starts sailing up and down the West African coast to capture ships. And it manages to capture three Dutch slave ships, including the Zorg at Cape Coast Castle. And the Zorg is captured with 244 captives aboard. So bearing in mind that many of the Africans who were dealing with. with in this case had already experienced warfare and captivity to the Dutch before they even enter British hands. And in March 1781, the alert manages to arrange the sale of the Zorg at Cape Coast Castle and the purchasers of the Zorg are a famous slave trading family from

Liverpool called the Gregsons who run a syndicate business and they rename the ship the Zong install a new captain called Luke Collingwood as captain, and the Zong then spends another few months along the West African coast, trading for more captives. And I suppose one of the things to bear in mind in this case is that from the 21st century, I think our perspective is often that the slave traders were somehow private individuals and private commercial interests totally divorced from the state. But actually what we see in the 18th century is the British state's warfare aims

are fundamentally connected and served by those who are engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. So there's this real partnership between the British state and warfare and slave trading. What were the conditions like on the Zong when it set sail for the Caribbean? It was built to carry 200. There were more than 400 on board. There were only 17 sailors. And given that some of them had to sail the ship, that doesn't leave many to look after the 400. plus people, their men, women and children, feed them all the rest of it, on exercise, whatever it was.

The conditions on any slave ship were very difficult and oppressive. Typically, the adult men would be kept chained, lying down below deck, and would be let up onto deck maybe once a day to exercise, whereas the women and children would often be kept on the deck, not necessarily chained, but they would be kept behind what was called a wooden barricade. And this barricade was a large fence that ran horizontally across the deck of the slave ship and through which there would be slots which the crew could stick firearms or weapons to kill the women and children in the event of an insurrection.

So that's a general space of a slave ship in the 18th century. The Zong itself was a particularly oppressive place for several reasons. And as you say, one of them is that it has many more captives aboard than an average slave ship at this time. So it has 2.26 captives for every ton of the vessel that compares to 1.6 per ton for an average slaving vessel. So it's extra additionally packed. And then in terms of the crew, this slave ship has started as a Dutch ship.

And then after its capture, most of that crew leave the ship. And the Gregsons have to find their own sailors, their own slave ship crew, to board the Zong in West Africa. And this is a particularly difficult thing to do. So they're trying to find any sort of rag-tag spare European sailor who could serve aboard this ship. So that crew itself is being brought together in quite a motley and disorganised way.

And at the start of the journey from West Africa, there are 23 captives for every crew member that is serving aboard that vessel. And that compares to an average of about nine or ten captives, for a slave ship crew member in West Africa. So this is, you know, the crew have essentially a double workload as this ship is leaving West Africa. Thank you.

Vincent Brown, why did the crew start to throw and slave people overboard in the Caribbean before we get to the zone? Well, in general, slave ship crews through dead captive Africans overboard, because from the perspective of the commercial enterprise, they were spoiled cargo. They had lost their value. And there are quite chilling descriptions from slave ship sailors of sharks following in the wake of slave ships

because they knew they could feast upon the dead when they were thrown overboard. In the case of the Zong in particular, live Africans thrown overboard, they were thrown overboard in part because Captain Collingwood had told the crew that they were sick, they were dying anyway, and they were unlikely to fetch a high price at market. This would have been a special concern to the officers who generally enjoyed what they called the privilege of two slaves from the sale of the entire cargo. Now, what that meant was that when they averaged out

the value of the entire cargo as it sold in a place like Jamaica where they were heading, then each of the officers would get the privilege of the value of two of those slaves in the general. value. So what I think is important to remember here is that by throwing overboard sick and dying Africans who may or may not have survived, but certainly would have lowered the price, the general average price of the cargo, the officers were gaining in the average value of their privilege. The plea was that they were running out of water. And now obviously that matters on a ship. How much truth do you give to that suggestion? And how did it play?

court? Well, not a lot because from the trial transcripts we have or from Granville Sharpe's notes, what it looks like is that, you know, on November 29th, the crewmen came into the hold and selected 54 men, women, boys, and girls before they took them up to throw them overboard. And the next day they came for some 43 more. But the day after that, it rained. And the crew collected enough fresh drinking water to add, you know, what they said was a three-week supply to the ship's store. And then they came below to take 36 more Africans. And they managed to bind and jettison 26 of them before the final 10 of the entire 133 leapt overboard into the sea and escaped to drown themselves. So in those three days, Collingwood and the crew had caused the deaths of 132 Africans.

And the last of those were killed after they had collected fresh water. Thank you very much. Bronwyn, what role was insurance playing in situations like this? Yeah, so slave trading was a pretty risky business. The sort of risks to profit are numerous, not only sick slaves, but also slaves who rebel against the ship were often thrown overboard. And so the role of insurance was to sort of guarantee some level of profit for people who undertook these ventures. So some of the journeys took over a year to complete. Miscalculations could be costly, as in the case of the Zong, miscalculating the amount of water.

And so that meant the business of insurance had to adapt to the slave. trade conditions and it had a sort of wider effect on sort of ideas about insurance more generally. But for the purposes of slave ships, what's surprising about the Zong is actually that there are sort of no particular rules about thinking about slaves as different from other kinds of cargo. And this is what really stands out, I think, to the abolitionist campaigners later on, is that the application of that insurance policy to enslaved captives treats them as any other form of cargo. And so there is a sense that really the campaigners who sees on this, Granville Sharp and Alouda Aquiano and others, that actually what's really happening in the Zong is the sort of gross commodification and financialization of human beings.

for profit. So they're like basically committing, I mean, they basically accuse them of committing insurance fraud at some at some level, basically figuring out that they weren't going to earn enough on the open market. And so throwing them overboard before they bring down the sort of value of the ship more generally. So being able to make that profit through the insurance premium rather than through the sort of market price for slaves that would have been affected by the shortage of water. Thank you. Vincent Brown, what would have happened to the survivors in Jamaica? Do we have any evidence after they docked? They sold very well. Prices had gone up. It might have been better to keep the people on board in the first place.

What would have happened to the survivors in Jamaica? Well, we don't know exactly what happened to them. We do know that on December 28th, the merchant firm Coppels and Aguilar, offered 200 the survivors of the massacre for sale at Black River, which is in the parish of St. Elizabeth. They would have gone to planters in the parish of St. Elizabeth and probably also in Westmoreland Parish, both of which were prime sugar-growing regions in Jamaica at the time when prices were extremely high. And the question really is, how would they have told that story to other enslaved Africans and enslaved native blacks in Jamaica about this. knowledge that, you know, British slavers would kill them without readily apparent reason

in cold blood. That, I think, is really the question that hangs in the air for me. How did people tell the story the Zon on those Jamaican plantations? How did they tell it to their fellows? How did they tell it to their children? How does the memory, right, of that kind of violent, violent conflict between humanity and greed come down to us through the memories of those Africans and their ascendance. Absolutely. Do you have any evidence at all, Vincent, of that story, the Zong story, being taken up on the plantations at or around the time? I don't. I haven't done the oral historical work that it would have taken, and I haven't found evidence to show that there were Africans who were talking about this story on those Jamaican plantations. So I can't say from the historical

evidence that they were, but we can assume that that story is something that people told each other. Yeah, Bronwyn, have you any evidence of that before we move on? Not in the Jamaican context, but there is plenty of sort of oral histories done in West Africa to show the sort of ways that people started to think about their relationship to these slave traders on the coast and sort of rivers to avoid being captured in ideas about what, happens when you were boarded onto one of these ships, ideas about Europeans, you know, there was a lot of rumors that Europeans were eating people who ended up on these ships. So there's a sort of whole mythology that arises and a sort of a useful mythology that arises to keep people

sort of wary of the slave traders in the region. We also know that somebody at that time and walked through the docks at Liverpool and asking sailors, which is the worst place to go to? And all of them said Jamaica was the most dangerous and desperate. Is that right? That's right. By the early 19th century, there was a traveler who had said that Jamaica was the deadliest place in the British Empire, outside, of course, the forts on the West African coast,

when Jamaica was a place where no insurance company would insure any man's life on any terms, this traveler said. Back to your brother for a moment or two. Can you tell us about Equiano and Sharp, who began to bring the Zong to a wider public attention? It had bubbled way under the surface. It grew afterwards more and more into a scandal, but not much at the time, but the people who work to bring at them, those two, Aquano and Sharp. Can you tell us about them? Yeah, so Alada Aquiano is an interesting character in the sort of rise of British abolition.

He is a former slave who writes that he was enslaved in Nigeria, modern Nigeria, and traded in South Carolina, in Virginia. He lives aboard a Royal Navy ship for a while. Eventually, by the 1780s, he finds himself. In Britain, he buys his freedom and is working with other former slaves and other free. and other free Black Britons who are campaigning against the slave trade at a very sort of small level at this point and trying to raise awareness of the plights of the slave on the Middle Passage from Africa to the West Indies. And so he is looking for a case like this. And he brings it to the attention of Granville Sharp, who has a reputation as an abolition.

and a legal thinker about the sort of role of slavery in British society. And so together, Granville Sharp and Alouda Aquiano begin to publicize this case and take it to various parliamentarians who they have influence with to other people that they have heard of. So ministers and Quakers who have begun to sort of agitate against the slays. of trade, to show this as a sort of perfect example of the problems of greed and excess that the Middle Passage has sort of brought to Britain's shores. Thank you. Jake, what progress did Sharpe and Aquino make on the Zonke's?

We would think now that, oh, it was such a terrible scandal that once the whisper of it got round, there would be a conflagration of... of concern and fury, but you tell us what really happened then. Well, Sharp and Equiano did manage to make a bit of progress in the case. I mean, looking at Sharp's diary is really interesting, because as soon as he hears from Equiano that there's this case, he then immediately goes and meets with bishops and influential clergymen in the next couple of days to get them preaching about the horrors of the Zon case

and how this does implicate every Britain's soul in this kind of, traffic and mortal sin. And what Sharp does, who's essentially a kind of self-educated lawyer, is he goes to the court cases to record what happens. And the first case is a jury trial which Sharp isn't present at and is decided in favour of the owners that the insurers should pay out. And then the insurer's appeal, and in May 1783, the appeal is heard. And Sharp went to that appeal and transcribed the court case. And that's now the main source we have of the Zong case is Sharp's transcription. And what Sharp did was that he used that transcription to protest against the case being heard exclusively as an insurance case. He found this really objectionable

that Africans' lives were just being equated with money and that the only question here was one about liability for insurance claims for compensation. He said that actually this should be tried as a murder case, that the slave ship crew should be indicted for murder. And so what he does is he writes a long letter to the Admiralty, urging them to take up this case and to prosecute the slave ship crew for murder. And the Admiralty don't respond to that letter. And actually it's only just been found out in the last five years

that Sharp also wrote a new version of that letter, which he aimed to get published. And if that letter had been published, then it would have potentially been one of these explosive abolitionist pamphlets in 1783. We're not entirely sure. So the copy is in the British Library that Sharp wrote out perfectly by hand and sent to his publisher, who he'd worked with before. But the publisher didn't publish it. And one answer could be that Sharp had a change of heart, that the Alps'Irote.

that the Admiralty or some other influential parliamentary lobby had put pressure on him or threatened him and so that he didn't publish. Another alternative could be that the publisher refused thought this was too hot to handle. But essentially, this is one of the tragedies of the case, is that the moral imperative to try this case as a murder case is something sharp in Equiano campaigned for

and was silenced not once but twice. Can I take that point up, Vincent Brown? what ideas were propelling the case against slavery in Britain? It seems to have been a sleeping beast for two, three hundred years, and then it was coming together at the end of the 18th century. We know a lot about Wilberforce and what he stood up and did, and the Clarkson and so on, but this song massacre played its part.

Can you give us some idea of the arguments going on and what impact they had in the coffee houses or in society or wherever you want. Yeah. So one of the reasons why, what Jake said is so important that Equiano and Sharp wanted this to be tried as a murder case, and one of the reasons that was urgent is because in the 1780s, especially Sharp but also Ekeano, were concerned that this slavery was a threat to the very soul of the British Empire. Granville Sharp was not an evangelical. He was a high church Anglican, but he shared the evangelical belief in Providence and in the moral government of the world

and was already had an established anti-slavery reputation by the time he heard about the Zon case from Equiano. He believed that these sins committed by the sailors were also sins committed by the British nation and that divine judgment might be the result. And in the 1780s, there were a number of calamities that people were. in the British Empire, especially kind of at the heart of it in England, were concerned about. One was the American Revolution and the loss of the North American colonies in the British Empire. During that revolution, slavery had become a subject of political debate and was bandied about as a kind of charge one against the other. You're the slaveholders.

How could you be crying out for liberty when you're holding slaves in the southern colonies and even the northern colonies of North America? people talked about slavery as a kind of a moral stain on the character of different places and different peoples. Granville Sharp took that idea very seriously. There were also a number of major hurricanes, right, that swept through the Caribbean, that destroyed plantations, killed many people, and people interpreted those weather events as divine judgments. So again, by the time this anti-slavery agitation is really heating up in the 1780s, people are concerned that there is an immediate danger come from God in continuing this practice. Now, again, as I said, evangelicals and dissenting Christians were among the leaders of this movement, in part because they feared that judgment. That's fascinating. Bronwyn, against that view, that was very powerfully put. Against that view, there was a view that the slave trade wasn't wrong, all that wrong anyway,

just needed a bit of tweaking. How resilient and how powerful was that a countercase? Yeah, so not all of the critiques of the slave trade in this period arose from the idea that slavery itself was a moral problem. In both West Africa and elsewhere around the Atlantic world, different people were concerned that the slave trade had expanded too quickly, that it was part of a sort of frenzy on the West African coast and in the Caribbean as a result of the sort of boom in demand for sugar and other commodities produced in the plantations.

But what's interesting to me is that you get people like Malachi Pothal Thwait, who's a sort of former Royal African Company trader, who complains that the end of the monopoly that the Royal African Company has up until the mid-7, the, the mid-18th century, leads to abuses like traders overfilling ships with captives or novice, untrained slave traders, kidnapping people from the coast rather than purchasing them through the correct channels, or taking shortcuts on provisions in water like you see with the Zong or committing insurance fraud. And so Sharp and Equiano's campaigning about the Zong taps into another existing critique, this critique that this critique that,

the trade is out of control rather than that the trade is morally wrong. Yeah. Jake, what happened to the British slave trade in the first decade, decades after the Zong massacre? Can you take up Bronwyn's point? I think it's a very fine point that it wasn't the trade that was wrong. It was the way the trade was being conducted that was out of control and out of order. Yes, and Bronwyn has sketched these really important tweaks. that the Parliament tried to enforce on slave trading,

but actually these tweaks have relatively little effect. So in the period 1781 to 85, about 100,000 Africans are boarded aboard British slave ships to go to the Caribbean. In the next five years, that increases to 120,000, and then in the first five years of the 1790s, that increases again to 160,000 Africans. So actually, the British transatlantic slave trade is increasing immediately after the Zong case.

And the reason why is, as Vince said, the slave plantations that are growing sugar are the most profitable and valuable in the Atlantic world. And Britain even adds more plantations in this period because of successful warfare against the Dutch and the Spanish. So the British managed to capture Trinidad and British Guyana in the 17th. 1990s to early 1800s, and these become some of the primary land, you know, the prime land for sugar production in the Atlantic world. And the British are trading captives to these places too. So it's one of these ironies in a way of the Zon case is that the tweaks are relatively ineffective. The slave trade is still expanding, and the British Empire itself is still expanding right on the eve of abolition. So would you like to take that up, Vincent?

So we had the zong, we've had people protesting about it, we have the moral question rising up and people that we now remember and applaud, bringing it forward and the trade goes on expanding. Yeah, well, because it was enormously profitable. As Jake mentioned, and as Bramma mentioned earlier, it needs to be remembered that the Caribbean plantation colonies were the most profitable colonies in the British. Empire, Jamaica foremost among them. So one thinks of, you know, the North American colonies,

the 13 colonies in the British Empire, especially Americans think of it that way, but there were actually 26 on the eve of the American Revolution. And by far the most profitable, the most militarily significant, the best politically connected of these colonies were in the Caribbean, with, again, Jamaica being at the heart of it. As long as that trade remained profitable, as long as those plantations needed those laborers, there were going to be people who were going to profit by filling that need. And so the trade continued to expand because the system continued to expand. All of those various reforms and tweaks notwithstanding. But it does need to be remembered. And I think it's crucially important that this core of especially evangelical Christians that took this case up

continued their activism and never gave up despite the fact that a lot of their desires for the Zong to be tried as a murder case or for the slave trade to be. ended were deflected into these various reform efforts. You've talked about it expanding and having a grip because it's so profitable and so on. And yet by 1807, which isn't that much further on, the active abolition of the slave trade was brought about. Was that a lot due to the power of Wilberforce and his following? It's definitely the case that the evangelical lobby of which Wilberforce is a primary figure

is crucial to this story and by this point there have been a couple of previous attempts to pass an abolition bill that have failed and they failed because Britain has been at war with revolutionary France and so any major reform

was seen as a potential threat to the political order but in 1807 there is a brief cessation of hostilities with France and this enables this enables Parliament to pass the Abolition Act. So absolutely the evangelical lobby is central to this endeavour, as is the geopolitical situation which enables Parliament to take a breather and focus on abolition.

But to come back to you, Vincent, for a second, we're talking about the Zong. Is it possible to draw a line between the Zong massacre and that act of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807? Is there a connection there that you can tell us about? Well, one of the things I think that Jake points out that's so important to remember is that they're these activist movements, but they can only be successful when they have particular opportunities, in particular context. Policymakers only listen to activists when they think it's in their immediate political interests to listen to them. So there's no straightforward connection between the Zong massacre and eventual abolition.

I would say the most important connection is that it animated those key players. those activists like Randall Sharp and Alad Equiano, and shocked the conscience of people who came to know about it. But the actual abolition bill, that was down to the interests of the policymakers who passed it. Bronman, how was the abolition of the British slave trade felt in West Africa? Well, what's been fascinating to me in my research in places like Sierra Leone and Senegal and Gambia has actually been that by the time of the Zong,

there are increasing objections to slave trading in African societies as well. So all of those political changes that I was describing earlier, the power that's gained through the control of the increasingly profitable slave trade, reshapes politics and society in the region, and in turn, you see political and economic power increasingly tied to participation in the slave trade itself. And so there's sort of this trap. There's no way out of the slave trade, even though there are these increasing objections. And so what happens in the sort of longer picture of the 19th century is that a lot of the places where there are these objections.

So the sort of Islamic reform movements that arise along the Senegal River and in the Sokoto Caliphate that pin a lot of their early success on objecting to the slave trade, to the transatlantic slave trade specifically. they develop as new power centers over the course of the 19th century as abolitionism on the coast also comes into effect. And so there's a sort of squeeze of those original middlemen trading states. But I think what's interesting is that this change in power dynamics has almost no effect on the total volume of slaves who are exported. It affects where those slaves are exported from. but you still have between sort of 60 and 85,000 captives a year being exported between the abolition of the slave trade and the 1840s. So in particular places, like on the Gold Coast where the British had been in charge and they'd been trading with Afanti, you do see a rapid decline after abolition.

You also see a rapid decline in places along the Senegal River where there are African objections to the slave. trade, but you see this sort of massive shift towards the bites of Biafra and Benin and down into West Central Africa into places like Angola. So ultimately, there's a sort of, there's an impact of abolition, but it tends to be more on the sort of who's in, who's in power gradually sort of shifting to the European, the Europeans on the coast and these new political centers on the interior and moving away from those middlemen. But in terms of actual numbers of slaves traded, it doesn't have much impact. Yeah, it's worth remembering that despite the decline of the British slave trade, the

cessation of the British slave trade, the slave trade see some of its best years in the trade to Cuba and Brazil in the 19th century. When you say it's best years, who's conducting it then? Is it still the British? No, that's the Brazilian traders and the Spanish traders who have forts in these other regions of West Africa that Bronwyns mentioned. So after 1807, the British mainly withdraw from the slave trade, as direct traders at least. But the Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian traders still have their own factories on the West African coast for loading captives onto slave ships, and they effectively manage to dodge any British attempt to abolish a slave trade. They perfect very quick methods of loading captives onto slave ships, sometimes in a matter of

hours, and they're sending these ships quickly across to the coffee and sugar plantations of Brazil and Cuba right into the 1840s. And in fact, that gives us some window onto one of the big legacies of the Zong case, which is a famous painting by JMW Turner of the slave ship, which he exhibited in 1840. And this painting shows a slave ship in bright red against a red sky, often these colours associated with anger and blood and warfare. And there are Africans drowning in that painting. And that painting is often thought to be Turner's interpretation of the Zong case, and it probably is. But I think it's important to remember that he's exhibiting this in 1840, really at the peak of Brazilian and Cuban slave trading in a protest against the continued

slave trade in the Atlantic world. Finally, Vincent, what would you say, was a a primary legacy of this massacre? I think the primary legacy is it serves as a stunning example of the elevation of greed over human life. And I think that matters a lot, that, you know, that happens in history and that people can and do recoil from the elevation of greed over humanity. I think now, in November 2020, about how people pose this question of, you know, well, or not we open up the economy in the midst of a plague or we do everything we can in aid of the public health. And as it turns out, the only countries that have managed to recover their economies in the context of this plague are countries that have taken the public health seriously, like South Korea, like China, for that matter.

But one still sees that argument that somehow one can choose economic life over human life. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks to Jake Sir Brian Richards, Bronwell Everl and Vincent Brown. Next week is the distinguished Portuguese poet Fernando Pesua. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It seems to us nowadays, today, me and I'm sure lots of people, this was such a terrible thing. And yet it didn't seem such a terrible thing. Even though it was backed by, the cause was backed by very eloquent and influential people.

Is it because we have changed so much? What do you think, Bronwyn? And that's a question that relates to your book. Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that it takes off in the way that it does is because it does epitomize a sort of general sense of discomfort with the amount of globalized, for lack of a better word, trade that's happening in this last bit of the 18th century. So I think as Vincent talked about, there's a concern about sort of providence and what, you know, how God is punishing the British Empire for its excesses by, you know, losing the American Revolution and these kinds of things. And so there's a sort of feeling out there that something is wrong.

in the British Empire. And I personally think that this captures the imagination of a lot of people because there is a sense that, you know, the East India Company is a sort of disliked institution in this period, that the empire was maybe acting sort of too aggressively against the American colonies. There is, you know, Sharp is part of a sort of British movement. that supports the American Revolution. So there is a sort of wider sense of that.

And I think what really speaks to that from my perspective is that a lot of people are boycotting the slave trade in other contexts in this period. And so you get African boycotts of slave trading. You get American boycotts associated with the American Revolution of slave trading. And then eventually in the 1790s, you get British boycotts of sugar

because of its associations with. the slave trade. And so I think there's something there about the sort of the relationship that people have to the commodities, to the globalized nature of trade, and they're sort of growing unease with the kinds of practices that are associated with that trade, whether it's labor or whether it's the sort of terrible conditions of the Middle Passage or whether it's sort of forcing people to buy East India Company tea when they don't want to buy it. I think the thing which really captures the imagination in this case is the horror that Sharpen Equiano felt that life could be equated with money and an insurance payout in such a bald way.

And I think that's the part which seems closest to a lot of the values we have today. Actually, the commodification of black life and of enslaved Africans is something which was a central part of the 18th century commerce and continues right through to the 1790s and even after 1807 with the Abolition Act, the Navy are paid prize money for every African captive that they managed to, in avert of commerce, save from the slave trade. So even the Abolition Act uses the indexing of money,

money to African life into the period of abolition. And I think that's something which we struggle today to reconstruct in our heads, but was very much central to British commercial practices and British state practices regarding law, the use of the Navy and warfare. Can you, Vincent, would you like to, we don't know much about what happened to that particular shipload of African slaves taken over there? Yes, I mean, well, you see that the demographic geography of the Americas still bears the imprint of the slave trade and the importance of slave societies. It turns out to be the case that where European empires found a way to exploit enslaved labor, first indigenous Native American labor and then African labor, was where they thrived the best in terms of profitability.

where they brought in the most people. And you can see in those most profitable parts of the colonial imperial world, in Brazil, in the Caribbean and West Indies, and the southern United States, you find those populations having high proportions of black people descended from enslaved Africans. So, of course, just in the very demographic imprint on the Americas, one sees the legacy of the slave trade. and as both Jake and Bronwyn have so eloquently stated, one sees the political legacies of the struggle against the slave trade and against slavery as well. Is there the experience of all three of you? This is obvious your problem. But in what way as African studies increased in the last few years, 10, 15, 20 years? So this is a great and important question.

I think in some ways we are still dealing with the legacy of the philosopher GWF. Hegel's proclamation. that Africa forms no historical part of the world, which he said in the 19th century. And with the formation of the academic disciplines in the 19th century, of course, you know, Africa wasn't really considered to be a subject of history. It was the province of anthropologists, and black populations in states were considered a problem for the nation state that was the subject of sociologists. It wasn't really until the middle 20th century and decolonization that historians began to take African history seriously as a fundamental part of the way they understood global history

as a subject itself. And so we're still in some ways playing catch-up by incorporating what we know and what we can learn of African history into what we understand of Atlantic, European, American, and global history. Vince is exactly right about the methodological and regional importance of African studies in understanding some of these wider processes in the Atlantic world. I think what I would add to that is that actually some of the recovery of evidence that we can do in particular cases is something that African studies has really contributed to because it has encouraged historians to widen the kinds of sources they use. So thinking about things like musical traditions and how they have moved from different parts of West Africa to the Americas

and tracing those back to places in West Africa by playing recordings to different groups in West Africa, for example. The same thing with songs, with musical instruments, with speech and language transmission as well. That these are things which fundamentally moved with slave ships from West Africa to the Caribbean. And African Studies has contributed to the discipline by tracing some of these particular movements from parts of West Africa to specific communities in the Americas. Yeah, I would agree with all of that and say that I think that the study of the slave trade in particular has really contributed to widening people's understanding of Africa's contribution to the development of the modern world. So work on, you know, the

role of slavery and contributing to the development of. of modern forms of capitalism and of imperialism, the demographic changes, the sort of changes in food ways and in music and other kinds of religious and other customs. But I think the sort of part of the puzzle that I think is the really exciting bit that's still left to be done

is to fully understand the place of Africa in the wider Atlantic world this period. So not just its contributions to the slave trade and to the sort of development of the new world and to the economic development of Europe, but also to understand what is happening politically and commercially and socially in Africa as sort of part of this wider Atlantic world and how the things that are happening elsewhere have an impact in Africa, but also how Africa then has an impact on those wider political transformations. So culturally and economically, I think we're making really great strides,

but I think the sort of place that I would point potential researchers to is the ways that politics actually is also helping to shape this wider Atlantic world from an African perspective. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. From BBC Radio 4, a new series from Intrigue, Mayday. On November the 11th, 2019, James Lemezer was found dead in Istanbul. He was the ex-British Army officer who helped set up the white helmets in Syria. Ordinary people trained to save civilians in the aftermath of bomb attacks,

the biggest heroes in an ugly war. But lots of people here in the UK say all the white helmets videos are statured. aged, part of the greatest hoax in history. I'm Chloe Hajemotho and I've spent the last year investigating the white helmets and James Le Measureer, who they are, who he was and why he died. Subscribe to Intrig now on BBC Sounds.