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Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change @ the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.

But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.

Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition

So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:

‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’

A theme of our times

These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:

‘no world’ from ‘An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters’ by Kara Walker, Hon RA (2010) British Museum, London © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

Mixing ancient and modern

Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.

Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (around 1770) The Menil Collection, Houston Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston

So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.

Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by showing Yinka Shonibare (2023) Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Exhibition premise

The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.

So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:

  • portray rich slave owners and their plantations
  • portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
  • more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation

These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.

As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:

But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.

I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.

Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author

The videos

What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:

In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.

This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.

The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.

So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.

Responses

This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.

But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.

It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.

If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.

To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.

So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).

Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:

The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.

It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.

One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.

It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.

1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.

2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:

Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.

3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.

4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.

5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.

6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.

All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.

Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.

I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.

To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.

But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of  both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.

7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.

The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:

But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.

After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.

Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author

Labels or works?

As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.

Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.

Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.

Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.

Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.

And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)

And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.

The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.

The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.

All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.

Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.

Installation view of ‘Naming the Money’ by Lubaina Himid RA (2004) © Lubaina Himid. Photo by the author.

Warning

As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.

Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.

Tate did it very prominently in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:

This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.

And by the doorways into some of the individual rooms there are warnings that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.

Related links

Related reviews

Other posts about slavery and racism

Origins

The Islamic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade

The American civil war and slavery

Slave accounts

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by Simon on March 16, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture, Slavery
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Posted by Simon on March 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/entangled-pasts-1768-to-now-art-colonialism-and-change-royal-academy/

Behind The Red Moon by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern

Soon after Tate Modern was opened in 2000 its vast Turbine Hall became known as a space which challenged contemporary artists to create installations large and dynamic enough to fill it, in a series of special commissions, which have wowed the art world, Londoners and the millions of tourists who visit the gallery. Just recently the latest effort to fill, dazzle and amaze went on show. It is ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by the Ghanaian-British artist, El Anatsui.

‘Behind The Red Moon’ consists of three huge installations which are, basically, hangings suspended from the high ceiling.

They are made from ‘industrial’ materials, namely thousands of repurposed liquor bottle tops and metal fragments which have been crumpled, crushed, and connected by hand with copper wire into huge hangings. Later, large sheets were pieced together to form massive abstract fields of colour, shape, and line.

Act 1. The Red Moon

As you enter the Turbine Hall and walk down the gentle concrete ramp you are presented with an enormous red hanging. It is, of course, about slavery, as so much contemporary art is, especially that at the guilt-ridden Tate galleries:

The red side of ‘Act 1. The Red Moon’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Curator explanation:

The first hanging on the ramp resembles a majestic sail billowing out in the wind. Ships have transported people and goods around the world since ancient times. During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved African peoples were sold and exchanged for gold, sugar, spirits and other commodities. They were then taken across the ocean towards the Americas, with many labouring on sugar plantations that fuelled the alcohol industry. Later, spirits produced in the Caribbean would be shipped to Europe, and from there to Western Africa. The bottle tops used in this commission derive from a trade network of present-day commodities rooted in colonial histories. At the height of the transatlantic trade in the 18th century, sailors would sometimes use the moon to guide their journeys. Its gravitational tug as Earth’s natural satellite also sets the rhythm of the ocean’s tides. Here, red bottle tops form the outline of a red ‘blood’ moon, seen during a lunar eclipse. Elemental forces interweave with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion and survival.

When you walk beyond it you discover that the other side of the sail is yellow.

The yellow side of ‘Act 1. The Red Moon’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Act 2. The World

The second installation is completely different – a cluster of vaguely zoomorphic shapes – yellow-gold in colour, maybe fish or fragments of continents?

Atrium view of ‘Act 2. The World’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

The trick is that, when you climb up the stairs from the atrium to the bridge spanning the two parts of Tate Modern you realise that they’ve been hung close together and then that, from a specific point of view, these apparently random shapes coalesce to form a circle. It is the earth.

Bridge view of ‘Act 2. The World’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

The curators explain:

The sculpture in front of the Turbine Hall bridge is composed of multiple layers. They suggest a loose grouping of human figures, suspended in the air in a state of movement. When viewed from a particular position on the bridge, the fragmented shapes converge into the single circular form of the Earth. The circle echoes the red moon of the sail as a fellow celestial body. Anatsui has a longstanding interest in the fragment as a symbol of renewal and restoration. He has said that ‘breaking is not destruction but a necessity for reforming.’ As separate elements, the group of restless human forms might imply dispersion through the migration and movement of people across the globe, both forced and voluntary. When viewed together, the fragmentary circle gestures towards new formations of collective identities and experiences….The ethereal appearance of the figures is achieved using thin bottle top seals wired together to create a semi-transparent, net-like material.

Act 3. The Wall

Finally we walk under the bridge and are presented with the third and largest work, another hanging, in a dire, threatening black.

Black side of ‘Act 3. The Wall’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Once again, when you walk beyond you discover that the other side is a completely different colour and mood, the same kind of yellowy gold colour.

Yellow side of ‘Act 3. The Wall’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

A quote from the artist makes explicit the link between Tate, the slave trade and this work:

‘Tate & Lyle sugar was the only brand we used during my childhood in the Gold Coast. I came to understand that the sugar industry grew from the transatlantic [slave] trade and the movement of goods and people. My idea is to play with all these elements.’ El Anatsui

According to the curators:

Facing the yellow back of the sail, the wall might suggest an arrival at shore. Metal pools rise from the ground at the base of the wall, resembling crashing waves and rocky peaks. For Anatsui, the use of black refers to the continent of Africa and its global diaspora, charged with the potential of homecoming and return. Moving behind the wall reveals an edifice of shimmering silver, covered in a multi-coloured mosaic. As lines and waves of blackness and technicolour meet, they echo the collision of global cultures and hybrid identities that Anatsui invites us to consider throughout the commission.

Here’s what the folds of fabric look like at the foot of the piece:

Detail of the foot of the black side of ‘Act 3. The Wall’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

And certainly, because this one comes down to floor height you can really see the way that what appears to be a shimmery light fabric from a distance, is in fact made up of metal fragments, bottle tops and other strips bearing logos of consumer products.

Detail of the gold side of ‘Act 3. The Wall’ from ‘Behind The Red Moon’ by El Anatsui @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

What did I think? Well, I always like the use of industrial waste and detritus or stuff found lying around, hence my liking for the Arte Povera movement and Land Art. And they’re certainly very very big, and do create a sort of billowing shimmery effect. And they play the slave trade card very adeptly, the same slave trade topic which was addressed by Kara Walker in this very space just three years ago. Maybe Tate should rename it The Slave Trade Hall and make every (white) visitor wear chains for the length of their visit. (Now that actually would be a challenging piece of interactive art.)

But, as you can tell, in the end, it’s very good, it’s very competent, it presses the right buttons, but…meh.

Related links

Related reviews

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by Simon on November 12, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on November 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/12/behind-the-red-moon-el-anatsui-tate-modern/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 1. Key features of 17th century Britain

Mark Kishlansky (1948 to 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

  1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I and Charles I) 1603 to 1642
  2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 to 1660
  3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II and James II) 1660 to 1688
  4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William and Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 to 1714

Although obviously you can also divide it by monarch:

  1. James I (1603 to 1625)
  2. Charles I (1625 to 1642)
  3. Wars of the three kingdoms (1637 to 1653)
  4. Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653 to 1660)
  5. Charles II (1660 to 1685)
  6. James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685 to 1688)
  7. William and Mary (1688 to 1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge that his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

  • business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
  • empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
  • feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
  • media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
  • new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
  • the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
  • sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
  • architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
  • philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
  • non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Patriarchy

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

Hierarchy

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography

80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West

The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east

The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population

The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation

Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy

The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans

Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

  • abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
  • reforms of theology and practice: getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
  • reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
  • adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning

Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping

The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus

Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

The point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion

What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties

It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

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by Simon on August 24, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-1/

Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)

Without the slaves there would have been no sugar and without sugar there would have been no national addiction to coffee and, later, to tea.
(Black Ivory, page 4)

I bought Walvin’s book 20 years ago, read it and found it as unsatisfactory then as I do now. He uses a thematic approach to grouping the material in order to loosely follow the slave experience. Thus the opening chapters describe the ways slaves were seized in Africa – in war or expressly for slavery – marched to the coast, he describes the coastal slaving forts, the Atlantic crossing, the slave auctions in America or the Caribbean, and then life and death on the different types of plantation.

It’s a valid enough approach, but the downside is it is very bitty. It creates a kind of magpie effect, picking out dazzling facts and incidents from Barbados in 1723 or Georgia in 1805 or Jamaica in 1671, fragmenting your understanding.

Not only is there little sense of chronological development and change, but some of the incidents he chooses are in reverse chronological order, so that the chapter about slave rebellions opens with the massive slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s, treating it at some length. But a) to do so he has to bend his own rules since Haiti – then called Saint Domingue – was a French colony and everywhere else Walvin restricts himself strictly to British colonies.

And b) he then works backwards from the Haiti revolt, to describe far earlier uprisings from the 1600s onwards, for example the Stono uprising in South Carolina in 1739, or jumps forward to uprisings near the end of the period – Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, 1831, or the 1822 Charleston uprising, and then back to Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, then forward to the Baptist Uprising on Jamaica in 1831.

It all ends up being quite confusing. Much more sensible would have been to try and show what the slaves cumulatively learned about organising uprisings, and what the authorities learned about suppressing them.

Walvin repeatedly refers to the differences between plantation culture in the West Indies and on the American mainland, but never makes them as clear as Alan Taylor does in his outstanding book American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (sugar grew best in the West Indies, tobacco in the Chespeake Bay area (Virginia, Georgia) and Europe-style agriculture from New York north into New England).

It was entirely these agricultural and climatic facts which gave rise to the intensive slave labour of huge sugar plantations in the Indies, to large but not-quite-so-vast tobacco slave plantations in the South, and to the relatively slave-free, family-run farms of the middle and northern states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England).

Most irritating of all, Walvin has a fondness for rhetorical questions, which often just seem lame. It’s as if a historian of the Holocaust kept stopping every few pages to sigh, ‘But where are the memorials to all the Jews that died at Belsen?’ or ‘How can we imagine the feelings of the Jews of Jewish mothers as they carried their babies into the gas chambers?’

The facts are quite horrifying enough. They don’t need lachrymose embellishments, such as:

When Lord Mansfield died, in March 1793, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey… But where are the memorials to those thousands whose lives were touched by the career of England’s Chief Justice? (p.22)

But how many watery miles would always remain between the slaves he had sold in Antigua and their loved ones in Africa? (p.43)

Nuggets

Nonetheless, the book does have loads of nuggets of information tucked away in it, and I thought I’d extract and list ones which stood out for me, as an aide-memoire:

Drinks

The new fashionable drinks of the late 1600s and early 1700s – coffee, tea and chocolate – are all naturally bitter. They need sweetener. Sugar. Grown by slaves. What a stunning fact that a product from China (later imported into India and Ceylon), sweetened by tea from the West Indies, grown by slaves imported from Africa, became an addiction in cold northern Europe.

Puddings

During the 18th century the British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar: hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, creams, charlottes and bettys, trifles and fools, syllabubs and tansys, junkets and ices, milk pudding, suet pudding, custards and cakes, and rice pudding (rice grown by slaves in Georgia and Carolina, sugar grown by slaves in the Indies).

Somerset v Stewart (1772)

Slavery had never been authorized by statute in England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield decided that it was also unsupported in common law. Lord Mansfield tried to narrowly limit his judgment to the issue of whether a person, regardless of being a slave, could be removed from England against their will, and said they could not. Nonetheless the case ‘aroused enormous interest and political controversy’ (p.305) and became one of the most significant milestones in the abolitionist campaign.

Mansfield had in his own household a black slave, Elizabeth Dido, born to a slave woman captured aboard a Spanish ship by a British pirate, who got her pregnant and passed the baby on to his relative Mansfield, who brought her up.

In his will Mansfield specified that Dido be freed and given an annuity for life.

The Zong case (1781)

The Zong was a Liverpool-based slave ship. In September 1780 it departed the coast of Africa for Jamaica with 470 slaves on board. 60 Africans and seven crew had died from disease on the crossing when, on November 29, Captain Luke Collingwood called a meeting of his officers to decide whether to throw the sick Africans overboard in order to preserve the others and save drinking water. 131 slaves were thrown overboard. The owners of the Zong, Gregson, claimed the loss of their slaves (£30 each) from their insurers, Gilbert. The insurers refused to pay. The case was taken to court and provoked a storm of outrage. Another milestone towards abolition.

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

John Newton

John Newton, later in life an ardent abolitionist and author of the hymn Amazing Grace was, early in life, captain of a slave ship and responsible for punishing and reprimanding uppity slaves. He used thumbscrews.

The Middle Passage

It surprised me that, as a proportion, more of the white crews died in the Atlantic crossing, than the slaves. I have seen the diagrams of the slaves packed tight below decks hundreds of times, and they have been recycled in numerous works of art as symbols of unprecedented suffering. Who knew, that as a proportion, more whites died than blacks!

All Souls

Barbados was the most densely planted and cultivated sugar island in the West Indies. The largest slave owner was Christopher Codrington. It was his land which funded the establishment of the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford. It comes as no surprise to learn that in our politically sensitive times, the College is setting up a scholarship to help West Indian students.

West Indian output

Between the 1660s and the abolition of slavery, the African population of the West Indian sugar islands rose to 1 million. During that period over 10 million tonnes of sugar were produced.

Task work

Slaves were set tasks and, once these were complete, were free to tend their own gardens, practice artisan skills and so on. In fact, one of the biggest learnings from Walvin is that many slaves had a surprising amount of freedom and agency.

Many were trained in a very wide range of skills, from artisan work such as coopers, carpenters and smiths, to work gang overseers, to book keepers and accountants, while off to one side of field work was an entire hierarchy of domestic servants from lowliest char to senior butler and household supervisor.

I thought the chapter about ‘runaways’ would be about desperate conspiracies to break shackles, get through the barbed wire fence and escape – but this is completely wrong. It turns out many, many slaves had jobs which naturally took them far afield, taking all kinds of goods to local markets, fetching and carrying from towns or neighbouring plantations, and even operating boats and ships to carry plantation produce down river to collection centres and big towns.

Slaves were much more mobile than we might imagine. (p.165)

Some slaves’ jobs required them to be absent from the plantation for weeks on end, and so it turns out that the definition of ‘runaway’ is ragged round the edges. Many slaves didn’t ‘run away’ so much as stay away longer than a job warranted – for all kinds of human reasons, because they had a sweetheart to visit, or distant spouses and children they’d been separated from, to gamble and get drunk.

Free blacks

Similarly, it is startling to have it brought home how many free Africans lived in the slave areas, specially of the Deep South. They also sailed the seas as free sailors, alongside white sailors, ending up in ports wherever European ships anchored – which is to say, right round the world.

Striking that Olaudah Equiano, who left a detailed account of his life, worked aboard a British ship which made an expedition to the Arctic in 1773!

If there is one really pervasive message to Walvin’s book, it is the counter-intuitive one that slaves – captured, enslaved Africans and their descendants – were emphatically not passive helpless victims, but adapted to their appalling new circumstances, spread into all walks of life available, acquired skills, saved up and earned their freedom, set up businesses and schools, and sailed the seven seas alongside their European one-time captors.

As Walvin puts it, everywhere historians look, they see:

the growth of an independent slave culture, linked to the world of plantation slavery but operating and thriving at an economically autonomous level. (p.115)

The black African element not only underpinned the wealth of the British Empire in the 1700s, but was everywhere visible in that empire.

It was news to me that there was a black drummer in the Scottish court in 1507, that Henry VII and Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter, that Elizabeth I had black musicians and dancers. At a celebration ball in London in 1764 all the musicians were black.

Black servants were highly fashionable among the 18th century aristocracy. And not just aristocrats. Samuel Johnson’s much-loved manservant Francis Barber was black, and Johnson not only made him his heir but left him most of his important papers.

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with a black servant by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Death in the Indies

The majority of slaves were imported into the West Indies where they dropped like flies, because of poor food, appalling conditions, and being worked to death by the brutal requirements of sugar production. Fewer slaves were imported onto the American continent, but more of them survived because working tobacco was relatively less onerous, food and conditions were better, and, above all, disease was less lethal.

Music

The testimony of slave owners and visitors to plantations is full of evidence for the slaves’ fondness for music of all sorts, from chanted and sung words alone, to the accompaniment of instruments made from whatever came to hand, through to full proficiency on European instruments like the violin.

Christianity

I’ve met no end of progressives, especially feminists, who think that Christianity’s influence was and is and can only ever be a terrible, calamitous thing. In some respects this may be true, but Walvin has a chapter ramming home the fact that it was the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, and the spread of Protestant missionaries throughout the slave colonies, the conversion of many slaves to Christianity, and then the widespread dissemination of Christian anti-slavery pamphlets, sermons and so on, from the 1770s onwards – which played a huge role in creating widespread public and political support for abolition. The role of Christianity in freeing the slaves was ‘seismic’ (p.194).

Phases of abolition

Anyone familiar with the subject knows this, but it’s worth emphasising that abolition came in waves.

In the 1780s there were attempts to rein in what were becoming the well-publicised excesses of plantation owners in the colonies. Parliament passed laws restricting the types of punishment (for example, the number of lashes) they could dole out.

Phase one was the campaign from the end of the American War of Independence (1783) to abolition in 1807. This first abolition was the abolition of the slave trading by ship. From 1807 no British ship was allowed to carry slaves. Parliament and the campaigners expected that  this would result in an improvement in the conditions of slaves in the West Indies, and they set up a demographic register to monitor change.

In the event, the evidence came in that it improved nothing. The condition of slaves in the Indies remained as miserable as ever. Abolitionism was put on hold during the Wars with France. When these ended in 1815, there was a period of intense political repression in Britain. But this slackened in the 1820s and a new generation called for further reform, and not just of slavery.

The new post-war generation chafed against the domination of the landed gentry under the old voting franchise. The industrialists of the north chafed against having no political power to match their new wealth. Apologists for capitalism insisted that Free Trade was the great panacea which would drive the British economy and so campaigned against trade tariffs. Christian missionaries provided a ceaseless supply of literature describing the appalling conditions and sufferings of the ongoing slave colonies.

This was the second wave of abolitionism, led by a new generation, which called for the abolition of slavery on moral, Christian, but also economic and political grounds. Free market economists insisted that slavery distorted markets, businesses and wages, thus hampering the growth of British trade and prosperity.

It was only after the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, and a new ‘reformed’ Parliament assembled, that a laws was finally passed to abolish the condition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

On 1 August 1834 all slaves under 6 were freed. Adults became ‘apprentices’ and were still forced to work for their owners for 40 hours a week, for nothing, for a period of 6 years. Some islands decided tojust get on and free all their slaves.

Many of the colonies had reacted to the unrelenting pressure from the church and the mother country against slavery, by steadily releasing slaves already, especially if they were old, ill or unable to work. Slavery was always first and foremost an economic consideration.

Full abolition only came at midnight on 31 July 1838. Freed slaves across the West Indies held marches and parades, made speeches, attended church, decked their houses and towns with flags and bunting.

The British effort to quell the slave trade

Having seen the light, the British became enthusiastic opponents of the slave trade wherever it remained. It became a standing order of the Royal Navy to confiscate slave ships. Between 1820 and 1870 the Royal Navy seized 1,600 slave ships on the Atlantic and freed 150,000 slaves, especially heading to Cuba and Brazil.

American slavery

But we no longer had jurisdiction over the United States. By 1860 there were some 4 million slaves in the USA, far more than had been liberated from the British colonies in the 1830s. Their struggle for liberation, and the epic civil war it prompted, is another story.

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by Simon on August 10, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 10, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/black-ivory-james-walvin/