Introduction

Abstract

‘They forgot her like a bad dream … Remembering seemed unwise.’ Toni Morrison, Beloved Until this year British responses to the slave-trade and slavery might well have been characterized as a collective forgetting. Yet 2007 has seen an unprecedented range of activities associated with the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. The television programmes, books, talks, exhibitions and drama productions that are taking place all over the country mark the extent of involvement in a debate over the meanings of that legacy. Museums, galleries, community groups, churches, schools, universities, libraries, theatres, publishers, the press and the media have engaged in multiple initiatives exploring slavery and abolition, raising questions about the legacy of the transatlantic slave-trade in British society. The Museum in Docklands, for example (featured in our cover design), has a new permanent exhibition opening in October on ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’. All this activity, it is worth noting, is a peculiarly British phenomenon. The British initiative on the abolition of the trade in 1807 was a world-historical event with effects on the scale of the international trade and its banning by other countries. Yet in the Caribbean there has been extensive reluctance as well as widespread indifference on questions of commemoration. Slavery is seen by many in the region as a matter of anger, shame and humiliation, not something to be dwelt upon. While the British were anxious to forget it for one set of reasons, Afro-Caribbeans had another. In the U.S., for rather different reasons, there has been little interest in the bicentenary. So why all the activity in Britain this year?