Offline: The slave trade—medicine's necessary remorse

Abstract

When Edward Colston's statue was toppled by protestors in Bristol, UK, on June 7, 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, observers may have wondered why. Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary at the time, called the episode “utterly disgraceful”. I went to school in Bristol for 11 years. Colston was a big name back then—Colston Hall, Colston's Girls’ School, Colston Tower. For my entire time in Bristol (up to 1980), Colston's legacy of slavery was never taught, discussed, or even mentioned. Eric Williams’ book, Capitalism and Slavery, corrects a deep injustice—the erasure of the slave trade from the history of Britain. Williams was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1911, when the country was a British colony. He obtained his DPhil in 1938 and published his thesis as Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 (the book was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021). Williams went on to become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, when his country finally achieved independence. He died in 1981. Capitalism and Slavery is the story of slavery in modern Britain. Bristol plays a prominent part. The city was the slave capital of England. In 1755, Bristol boasted the largest number of slave traders in the country—237, as against London's 147. As one local historian wrote, “There is not a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave.” Williams' book is about more than one city. To assuage our guilt, a comforting myth in British history has grown which gives a special place to William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the man credited with leading a successful campaign to abolish the slave trade. A Member of Parliament who was honoured with a burial in Westminster Abbey, Wilberforce is today viewed as a statesman-saint. The truth, according to Williams, is very different. In Capitalism and Slavery, he describes the legend of Wilberforce and the abolitionists as “one of the greatest propaganda movements of all time”. They were reactionaries, not radicals. They fought for causes that repressed working-class discontent. They opposed democratic reforms. And they “repeatedly disowned any idea of emancipation” for enslaved people. Williams uncovers the hidden history of slavery. The only way to understand slavery and its abolition, he argues, is by understanding the development of capitalism. As Williams puts it: “Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was a consequence of slavery.” It worked like this. Colonisation depended on the transfer of people from coloniser to colonised. But as the home country prospered from the plundering of its colonies, so fewer people were available for export. An alternative source of human capital was required. Triangular trade was the answer. Manufactured goods were exported from Britain to Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves at a profit. Those enslaved people were then taken to the West Indies—“Each slave had less room than a man in a coffin”—where they were in turn exchanged for raw materials, such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton, also at a profit. These raw materials were returned to Britain and the cycle began all over again. The first British slave trading expedition was in 1562. Between 1680 and 1786, over 2 million enslaved people were transported. The vast profits that accrued financed the Industrial Revolution—a new era of mechanised manufacturing, railways, banking, and Britain's naval and military supremacy. The American Revolution disrupted triangular trade, and Britain turned its attention away from the West Indies to India. Slavery became unprofitable. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger encouraged Wilberforce to take up the cause of abolition—not for humanitarian reasons, but to terminate an unprofitable business that was a drain on Britain's economy. The abolition of the slave trade came in 1807, followed by the abolition of slavery itself in 1833, although slavery continued across Britain's Empire. Williams does not have anything to say about science or medicine directly. But one fact seems indisputable. The advances in science and medicine between 1680 and 1807—the foundation of the medicine we enjoy today—owe much to the wealth created by the slave trade. British medicine is built on the tortured corpses of enslaved African people—a truth we have eliminated from our mythic history. It is time to re-examine our past, acknowledge our debts, and pay reparations for the horrors perpetrated by our forebears.