Commemorative History without Guarantees

Public commemoration, as this 200th-anniversary year of the abolition of the British slave-trade reminds us, can arouse strong feelings, not least about present-day responsibility for past atrocities. Calls for official apology for slavery have met with prime-ministerial refusal: beneath the political posturing lies a real question about how Britain's rulers and subjects should relate to historical wrongs and their ongoing legacies. State-sponsored, tightly scripted events – like the Westminster Abbey service interrupted by protester Toyin Agbetu – are too obviously self-congratulatory to satisfy anyone outside the establishment. More satisfying politically and intellectually have been the great variety of memorial events and exhibitions held nationwide, notably in ports like Bristol, Liverpool, and London where the trade was most active, and in Hull, William Wilberforce's home-town: events that provide a more open-ended forum for debate about Britain's complex role in slavery and its contribution to slavery's eventual abolition. At their best such venues offer a chance to interrogate the past and present state of 'multicultural' Britain and its relationship to Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Nevertheless a persistent, fundamental, even necessary unease permeates all these events. As commemoration increasingly (and honourably) seeks to represent and empower once-enslaved Africans, and to augment and change our understanding of how slavery underpinned the development of modern Britain – while still assigning to Britain moral credit for slavery's abolition – the contradictions between national crime and national pride widen. Commemoration raises many thorny questions about how the stories of slavery and emancipation have been told: what has become dominant narrative and why, and what has been untold or repressed. Why, for example, have schools until recently excluded even the most sanitized versions of this history from the national curriculum? It is easier to call for new narratives and a different kind of public discourse about slavery and abolition than to know how these would be received and used in 'multicultural' Britain.

A common preoccupation which surfaces strongly in both books under review – one by a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century transatlantic slavery and abolition, the other by an eighteenth-century feminist literary and cultural critic – relates to the morality of commemoration. Can new, sometimes experimental forms of public memorialization make for more ethical modes of political understanding, ones that move us toward an engagement with slavery's all too visible legacies in Britain today?

The commemoration of Britain's abolition of the slave-trade and of West Indian slavery has a history of its own. John Oldfield's fascinating study traces how our collective memory of transatlantic slavery has been constructed from 1834 to the present. The book examines paintings, memorial statues, memoirs, pageants and ceremonies in Britain, the United States and the West Indies. It opens with the disputes surrounding two abolition 'relics': Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840, commissioned by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS),¹ and the Life of William Wilberforce. By His Sons, Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce. Both the painting and the biography became sites of struggle over hierarchy and reputation in the anti-slavery pantheon.

Benjamin Haydon was a well-known painter of historical scenes and genre paintings, but no anti-slavery advocate, when he witnessed the opening scene of the BFASS convention. The effect on him seems to have been transformative. The convention was presided over by the eighty-two-year-old veteran Clarkson, and attended by the ex-Jamaican slave Henry Beckford (only one of four black men invited to attend). Beckford's presence moved Haydon, who placed him in the centre of his painting, next to Clarkson: 'the African sitting by the intellectual European, in equality and intelligence, whilst the patriarch of the cause points to heaven as to whom he must be grateful'. Presented neither...