Excessive Memories: Slavery, Insurance and Resistance

If there existed such a thing as a collective British consciousness about transatlantic slavery, it was, until recently, one that remembered the nation's humanitarian crusades, firstly to end the slave-trade, then to abolish slavery itself within its own empire, and finally to persuade and coerce other Western nations to follow suit. The public acknowledgement that 2007 marks the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave-trade undoubtedly evokes this celebratory narrative once again. It also provides a different opportunity, however. This is the opportunity to address how, and in what ways, Britain publicly remembers, and represents, the postcolonial present in relation to its imperial past.

It is little noted in histories of postcolonial thought that explicit criticism of the 'abolitionist' form of British cultural memory began in earnest in the era of radical anti-colonial struggle. In particular, Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) mounted a powerful critique of the humanitarian narrative.¹ As part of his critical intervention against the moral hegemony of 'abolition' as the defining way to understand this particular trajectory of Britain's imperial history, Williams famously asserted a materialist argument. He mounted an explicit attack on the nineteenth-century liberal order by claiming that slavery had been abolished in the service of economic interest rather than as a result of enlightened conscience. His thesis set terms for a vigorous historiographical debate that still rages today.²

The significance of Williams's book extends beyond the confines of an internal and strictly disciplinary arena. In harmony with other anti-colonial writers such as C. L. R. James, Franz Fanon, and Walter Rodney, Williams ensured that transatlantic slavery could not be viewed as an isolated event, safely framed and understood as a historical aberration which, once overcome, gave way to the smooth and triumphal march of western progress. Instead, his depiction of its context and the context of its abolition paved the way for an understanding of slavery as constitutive of primitive accumulation, integral to the birth of modern globalization, and living on within the historical legacies of capitalist modernity.

Thus Williams's assertion, that the slave-sugar triangle produced the conditions in which European industrial development could emerge at the expense of the colonial peripheries, challenged nationally-bound historical paradigms and their racial exclusions and raised the question of how the postcolonial present was to be rethought in relation to a colonial past. In this sense, Capitalism and Slavery indirectly addressed the co-ordinates

Fig. 1.

Caption George Case, co-owner of the Zong and Mayor of Liverpool, 1781–2. Portrait by Thomas Phillips (1770–1845).

of cultural memory as well as intervening in a historiographical debate, and it highlighted the deeply political dimensions of both. The Marxist, internationalist and materialist spirit in which Williams argued is often stripped from the conceptual and analytical frameworks in vogue today but it should be noted that his ground-breaking work continues to inform the new Atlantic, diasporic and transnational perspectives that are now brought to bear in contemporary reassessments of the histories of slavery and abolition.

These debates, inaugurated in part by Williams, have struggled to be heard beyond the confines of the academic realm. At a public and institutional level, Britain's legacy of slaving continues to pose the politically complex problem of addressing the issue in national terms. This is hardly surprising given the implications and difficulties of making concrete connections that link a liberal-democratic and multicultural present with centuries of imperially organized global trade in enslaved as well as other forms of coerced labour.

One of the most memorable aspects of Capitalism and Slavery concerns Williams's naming of prominent financiers, manufacturers and commercial merchants who profited from the Atlantic slave-trade and from plantation slavery, and who were key mediators in the development of British industrialization. Taking Liverpool as his primary example, Williams began to map the private, social and business networks that facilitated the accumulation and circulation of capital, and which linked the development of the triangular trade with the progress of the Industrial Revolution. He...