Slavery & Abolition

Graham Norton looks at dilapidated forts and castles in West Africa

Robin Blackburn describes how the message of liberte, egalite, fraternite, acted as crucial catalyst for race and class uprisings in Europe's Caribbean colonies.

Emancipation in British Guiana brought an influx of indentured labourers from India, whose working and living conditions were destructive of caste and culture, and often as harsh as those of the slaves they replaced.

Slavery would seem to be the epitome of domination by an all-powerful master over a passive, subservient dependent. But is this the whole picture?

William Wilberforce died in July 1833. Since then his reputation as champion of the abolition of slavery, evangelical and politician has undergone a series of reassessments.

'Thrice had his foot Domingo's island prest, Midst horrid wars and fierce barbarian wiles; Thrice had his blood repelled the yellow pest That stalks, gigantic, through the Western Isles!' ran the epitaph to one of the more than 20,000 British soldiers sent to St. Domingue in the 1790s.

Stephen Usherwood shows how Lord Mansfield employed his precise legal mind and his reasoned humanitarianism to expose the iniquities of slavery - and thus helped pave the way for its abolition.