In Legacy (2019), Thomas Harding wrote about the catering giant J Lyons & Co – founded in 1884 and run by the author’s maternal family as a spin-off from their tobacco company – and acknowledged how his ancestors, like others involved in the tobacco industry at that time, had grown wealthy at the expense of enslaved African labour. The following summer, in 2020, confronted by news images of the slave owner Edward Colston’s statue being toppled in Bristol (part of a global response to the death of George Floyd), he started to see how the earlier gap in his own awareness belonged to a wider “national amnesia” that was being called out by the Black Lives Matter protests.
“As a child,” he reflects, “I was taught that Britain had been the first nation to abolish slavery… that we were the ‘good guys’.” Stirred by the protests, Harding was inspired to “find out something more” about Britain’s history and culpability. White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery is the fruit of that endeavour, and puts Harding alongside other recent revisers of Britain’s imperial history, including Sathnam Sanghera (Empireland), Kehinde Andrews (The New Age of Empire) and Corinne Fowler (Green Unpleasant Land).
Harding focuses on a single event; the 1823 uprising in Demerara, now Guyana – “an example,” he writes, “that captured what British slavery was like in a microcosm” and that takes him on a journey into the past and also to present-day Guyana in search of what its history has left behind.
The story unfolds through the eyes of four key characters (all men): John Gladstone, the owner (and slave owner) of a small sugar plantation called Success (whose fourth son would grow up to be the liberal reformist and four-term prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone); the rebel ringleader and enslaved man, Jack Gladstone, who bore their family name and sought to overthrow them; John Smith, the Anglican missionary subsequently dubbed the “Demerara martyr”, who was court martialed for stirring up abolitionist sentiment among the enslaved people, found guilty and subsequently died in mysterious circumstances while in custody; and John Cheveley, a twentysomething colonial administrator, who was an eyewitness to the revolt and its fallout, which caused, according to Harding, a reinvigoration of the anti-slavery movement in Britain, propped up by the scandal of Smith’s death abroad.
Overstatement of the role of British humanitarians, including William Wilberforce, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Elizabeth Pease and Anne Knight, in bringing about the end of slavery has long been challenged by scholars such as Eric Williams (also Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister), who in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that abolition was more a response to the economic collapse of the plantation system, and by CLR James, who in his study of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), argued for the key role of enslaved populations themselves in weakening the hand of slavers by rising up against them.
Harding’s historiography provides a valuable introduction to the various strands of this debate and to these canonical texts that readers keen, like him, to find out more should engage with directly. He also makes a strong case for the inclusion of Demerara in a list of the key rebellions – typically identified as Haiti (1791-1804), Barbados (1816) and Jamaica (1831-32) – that helped to bring about an end to British slavery.
Less successful is the book’s dramatic portrait of characters and political intrigue, which presumably aims to deliver a yarn comparable with works such as William Dalrymple’s magisterial treatment of the 1857 Indian mutiny, The Last Mughal (2006), but lacks that book’s richness and complexity.
The more convincing emotional pulse of the book resonates in the brief autobiographical notes, interspersed between the chapters, that describe conversations, first in the UK, then over the course of a research trip to Guyana, with the descendants of enslaved people – Black people – who it would have been to good to hear more from, as they open Harding’s eyes to the enduring legacies of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. He is initiated into the effects of poverty, mass incarceration and social immobility, all understood by the end of the book as consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, and as a consequence he starts to grasp the case for reparations for slavery, emerging as a passionate advocate.
There is, though, a vital omission in his account; nearly 80% of Guyana’s population now live on the frontlines of climate breakdown – the product of a global industrial system, also built from the gains of slavery, that has left post-plantation economies across the Caribbean catastrophically exposed to the impacts of global heating, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Failure to acknowledge this present violence makes his case for reparations, though admirable and well intentioned, incomplete.
White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery by Thomas Harding is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
