Black and British by David Olusoga

Author:David Olusoga [Olusoga, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

With some justification, the efforts of the British West Africa Squadron and Britain’s wider commitment to the suppression of the international slave trade have been criticized for being half-hearted or tokenistic. Critics at the time believed the task of halting the Atlantic trade was too vast an undertaking even for Britain, and went against her national interests, while more recently historians have pointed out how the mission to end slavery dovetailed with suspicious ease into British colonial expansion in Africa, allowing British power and trade to penetrate into the region in the second half of the nineteenth century. There is little doubt that the West Africa Squadron was never given the resources to comprehensively confront the slave-traders. From the start the ships were too few, and many of those later dispatched to increase its strength were too old and too slow to perform their task effectively. Lord Palmerston complained that too many of the squadron’s ships were ‘old tubs’ and it is significant that the Black Joke, most successful and celebrated ship of the squadron, was a converted slaver and not dispatched from Britain by the Admiralty.22 Yet Britain’s crusade was supported by successive British governments of different political stripes, all of which found funds for it and defended it from its detractors. The mission was also given considerable bureaucratic backing and diplomatic assistance, and in 1841, a dedicated Slave Trade Department was created within the Foreign Office. This department had its own offices and staff, who administered the jumble of treaties, kept track of the global slave-trading networks,23 and drafted diplomatic agreements between Britain and the states whose trades it was seeking to suppress.24 British consuls and ambassadors monitored the movement of shipping, gathering intelligence and even paying bribes for information in support of the anti-slavery cause.25 They fed their dispatches and reports into the Foreign Office, which collated a detailed global picture of the trade. All this activity was a significant item of national expenditure. The navy spent around a twentieth of its budget to man and provision the West Africa Squadron,26 while over a million pounds was paid out in prize money to the officers and crews between 1807 and 1846.27 The expense was a constant complaint for those opposed to the mission. In 1845 the Liberal MP William Hutt claimed that the cost to the nation of almost four decades of anti slave trade patrolling had reached a figure double the £20 million the government had paid to forty-six thousand British slave owners who had claimed compensation eleven years earlier.28 Alongside the expense of manning and supplying the ships of the squadron there was also the not inconsiderable cost of administering and developing the colony of Sierra Leone. Expenditure there irked opponents, especially when it increased under Charles McCarthy, the most energetic and far-sighted of the colony’s governors, who began a series of infrastructure projects in the 1820s, the remnants of which are scattered across the centre of modern Freetown.

Opponents and critics also suggested that Britain’s

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