Book Review, 22 March 2007
Reviewed by Jonathan Wright

History of Human Bondage

The Trader, The Owner, The Slave
James Walvin
Jonathan Cape, £17.99
Tablet bookshop price £16.20 Tel 01420 592974

Thank goodness we vanquished slavery. Except, alas, we didn't. Reports of appalling human bondage occasionally claw their way into the news, but behind such headlines there are countless neglected stories of people dragging their fellow men into servitude. Slavery is still part of the fabric of human society. Remarkable organisations confront this devastating fact every day. The rest of us usually cling to the cosy assumption that slavery is a relic of the past. This year, we should all celebrate the bicentenary of the British slave trade's demise, but we should not pat ourselves on the back for being ever-so-morally-evolved. We should just think ourselves lucky to be living in a time and place when slavery is reviled.

Tracing how our slavery-abhorring era emerged has been one of the cornerstones of James Walvin's eminent academic career. Gloriously, he has always privileged the human element over the deployment of shiny quantitative data or artful theorising, and his latest book adopts a familiar historical technique: trying to encapsulate a nebulous subject through portrayals of representative lives. It is, like any other, a flawed technique: there is no such thing as a representative life. By investing so much in particular historical figures you risk losing sight of the complexity of a centuries-long historical phenomenon. Contrariwise, such an approach allows the reader to engage intimately with an overwhelming subject: the details of an individual life wield a power that swathes of statistics can never match. The trick is to select your protagonists with great care. Happily, that is precisely what Walvin does. His three characters turn the sprawling history of eighteenth-century slavery into a compelling human drama.

Walvin's account of the slave trader John Newton offers a glimpse of filthy, disease-ridden life on board an eighteenth-century slave ship. Walvin strives to be even-handed, and is careful to portray Newton as, in many ways, unexceptional: an intelligent, pious man who was probably no more or less cruel than any of his peers. What singled Newton out, however, was his transformation in later life. Walvin traces Newton's career from human-trafficker to sermonising curate in rural Buckinghamshire, where he churned out edifying hymns ("Amazing Grace" among them) for his congregation. By means of a repentant (if sanitised) autobiography, Newton even lent support to the abolition of the trade that had once garnered him handsome profits.

Thomas Thistlewood underwent no such metamorphosis. He was a brute from beginning to end, and his story allows us to peer inside the world of the Caribbean plantation. Walvin does not spare us the harrowing details: we see Thistlewood doling out grotesque punishments - making slaves urinate in other errant slaves' mouths; applying salt and lime juice to freshly inflicted wounds - and we see him sexually exploiting female slaves with unbelievable abandon (his journal reveals that, over 37 years in Jamaica, he had sex with 138 different women). Again, however, Walvin is determined to offer a rounded portrait, and so we meet Thistlewood the devoted collector of books and Thistlewood the famed horticulturalist who, during the 1760s, imported more than 130 species of flora from England. How, we are invited to ask, could so civilised a man also be a sadistic pervert of the first magnitude? How, the reader is prodded towards pondering, could an entire civilised society condone something as reprehensible as the slave trade?

All of this makes for grim reading, which makes Walvin's final subject all the more welcome. In Olaudah Equiano we meet the man who escaped the wretched slave economy to become a skilled writer, a Haymarket barber and a major contributor to the abolitionist cause. The story of Equiano's journey from servitude to manumission, fleshed out by a vibrant account of London's eighteenth-century black community, provides an edifying and rewarding coda to the book.

Do these three men sum up the entirety of eighteenth-century slavery? No: but they offer the reader an ideal point of departure. Publishers will offer up many books about slavery in this bicentennial year, but this is sure to be among the best. Admittedly, Walvin has a tendency to dismiss rival explanations of the advent of abolition (he is too eager to dismiss economic forces, for instance). Admittedly, he tries far too hard to connect these three disparate lives. That said, his book does a fine job of capturing an extraordinary period in British history.  Into the bargain, Walvin has also found time to produce a pithy and reliable survey of the entire British slave trade (A Short History of Slavery, Penguin, £9.99), and any reader who pines for more context should turn to this equally accomplished volume.

Slavery is much more than an enduring reality. It is also an idea. Even if the institution suddenly vanished from the earth, its legacy and seductive potential would remain. All those glories of ancient Greece and Rome would still be tarnished; the West's rise to economic dominance would still be marred by the despicable exploitation of the 12 million Africans upon which it was built. We should not be tormented by guilt over past misdemeanours, but we should have the wit to realise where we came from and where we might end up. This book reminds us that there is danger in glibly assuming that the urge to enslave has somehow been cast out of our moral universe. The instinct runs too deep; the quest for economic profit maintains its knack of anaesthetising conscience.

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