Interview in The Times
1 May 2021 By Sathnam Sanghera
Alex Renton on exposing transatlantic slave traders – in his own family
The author and journalist has written a powerful book detailing his ancestors’ involvement in the slave trade. He tells Sathnam Sanghera about his compulsion to uncover his shocking heritage and why he’s determined to make reparations for the past
Anyone attempting to discuss Britain’s historic involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, in which we sent some three million Africans in shackles across the ocean, faces a wall of whataboutery and deflection. I’ve recently attempted to spark conversation with my book Empireland and have met furious resistance, with people objecting even to discussing the history on the grounds that Spain/Portugal did it first, that France/Belgium did it more brutally, that slavery had a long history predating the British Empire with the Greeks/Romans/Ottomans/Mughals /Americans/Brazilians/Cubans all taking slaves, that the awfulness was counterbalanced by the good that Empire did, that Africans are ultimately to blame as they did the enslaving, that the Irish/British working classes actually had it worse, that it’s more important to focus on the fact that we were the first to end slavery and helped abolish it across the planet, that it all happened a long time ago and we should instead talk about modern slavery.
Writer Alex Renton, who has travelled from Edinburgh to talk to me at my home in London, dismantles the myths with the efficiency of someone shelling pistachios for a snack. Sure, some enslaved people in elite roles might have had better food and more cash than some working-class Britons, but the latter couldn’t be raped, tortured, sold or murdered with impunity. Abolishing slavery was not the act of generosity it is often painted to be: British slaveholders only gave up after securing £20 million in compensation and four years of apprenticed labour from the enslaved, which was slavery in all but name. And we were not the first to do it: Denmark and various US states abolished the slave trade before we did in 1807, while much of Latin America, Haiti, France (for a period during the Revolution) and all the northern US states abolished slavery itself before Britain did in 1834.
“Yes, we abolished slavery, but we shipped more Africans than any nation in Europe except the Portuguese,” continues Renton. “And saying the Africans were the ultimate slavers is like saying that the man who grows a coca leaf in Bolivia is responsible for drug crime in Roehampton. It’s absurd. As for modern slavery, it’s just not the same thing. Do you own your own children? Can you be murdered without anyone coming back to you? That seems to me not generally to be the case in modern slavery. And you have to remember that the men turning up in ships to buy these Africans were Christians of our culture who thought and think very much like us today.”
Which brings us to the reason why the views of this 60-year-old white journalist and former aid worker for Oxfam are relevant on this topic in the first place. While there may not be much visibly posh about Renton, beyond the easy confidence that makes him look immediately comfortable in another person’s home and a certain scruffiness reminiscent of our prime minister, it’s because his aristocratic ancestors, on his mother’s side of the family, were among the wealthy elite of 3,000 British people who owned 50 per cent of all the enslaved people of the British Caribbean at the time slavery was outlawed in 1834. And he has written a remarkable new book, Blood Legacy, which exposes, through his family’s historic business entanglements in Tobago and Jamaica, the responsibility his social class has for the brutal history and its modern legacies.
Read more (Times paywall)