“Important. . . admirable”: review in the Guardian/Observer
The author of Stiff Upper Lip examines his own family history to expose the extent to which the fortunes of the UK’s wealthiest relied on a dehumanising trade
Sun 23 May 2021 11.00 BST
This is an important book and not just because it is a chilling account of slavery and commerce in the West Indies in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s important because it establishes a vital link between then and now, cause and effect, history and its long and damaging legacy.
If Alex Renton’s last book, Stiff Upper Lip, exposed the wealthy’s perverse complacency about abuse in Britain’s boarding schools, Blood Legacy lays bare the ruling class’s most heinous historical crime: the brutal project to reduce human beings to the condition of working farm animals for financial profit.
Just as Renton used his own dubious privilege of a boarding-school education to bring a personal perspective to his previous work, so he draws on his family’s involvement in slavery as a moral touchstone here. One set of his ancestors were from Ayrshire, an area of Scotland whose large landowners disproportionately invested in plantations in the Caribbean (Scots owned more slaves per capita than any other nation in the UK).
James Graham (1789-1860), Alex Renton’s fourth great-grandfather, who owned two slaves. Photograph: courtesy of Canongate
The Fergussons of Kilkerran, of whom Renton is a direct descendant, were powerful members of the landed gentry. Sir Adam Fergusson was an 18th-century lawyer, MP and someone who knew many of the key figures in the Scottish enlightenment. He was thought of as a well-educated and highly cultured man. And he ran the family’s slave plantations in Tobago and Jamaica for almost 50 years.
Fergusson was also a meticulous keeper of accounts, which survive largely intact. In assessing this blandly sinister primary source, Renton asks how someone who took an intellectual interest in progressive debates could also methodically approve of collars, handcuffs and chains used to bind and torment innocent human beings. This is the question, in one form or another, which recurs throughout this compelling narrative.
One answer is that, as Fergusson never set foot in the West Indies, let alone on his plantations, the appalling reality of slavery was something that could remain safely abstract, consigned to some distant universe in which human suffering didn’t register. In a sense, this has also been this country’s experience of slavery, something that took place long ago and far away.
Unlike the US, where slavery and its continuing aftermath have shaped and disfigured so much of contemporary society, the UK has been able to remove itself from the scene of the crime. Instead, the whole sordid episode of paying staggering amounts of compensation to the slave owners has been hidden behind the patriotic tale of the battle to end slavery.
But what really happened was that an already privileged class of landowners was further enriched and those it had enslaved received nothing. As a consequence, the debt – financial and moral – was taken on by the nation at large. In the first instance, the interest on the loan was finally paid off in 2015. In the second, we’re only now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, starting to come to terms with the dreadful legacy.
Taking a lead from the US, that process has been cast in black and white, victim and perpetrator. There is no getting away from the racial nature of the Atlantic slave trade or the unspeakable depravity visited on the enslaved – by Europeans to Africans. But one of the strengths of Renton’s book is that it takes seriously the issue of class.
We’re only now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, starting to come to terms with the dreadful legacy
Slavery was first and foremost a system of exploitation designed to maximise profit. That was certainly the motivation that Fergusson brought to his accounting. Of course, to justify the human costs, an ideology was developed to dehumanise the victims, to render them a sub-species. This wasn’t a giant step to take because that’s how the lower classes in British society were already viewed (a common defence of slavery was that enslaved people were better off than this country’s poor).
But the ideology of racism proved more resilient than the business model of slavery. While the abominable treatment of humans ultimately brought diminishing returns (the Fergussons made less money from their plantations than from their lands in Scotland), the idea that Africans were lesser people proved remarkably robust and was even adopted by many of the lower classes.
However, it was the slave owners who were able to build huge country estates and finance social and political influence that lasts, in many cases, to this day. Renton is keenly aware that the family archives from which his research is drawn are overwhelmingly concerned with the wellbeing and profits of his ancestors. The plight of the enslaved people themselves scarcely figures, other than in the most cursory fashion. He makes his discomfort with this imbalance clear, but it’s the inevitable consequence of telling the story of slavery from the perspective of those who benefited from it.
In breaking class ranks, Renton has given voice to a long suppressed truth: many people who are rich and powerful in the UK today owe at least some of their fortune to slavery. It’s right that the UK as a nation should address its unsavoury past and there is a persuasive case for proper compensation at last being paid to the West Indies, where slavery’s corrosive effects remain manifest.
But there is also an argument, which this admirable book can only strengthen, that asks the material beneficiaries of slavery to be first in line to make an appropriate contribution to that cause. Renton is donating his advance and royalties to Caribbean welfare projects. Let’s see who follows his example.
Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery by Alex Renton is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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