But one of the strengths of Renton’s book is that it takes seriously the issue of class. 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. Taking a lead from the US, that process has been cast in black and white, victim and perpetrator.
In the second, we’re only now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, starting to come to terms with the dreadful legacy. In the first instance, the interest on the loan was finally paid off in 2015. As a consequence, the debt – financial and moral – was taken on by the nation at large. 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.īut what really happened was that an already privileged class of landowners was further enriched and those it had enslaved received nothing. 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. In a sense, this has also been this country’s experience of slavery, something that took place long ago and far away. 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. This is the question, in one form or another, which recurs throughout this compelling narrative.
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. And he ran the family’s slave plantations in Tobago and Jamaica for almost 50 years.įergusson was also a meticulous keeper of accounts, which survive largely intact. He was thought of as a well-educated and highly cultured man. Sir Adam Fergusson was an 18th-century lawyer, MP and someone who knew many of the key figures in the Scottish enlightenment. The Fergussons of Kilkerran, of whom Renton is a direct descendant, were powerful members of the landed gentry. James Graham (1789-1860), Alex Renton’s fourth great-grandfather, who owned two slaves.
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