Blood Legacy: Alex Renton (1839)
Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy
How does a person reckon with a disturbing episode in their family’s past? For the journalist and historian Alex Renton, this question became acute five years ago when he discovered the extent of his family’s involvement with slavery in the Caribbean islands of Tobago and Jamaica. In his book, Blood Legacy, Renton decided to confront this history head-on.
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As Renton describes in this episode, his approach is unusual in a British society that either avoids the subject of slavery, or prefers to recast the story in the celebratory terms of William Wilberforce and the Abolition Movement.
The reality, however, is not so comfortable. Only the Portuguese shipped more slaves across the Atlantic than the British. Around one in seven died on the voyage, and at the turn of the nineteenth-century, slavery and its associated industries generated about 12 per cent of British GDP.
A map of the West Indies, produced in Edinburgh in the 1760s. (Library of Congress)
In the 1830s, the British Parliament sought to bring a total end to this practice. As Renton explains, however, during that time pragmatism was at play just as much as principle and while many families lost their slave holdings, many others also became spectacularly rich.
This wealth came directly from the British Parliament. On the heels of the Act that abolished slavery in the British Caribbean (August 1833) came the Slave Compensation Act of 1837. This piece of legislation set aside a sum of £20 million – as much as £17 billion in today’s money – for those slave owners who were deemed to have lost their property.
To finance this compensation scheme the British government were compelled to take out one of the largest loans in human history. This loan was only finally paid off in 2015. Among those to receive compensation were Renton’s family, who were given the modern equivalent of £1.5 million for the near-200 slaves that they had owned in Jamaica.
In this episode of the podcast examines this story with a journalist’s eye. He tells us about his distant relative, James Fergusson, and explains his abuse of his slaves in Tobago in the 1770s. He talks about the peculiar Scottish connection with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how the bounties of the 1830s were spent on spectacles like the Eglinton Tournament.
Alex Renton is a campaigning journalist working on poverty, development, the environment, food culture and food policy. He has won awards for investigative journalism, war reporting and food writing.
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Click here to order Alex Renton’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: August 1st 1838, Falmouth, Jamaica. William Knibb and his congregation meet to bury a coffin containing a whip, chains and an iron punishment collar. An inscription by the burial reads: 'Colonial Slavery died 31st July 1838, aged 276.'
Scene Two: August 28th 1839, Ayrshire, Scotland. The Eglinton Tournament begins.
Scene Three: 1839, Rochdale. The founders of the Anti-Corn Law League, Richard Cobden and John Bright deliver their first speeches in what would become one of the most successful campaigns of the 19th century. The trade reforms they campaigned for would destroy the sugar island economies and put most of the newly liberated people out of work and into desperate poverty for the next 50 years.
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Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Alex Renton
Production: Maria Nolan
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Slavery in the nineteenth century
This lithograph from 1830 shows a European man in Freetown, Sierra Leone, being drawn in a carriage by dozens of slaves (Wellcome Trust)
By 1800, slavery and its associated industries generated about 12 per cent of British GDP.
Discussions about emancipation reached a peak in the 1830s. While some in Britain felt that abolishing slavery was correcting a historical crime, others displayed much more self-interest. The racist illustration on the left was published in around 1833 and it shows the various reactions elicited by plans to compensate slave-owners with the staggering sum of £20 million. To the right is a scene that is more often commemorated in Britain. It shows a meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade at Exeter Hall in 1840.
In this episode Alex Renton references the database of compensated slave owners, which is part of the Legacies of British Slavery project run by University College London. If you would like to browse this archive, click here.
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Click here to order Blood Legacy by Alex Renton from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
Alex Renton is a journalist and writer: he uncovers his own family’s slave-owning past and uses this as a means of approaching the growing debate about such legacies and contemporary consequences of Britain’s empire.
