From a Culture of Abolition to a Culture War: Remembering Transatlantic Enslavement in Britain, 1807-2021

In Chapter 5, Jessica Moody addresses the issue of remembering enslavement in Britain. Britain played a major role in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans until two acts in the early nineteenth century brought a faltering legal end. This history included the forced trafficking of estimated 12 million enslaved Africans featuring physical and sexual violence, degradation, and torture. The public memory of this past has been highly contested, most recently, in the 1990s; in 2007 at the time of the Bicentenary of the British Slave Trade Act; and in 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down the statue of British slave merchant Edward Colston. Moody argues that until the later twentieth century, British public memory of this history did not focus on the scale and economy of slavery nor its brutality and violence. During the nineteenth century and until close to the millennium, official public memory rather sought to celebrate its own – largely parliamentary – history of abolition. Britain’s celebration of largely white abolition heroes served to obscure the longer, violent history of enslavement and its legacies. Moody relates that this shifted in the 1980s onward with Black political protests, demographic change, and a shifting historiographical framework. By the end of the twentieth century, Britain’s public memory of slavery had much more of a focus on issues including slave resistance, the experiences of the enslaved, and the brutal history of transatlantic enslavement. This chapter considers broad patterns of public memory and forgetting as well as critical moments in the history of Britain’s memory of transatlantic enslavement including the tensions around the public discourse in 2020 and 2021 following the police murder of George Floyd in the United States.