Seeing his profits slip away as the deaths mounted, Collingwood resorted to an insurance scam. With each African covered at £30 apiece (over £2,000 at today's prices), he decided to jettison parts of the cargo to 'save' the rest. The Zong's maritime insurance would cover the cost of each lost slave. Citing a lack of drinking water, the captain had 133 slaves thrown overboard. Some went to their death with arms still shackled; others jumped into the ocean themselves.
But the Zong's insurer didn't buy Collingwood's story and in 1783 his damages claim ended up in a London court, not as a murder trial but as a civil insurance case. The presiding judge quickly found in Collingwood's favour.We might not have known about this case today if it hadn't been for ex-slave Olaudah Equiano. Living as a free man in London, he alerted the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who in turn brought the crimes of Collingwood to public attention. Very slowly the true horror of slavery was beginning to infect the British imagination. The Zong case was one of a series of atrocities that spearheaded progress towards the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
This week Tony Blair is to deliver a 'historical expression of regret' for the British state's involvement in slavery; Baroness Amos, the Leader of the Lords, is among those who have been pressing for an apology. Rightly, it will not be an apology on behalf of our ancestors. Rather it is an appreciation of the role Britain played in the forcible transportation of 11 million Africans and how that Atlantic trade shaped our past. It represents an understanding of how important slavery was in moulding modern Britain and how significant it is to the heritage of many black Britons today.
But why should we alone be apologising for slavery? For one of the most persistent objections to this sort of statement rests on the pre-existence of slavery in African society; Equiano's own father kept slaves. Although it was different in nature, there was a strong culture of slave trading prior to the European arrival in Africa. Much of it was driven by the Middle Eastern market, with Arab merchants bringing Africans into Persia and the Mediterranean. Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa, was a famous slave-trading hub.
Moreover, the Portuguese and French were in Africa earlier and equally adept at the bribery, cunning and violence which underpinned the trade. Yet during the 18th century the slave trade intensified both in quantity and barbarity (whether this was partly a product of racism, or racism a product of slavery, remains a moot point). And Britain - with its vast merchant navy, seafaring entrepreneurialism and growing empire - was at the heart of it.
The 'triangular trade' began in the ports of Bristol, Liverpool, London and Glasgow, where consortia put together by the Royal African Company or the Merchant Venturers set out for the West African coast laden with metal goods, guns, alcohol and textiles. During the latter half of the 18th century, thousands of British ships worked their way along the slave forts of the Atlantic coast, from Senegal to Nigeria, buying captured slaves trafficked from the African interior. It was said an approaching slave galley could be smelled two days before it docked, the congealed putrescence of blood, faeces, vomit and rotting bodies wafting downwind.
Chained together, the slaves were herded on to the ships for the gruesome 'middle passage'. In a successful run 5 per cent might not make the journey; more typical was a 20 per cent mortality rate. Starvation, suicide and self-mutilation were common. Equally common was a state of psychotic depression. One escaped slave described how 'the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable'. It is a contested figure, but historians now point to well over a million Africans dying during the middle passage.
As the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, many ships docked first in Barbados. During the 18th century this small island became the jewel in the emergent British empire. Dotted with windmills and plantation houses, Barbados was a colonial goldmine as the British put the branded Africans to work in cane fields and rum plants. Those strong enough to survive the middle passage now confronted the comparable savagery of plantation slavery. On the sweat of their toil, Europe's burgeoning consumer culture was erected. Having sold their slaves, the ships returned from the Caribbean laden with raw produce. This trade in tea, coffee, rice, rum, tobacco and, above all, sugar formed one of the foundations of the Georgian economy, making the Atlantic slave trade a vital forerunner to the industrial revolution. Britain's rise to economic and imperial greatness was intimately connected with slavery.
Today the evidence of the trade is all around us: from Jamaica Street in Glasgow to Venturers' House in Bristol to Liverpool's Town Hall. Our urban fabric is laden with slave iconography. Yet the nexus of slavery was never limited to industrialists or merchants. The profits it promised seduced investors from Oxbridge colleges to numerous MPs to members of the royal family. Much to its present shame, even the Church of England got in on the act, running the Codrington plantation in Barbados.
Similarly, some of the great aristocratic fortunes of the 18th century were built upon slavery. Investments in the West Indies gave the Lascelles family the wealth to endow Harewood House in Yorkshire and William Blathwayt to retire to Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire. Within Dyrham Park's exquisite panelling are two black slaves carrying shells.
The universality of slavery within British society makes the 1807 Act all the more remarkable. The idea of abolishing this fundamental part of the economy seemed outrageous and impossible. Why did it happen? Historians of the left used to emphasise the role of slave revolts (as CLR James did in his spectacular account of the birth of Haiti, The Black Jacobins) and the move from a colonial sugar trade to industrial capitalism. The slave-owning elite were both fearful for their own skins and starting to realise the prohibitive costs of plantation labour.
Today scholars stress the role of civil society. As Adam Hochschild has chronicled in his book, Bury the Chains, the work of activists such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson mobilised public opinion in favour of abolition. They pioneered the tactics of the modern pressure group with petitions, boycotts, mass rallies, public debates, legal injunctions and parliamentary action. In 1792 some 13,000 residents of Glasgow put their names to an abolitionist petition. Many of the activists were drawn from the Nonconformist movement (notably the Quakers) with Josiah Wedgwood designing the abolitionist badge bearing the slogan 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'
Yet what was equally remarkable was the involvement of ex-slaves in the debate. Equiano was joined by other African writers such as Ottabah Cugoan and Ignatius Sancho in the abolitionist campaign. Their vivid accounts of the human cost of slavery provided some of the most successful propaganda tools.
But in Britain in the 1800s laws were made by elites and the man who delivered abolition was among the most elitist of them all. William Wilberforce had no great affection for the African slave, but he had considerable regard for the spiritual state of England. He led the abolitionist crusade as part of his own evangelical vision for curtailing moral corruption. When Wilberforce's dogged certitude coalesced with a broader demand for political and social reform, the momentum towards 1807 was unstoppable. Ultimately it wasn't economics or security fears which ended the slave trade, it was public pressure and moral sentiment.
Which is why the 200th anniversary of abolition should be a moment of pride as much as guilt. The complexities of abolition mean that the kind of apology Tony Blair offered for the 1840s Irish potato famine - politically driven and devoid of historical context - does no service to the significance of abolition.
Yet next year's commemorations must be about more than Downing Street statements. They have to draw on all elements of civil society, black and white. First and foremost, we need a richer appreciation of the totalising impact of the Atlantic slave trade. As historian James Walvin puts it, 'We need to integrate slavery into the warp and weft of British history.' That means museums, galleries, and public institutions actively interpreting their collections in light of modern scholarship. English Heritage has already begun that process by looking at the abolitionist circle around Kenwood House in Hampstead. Forthcoming plans to reintroduce the history of the British Empire within the school syllabus need to take into account the history of slavery.
What is exciting is how much is already in preparation. At Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, a major Equiano exhibition is planned; in Lancaster, a slave trade arts memorial project is at work; in Bristol and Liverpool, there are 'slavery heritage trails'. Much of this is rightly concerned with exploring the history of the black presence in Britain. And, amid today's rumbling racial tensions, this activity says something very positive about our post-colonial sensibility. With 1807 as a backdrop, we are publicly addressing historic questions of race and empire in a far more sophisticated fashion than many other European nations.
Any official apology on behalf of the British government would get in the way of this. Not only would it be logically incoherent, it would unnecessarily goad middle England opinion and open up claims for reparations. Even the empathetic Bill Clinton steered clear of a full apology on his celebrated 1998 tour of Africa. Ever the lawyer, Clinton would only admit that 'going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that'.
More controversially, America has been debating how to deal with those ill-gotten fruits. Jesse Jackson has led a strong campaign for economic reparations both to Africa and to African-American citizens. But the question of the political and economic legacy of slavery is a complex one: is it really credible (especially in Britain) to link it with current racial inequalities in health, education or prosperity?
One interesting approach has been developed by Brown University in Rhode Island, which appointed a committee on slavery and justice to re-examine the role of slavery in its foundation. After discovering extensive ties, it recommended making amends by building a memorial, creating a slavery study centre and increasing efforts to recruit minority students, particularly from Africa and the West Indies. Now Yale and Harvard are similarly addressing their slave heritage.
But all this requires the kind of progressive public climate that prime ministers and presidents can shape. That is why Tony Blair's statement this week should be welcomed: it will publicise the sort of murderous excesses men like Captain Collingwood got away with and the implicit condonement they received from the British state. It gives an important imprimatur to next year's commemorations of this extraordinary, barbaric history and its multiple legacies today.
Humanity for sale
· The slave trade began in 1517, when a Spanish nobleman was licensed to import African slaves to the settlements. By 1754 there were 263,000 slaves in the New World; in all, 15 million were transported.
· Traders left England with alcohol, firearms and cotton goods, which they traded for slaves on the west coast of Africa. They then transported the slaves to the Americas, where they were traded for sugar, tobacco or cotton.
· Conditions aboard slave ships were horrendous. Hundreds of slaves were packed in, often chained lying down for the duration of the trip. A fifth died from disease or starvation on the journey.
· In America in the 1800s an 'underground railroad' enabled slaves on southern plantations to flee to the north or Canada. Up to 100,000 escaped.
· Tory MP William Wilberforce, a leading abolitionist, lobbied MPs in the 1790s. Britain stopped shipping slaves in 1807 and in 1833, a month after he died, the Slavery Abolition Act freed all slaves in the Empire.
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These are some very rough figures:
On May 21, 2001, the French National Assembly voted the Taubira law which recognized slavery as a crime against humanity.
At the same time, the British, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese delegations blocked an EU apology for slavery.
In September 2006 it was reported that the UK Government may issue a "statement of regret" over slavery. They have. Here.
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