Today Bristol is a wealthy, port city on the River Avon in the West of England. It has an excellent university, a thriving music scene and a cosmopolitan community. But, less than two hundred years ago Bristol thrived for a very different reason, one that it has only recently begun to face up to.
Sugar and cotton
Between 1730 and 1740, Bristol was at the forefront of the transatlantic slave trade, taking men, women and children by ship from north-west Africa to the Caribbean. There, the enslaved people were sold to plantation owners and forced to work as slaves, producing crops like sugar and cotton. By the time the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, over two thousand slave ships had left the port of Bristol. Slave trading was big business and money poured into the city, being invested in local industries, building works and the railways. As you walk around Bristol today, the legacy of those days is still all around.
Evil Triangle
Nearly all the major ports of Europe were involved in slave trading to some degree, but Bristol was among the most active. The trade worked in a triangle. A wealthy ship owner would organise a ship and fill it with a large and valuable cargo of trade goods. These might include wool, cloth and copper from the Bristol area, but also goods that had already been imported: linen and iron from northern Europe, glass beads from Venice, cotton from the East India Company and guns.
A terrible journey
These ships would set sail from the port of Bristol and when they arrived on the north-west African coast, their cargo would be traded for African men, women and children. These enslaved people would then be taken on the ships across the Atlantic and sold in the Americas, either in the Caribbean or North or South America, to plantation owners who wanted labourers for jobs like picking cotton. To complete the triangle, the ships, now empty of their human cargo, would be refilled with raw materials from the New World: sugar, cotton, cocoa, rice, coffee, tobacco, etc. and return to Bristol.
Wealth and refinement
The raw materials arriving in Bristol needed to be processed and so factories were set up. In the mid-1700s Bristol had twenty sugar refineries in the city, all processing raw sugar from the Caribbean plantations and of course bringing jobs and wealth to the city.
Facing up to slavery
For centuries, Bristol, a large city in the south-west of England, ignored or denied that it had anything to do with the slave trade of the 18th century. But over the last thirty years that attitude has been changing. Bristol has a large African-Caribbean community and often within that community people are pushing for transparency and some form of acknowledgement of what went on.
As a result, in the past decade the city has finally begun to speak openly about its involvement in one of the most shameful periods in human rights history. Sue Giles is a historian and curator at M Shed, a Bristol museum that has been actively remembering and reflecting on the city’s historic role in the slave trade. Using historical artefacts and documents, she has been able to build up a picture of how the slave trade worked, and it what ways it affected people. Speak Up met with Giles, who described how enslaved people suffered appalling conditions on board the ships that transported them to the West Indies. Densely packed in, thousands died during the journey, as she explained.
Sue Giles (English accent): For conditions on a slave ship, we have a few reports from various people about what it was like. One is an enslaved man, who as a child he wrote his life history, and he talks about the conditions on the slave ship and how appalling it was. Because obviously you have, depending on the size of the ship, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred people crammed into the hold of a ship. They can’t move around very easily. There are buckets to use as toilets, but if you’re chained to the man lying next to you and you’re in this tiny confined space, how do you get to the toilet bucket? Most of these people they were captured from inland and walked maybe a hundred, two hundred kilometres to the coast, where they got traded. They’ve never seen the sea, let alone been on a ship. You they were probably seasick. So you have urine, feces, vomit… all sort of mixed up together.
In chains
And, said Giles, enslaved men were often kept shackled on a journey that could take months to complete in sometimes terrifying weather conditions.
Sue Giles: Often the men were seen as the dangerous part of the crew. You might have men, women and children in the hold. The women and children were usually seen as quite safe so often they had more freedom and they could go up on deck more. But the men, being young, strong and likely to fight back, often they would be kept chained up. So, on display here in M Shed we have a set of chains and these might be used either on the march to the coast the enslaved would be shackled in various ways so they couldn’t run off and escape, or when they’re actually in the hold and there you have some very heavy iron handcuffs and chains and that would keep the men certainly under control.
The price of abolition
The anti-slavery campaign became increasingly powerful and in 1834 an act to abolish owning slaves in British territories was passed. But the British government had to pay a high price to achieve this, said Giles.
Sue Giles: Part of the reason for it being passed was not that everyone saw the virtue of abolishing slavery but because finally the British government had put into the act the offer of paying compensation for all the lost property. Because obviously all these plantation owners they owned their enslaved work force. It was their property, they were losing property. They weren’t going to agree to that without some form of compensation. And so once compensation was agreed, the plantation owners were happy with it. So that finally went through. They were paid twenty million pounds in 1834 for their lost property, and if you multiply that by something like eighty or a hundred to get [to] today’s values, they were paid a fortune. It was a loan that the British government had to take out to pay the twenty million. And that money was paid off only in the last couple of years. So, the British taxpayer has been paying for compensation ever since 1834.