Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy. Photo by Caroline Irby -
Over the past few years it’s been increasingly revealed – or rather, re-revealed – just how much of Britain’s wealth – which built and ran factories, canals and industrial machinery, the stately homes, the museums, the universities – came from “the West Indians” – the UK-based absentee landlords who profited from the transatlantic trade in African people. August institutions were created, sustained and enriched by the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans who produced cocoa and cotton, indigo, coffee and, cruellest of all, sugar, on estates throughout the Caribbean.
The British would have been aware of a lot of this a long time ago, of course, if they’d just read Eric Williams. It was he who wrote in the 1940s in Capitalism and Slavery that the bricks of Liverpool, England’s biggest slaving port, were cemented with African blood – an unforgettably sickening but almost literal metaphor.
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