White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery

Telling the history of the Demerara Uprising, through the roles of three protagonists (an absentee slave owner, an enslaved abolitionist and a missionary), author Thomas Harding takes us back to late Georgian times, and the British colony of Demerara (part of present-day Guyana). He picks up the story at the time of the years immediately leading up to the Demerara Uprising of 1823, the uprising itself, and the consequences for those who had acted for their freedom. It is an account that is meticulously told, as the author has pieced together evidence from contemporary newspapers, diaries, letters, and trials in court.

Woven through the book are reflections, in which he stops in his narrative, to reach out to other people today to garner their views on the history and impact of the slave trade. Such people might be friends, family, acquaintances, and he asks them questions: What should be done about the legacy of British slavery? What shape should reparations take? Should there be reparations? He travels too to Guyana to retrace the places involved in the story and to speak to historians, activists and descendants of the enslaved.

All the while, throughout the book, he returns to the historical account, to the world of the colonies, to the events of the time, and, fascinatingly, to the lives and views of the enslaved, and the views of those enslaving them.

The slave trade, and its consequences on people then and now, is a topic that, almost two centuries on, is so emotive that it would be easy for the book to be charged with fury. But, so horrendous are the cold stark facts that the book can be recounted in a chillingly calm and considered manner; anger isn’t needed to make the author’s points.

• Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (hardback) £20. ISBN: 9781474621045. HT