The bitter taste of sugar
White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
You can’t fault Thomas Harding on his timing. After a succession of books dealing with his Jewish family background (among them Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake), he moves further afield with a history of a revolt by slaves in the South American outpost of Demerara (later British Guiana and now Guyana) in 1823. Though brutally suppressed by the local militia, it is now seen as a pivotal point in the struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies.
Skilfully using contemporary court records, diaries, letters and newspaper reports, Harding reconstructs the tragic and horrific story of the uprising. Of the 89,000 inhabitants of Demerara, 77,000 were slaves (Harding prefers to call them “enslaved people”) imported from Africa to work on the sugarcane plantations that provided a lucrative income for their largely absentee British owners. Their living and working conditions were appalling, the British overseers brutal and barbaric, and few estates were worse than the one called Success, seven miles from the capital Georgetown, where the uprising was planned.
The only decent white people were the British missionaries ministering to the slaves. On Success, a young couple, Rev John Smith and his wife Jane, tried to alleviate the slaves’ suffering but merely attracted the hostility of the slave owners and overseers, who did everything they could to obstruct their work, with tragic consequences.
The uprising was led by a courageous young slave, Jack Gladstone (who bore the name of the estate’s Scottish owner, John Gladstone, father of the future prime minister) and his father Quamina. They were betrayed at the outset and the whole thing went off half-cock as a result. The insurgents refused to harm the overseers they captured; much good it did them — they were massacred, men, women and children, in cold blood by militiamen despatched from Georgetown. In the subsequent days, others were summarily executed or arrested, summarily tried and then shot or hanged. John Smith was also arrested and taken to Georgetown, accused of helping the rebellion. The account of his trial and that of Jack Gladstone, worthy of the worst excesses of Stalin’s Soviet Union and culminating in the death sentence, still has the capacity to outrage two centuries later.
Harding handles his material deftly, switching the action between Demerara and London, where news of the uprising and particularly Smith’s treatment spurred on the abolitionist cause. Slavery in the British colonies was abolished a decade later, though conditions in Demerara took much longer to improve.
Harding divides his historical narrative with ruminations on today’s events, concluding that “the legacy of slavery is very much alive in Britain today”, which some may think overstates the case. He wholeheartedly endorses paying reparations to the slaves’ descendants, while acknowledging the practical difficulties involved. On a visit to Guyana, he meets plenty of people who unsurprisingly back the idea; the Reparations Committee for the Caribbean Community reckons £50 billion should do the trick. Perhaps the whole notion merely perpetuates the master-servant relationship, of which slavery was the most awful embodiment, and encourages a perpetual sense of victimhood.
Whatever one’s view, Harding’s book is a timely contribution to an ongoing debate.