Not so sweet Demerara
White Debt By Thomas Harding Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20
In White Debt, Thomas Harding asks two questions about the British slave trade: how do we remember the past, and whom should we hold responsible for it?
Important questions, and ones very much at the forefront in recent years, as institutions are renamed and statues tumble. It is no accident that Harding begins with an account of Colston’s statue in Bristol.
Harding identifies a need to tell a more complex and unsettling history of Britain’s slave trade. Unlike America, where the crimes and consequences of slavery are both factored into its geography, Britain has a past that can seem elusive. Its slave history is conveniently placed behind a Caribbean cordon sanitaire, more identifiable with Wilberforce and the Emancipation Act than with what preceded it.
Harding’s literary calling card is his often ingenious combination of family history and History with a capital H.
In Hanns and Rudolf (2013) and The House by the Lake (2016), he explored his Jewish ancestors against the backdrop of Germany in the Second World War. Here, Harding turns to a more disquieting aspect of his family history: its complicity in slave labour in the 19th century, and the complexities and ambiguities, both past and present, that such a legacy implies.
The primary story of White Debt is an account of the ill-fated revolt of nearly 10,000 slaves in Demerara, present-day Guyana, in 1823. It was instigated by atrocious conditions and a tragic misinterpretation of an amelioration decree, and – after initial successes – brutally repressed.
It’s an arresting and meticulously researched narrative. The horrors of slave conditions and the repression of the rebellion are paraded through Harding’s deft handling of a mountain of source material without ever becoming gratuitous. Casual violence, rape, and torture brush up against sanctioned executions and corporal punishments.
More insidiously, superstition, hearsay and groupthink seep like poisonous gas through Demerara’s colonial society, often as brutal and destructive as the violence itself.
Harding structures his account around four men. Jack Gladstone was the slave who headed the rebellion. John Smith was the hapless chaplain universally distrusted by the plantation owners. John Cheveley was a young man from Essex, forced abroad by financial hardship, and an unwilling actor in the repression. And John Gladstone, father of William and owner of several plantations in Demerara, was holed up in Seaforth House in Liverpool, swatting at abolitionists from the sidelines.
Each character comes equipped with his own set of complexities and contradictions. Class, religion and the hard facts of financial gain variously inform a willingness to dehumanise or to be complicit in the act.
The second story Harding tells here, spliced into his account of the Demerara uprising, is about his family’s involvement in the slave trade, his subsequent research trip to Guyana
and an intense reflection on the issue of reparations and personal responsibility.
Harding’s account shares an affinity with Alex Renton’s excellent Blood Legacy (2021), which unpacks his family’s direct involvement in West Indian slavery. But where Renton’s ancestors were direct players, Harding has to reach a bit further to establish a connection. His ancestors’ tobacco business, Glückstein and Co, bought tobacco from American plantations. The family has thus ‘made at least part of its money from slavery’, a fact that leaves Harding stumbling ‘blurry-eyed’ around Georgetown, Guyana.
Harding’s second story is less successful. He canvasses a wide number of opinions but does little with them to mount an argument. Chats with family and friends on the matter leave him feeling grumpy and misunderstood.
The real head-scratcher is that there is no connection between Harding’s personal account and that of the Demerara uprising. Harding claims, ‘I wanted to find an example that captured what British slavery was like in a microcosm.’
But where the seamless transition between personal and general history in his previous books works so powerfully, the gap between the two stories here jars throughout. There is a whiff of opportunism that, once detected, is difficult to remove. The book closes with a whip-round among the Harding family to drum up a scholarship. The family wants to remain anonymous, but Harding disagrees. The book will put an end to that.
What is best in White Debt is what is best in Harding’s other works: a compelling historical narrative, and the herding of vast quantities of material into a well-shaped and evocative story. The case for reparations is, and will be, one of the most important and necessary conversations of the century. But this book adds little to the debate – certainly nothing new.