Is it ever really possible to avoid the burdens of history? David Cameron certainly thought so, back in September 2015, when the then prime minister’s visit to Jamaica was accompanied by a sense that the British government might finally confront its legacy of colonisation and enslavement.
Caribbean countries had recently called for reparation for historic wrongs, an act of recognition with an apology. They were disappointed. Instead, Cameron recalled Britain’s “work to wipe slavery off the face of the planet”, expressed the hope that the two countries might “move on from this painful legacy”, and offered a pittance of development aid to build a “human rights-compliant” prison in Kingston. The offer was seen by many as self-serving, to facilitate deportations from Britain.
The episode is evoked by British-Canadian journalist Alex Renton in Blood Legacy, a courageous, deeply affecting and excoriatingly honest account of his family’s role in enslavement. When the act abolishing slavery was passed in 1833, his direct ancestors, the Fergussons of Kilkerran, owned 198 enslaved people on their Jamaican plantation, for which they received compensation (at today’s value) of more than £3m for “loss of property”.
British taxpayers — including descendants of the enslaved — would end up paying the equivalent of £17bn in compensation to former slave owners, loans for which have only recently been paid off. The enslaved and their successors received nothing, in terms of money or apology. Over two centuries, successive British governments have locked the door marked “reparations”, fearful of a floodgate of claims for historic acts of wrongdoing.
The present government takes matters to another level, decrying efforts to decolonise school history lessons and fulminating against the toppling of monuments to colonialism and footballers taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter. While President Emmanuel Macron of France characterises colonisation as a “crime against humanity”, and Germany pays reparations to Namibia for the early 20th-century genocide of the Herrero group, Boris Johnson’s government offers silence and hubris.
The approach makes the three books considered here timely and necessary. Each addresses a fundamental issue that touches so many communities and countries — how they deal with the other and with their own past acts — and each serves as reminder that historic injustices cannot simply be wished away.
Britain’s failure to engage honestly with the legacy of colonialism reflects a temporal challenge: how to reckon with acts from the past which, if committed today, would be characterised as international crimes but, when they occurred, were considered lawful?
One school of thought tells us that we are where we are and must move on, not waste time on matters historic. It is an approach reflected in the March 2021 report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, established by the British government, which passed in total silence on the relationship between historical enslavement and contemporary racism, despite all the evidence — not least in relation to the criminal justice system, from stop-and-search to incarceration — that establishes a link.
The report’s preface contained but a single reference to “the slave period”, suggesting it to be not only about profit and suffering but also “how culturally African people transformed themselves into a remodelled African/Britain”. Around the world, the reaction to that line was understandable dismay.
The bygones approach seems to motivate Oliver Dowden, UK culture secretary, egged on by the prime minister, who wants museums and galleries to embrace Britain’s colonial history as a matter of pride. A year ago he wrote to museums instructing them not to remove controversial statues or other similar objects, but instead to “contextualise or reinterpret them”. Meanwhile, the National Trust’s recent report examining the slavery and colonial history of properties in its care was strongly criticised by a raft of Conservative politicians.
Renton opts for a different approach, one that encompasses truth-telling and full-scale financial reparation. His own reckoning started at home, in his grandfather’s papers, where he came across an “Inventory and appraisement of Carrick Plantation”, 11 pages dating to the late 18th century that listed the property of his forebears. It included the names, roles and values of 79 adults and five children, some worth less than a cow. “When I read this list I feel nauseous,” Renton records; it prompts him to engage in a meticulous excavation of the former family plantations in Tobago and Jamaica.
This family archive holds powerful tales, not least the journey of Augustus Thomson — enslaved name, Caesar — from Jamaica to London to confront his owner with an account of his unjust treatment, including the torture to which he and his family was subjected. Blood Legacy is filled with devastating detail, which includes lively conversations with descendants of the enslaved and a rich variety of academics.
The line between then and now flows through The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, Shrabani Basu’s fine account of George Edalji’s conviction in 1903 for the crime of maiming of a pony, and for not being white. The story is known in popular culture and literary writing — it inspired Julian Barnes’ novel Arthur & George — but Basu, an Indian journalist and historian, offers an original and forensic account, one that raises the broader colonial context in making a connection between racial prejudice and the functioning of the criminal justice system in England.
Edalji, a qualified solicitor, was the son of the vicar of Great Wyrley, a man born in Bombay of Parsi descent, and a mother who was the daughter of an English vicar. The Edalji family’s presence in the Staffordshire village in the 1890s provoked a vicious letter-writing campaign, seemingly motivated by beliefs, as one contemporary source put it, that the children of mixed-race marriages exemplified “the evils arising out of racial promiscuity”.
Such expression of white supremacy was reflected, Basu notes, in various forums of the day, from theatre to anthropological studies. When it came to George Edalji’s case, the charge, trial and reporting were deeply influenced by the colour of the defendant’s skin, with the wholly insufficient evidence producing an unjust conviction and seven years of penal servitude.
Arthur Conan Doyle stepped in, outraged by the actions of a Staffordshire police “steeped in prejudice”, in a manner comparable to the “squalid Dreyfus case” in France. Conan Doyle raised the matter at the highest levels and wrote an 18,000-word article in the Daily Telegraph that destroyed the evidential basis for the conviction. “Could anything be imagined meaner or more un-English than that the mistake should be admitted but reparation refused?” Conan Doyle asked as evidence of a miscarriage of justice grew.
A century later, the horrors of injustice and institutional racism continue to work in tandem. Basu connects the Edalji story to more recent events and speeches, from Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” to Theresa May’s wish for a “hostile environment” for immigrants. Basu evokes the recent conclusions of Labour MP and shadow justice secretary David Lammy, that parts of today’s British criminal justice system are infused with “overt racism”; she identifies a “historical chain of oppression and exploitation” which, last summer, led to the toppling of the statue of 17th-century slave-trader Edward Colston and its dumping in Bristol’s harbour.
Alex von Tunzelmann’s highly readable account of the construction and destruction of the statues of 12 men who fell out of favour at a particular moment in time and place — Fallen Idols — offers another approach to injustice, where ordinary folk take matters into their own hands. Statues tell stories, von Tunzelmann, a British historian, reminds us — and they raise questions about a community’s relationship to its past and how its history is represented. The key question that Fallen Idols grapples with is this: who gets to decide the stories our monuments should tell?
She opens with George III, knocked from his pedestal in Bowling Green, Manhattan, in the summer of 1776, by an excited crowd shortly after Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. His statue was beheaded, broken into chunks, shipped to Connecticut and melted into musket balls to be used against the British in the War of Independence.
The act of toppling — and powerfully negative feelings about colonialism — have been around for centuries and von Tunzelmann concludes, rather reasonably, that such acts are not necessarily senseless or hateful and do not — as some now claim in relation to the removal of the Colston statue — have the effect of erasing history.
Colston’s monumental presence was deeply offensive to many residents of Bristol. Von Tunzelmann does not seem to object to the manner of its removal, even if some greater degree of due process might have been preferable. “No version of history can be set in stone forever,” she concludes. Yet the act may ultimately not change anything much. She sets out various options: a new label, relocation to a museum, alteration or recontextualisation, a move to an outdoor sculpture park. Is toppling an act of justice or lawlessness? Von Tunzelmann makes the case for acts of rough reparation.
Toward the end of his book, Renton quotes Professor Frederick Hickling, the distinguished Jamaican psychiatrist, who died last year. He believed that “major aspects of European civilisation will come to be seen as the monstrously evil constructions of dangerously deranged people, totally concerned by their narcissistic egotism, and dominated by delusions of power and control”.
It is a view that wends its way through these books, each premised on the idea that past horrors have continuing consequences, that those consequences must be addressed if justice is to be done, and that over time a sense of injustice will prevail until there is some form of reparation.
What reparation means — a statue toppled, an apology or something more — is a matter on which reasonable people may disagree. In the meantime, it is hard to avoid a theme that runs through these three books, that historic racism in Britain remains deeply embedded in our institutions, that its nefarious effects continue to be felt, and that the failure to be honest about the past — and engage fully with it — is deeply damaging. It is time to open the door marked “reparations”.
Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery by Alex Renton Canongate, £16.99, 400 pages
The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village by Shrabani Basu, Bloomsbury, £20, 320 pages
Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues that Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann Headline, £20, 272 pages/$26.99, 320 pages
Philippe Sands is professor of the public understanding of law at University College London. His latest book is ‘The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive’, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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