White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s legacy of slavery, by Thomas Harding

Author: Thomas Harding. Review by Kathleen Bell.

We inherit a past in which damage was done. We can’t cure the damage, but its effects persist. It presents us with responsibilities.

In this book, Thomas Harding considers how the history of slavery affects us all, regardless of whether our ancestors were treated as property or treated others as items to be bought. His book has two strands. There is the story of the 1823 Demerara Uprising, which hastened the abolition of the slave trade, and, interspersed with that, conversations and personal reflections on how history is understood.

Harding’s stake is personal. His Jewish forbears were forced out of Nazi Germany and he accepted the reparations that were his due. Expressions of sorrow and apologies from Germans today are helpful because they ‘acknowledge the crimes of the past’ and enable him to feel seen. The granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal tells him she speaks of his crimes not from complicity but because she will not be an ‘accomplice to the silence’. When Harding writes of the Demerara Uprising he acknowledges wrongs from which he has benefited, both through ancestors who traded in tobacco and as a white person in a society where whiteness confers privilege.

The conventions by which history is written tend to promote a stronger sense of the humanity of enslavers than the enslaved. One of Harding’s achievements is to recognise those conventions and overturn them. How, for instance, do we refer to the enslaved people who demanded their freedom? Calling them rebels seems to confer legitimacy on the system under which they were held captive. After discussing this problem with the scholar James Dawkins, Harding rewrites his text to call them not rebels but abolitionists, recognising that their aims were identical with those of anti-slavery campaigners in Britain who took far fewer risks.

There are no contemporary images of the enslaved Demerara abolitionists and this can make it harder to imagine their full humanity. Portraits do exist of the people who enslaved them. To deal with this inequality, Harding commissioned artists to provide portraits of three leading abolitionists: Jack Gladstone, Quamina and Amba. These have the same prime position in the book’s illustrations as they do in the history it recounts.

As Quakers, we tend to be keener to describe our anti-slavery activities than to acknowledge the profit Quakers made from slavery. There’s a tendency to claim our forbears played a central role in abolition, and to ignore the vital campaigns and struggles of enslaved abolitionists. Unwillingness to explore the past, or to recognise its continuing effects, can make us accomplices to a harmful silence. Harding’s book is a helpful reminder of questions we need to consider, and of the white debts that may need to be repaid.

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