BRITAIN'S SLAVE EMPIRE. By James Walvin. 157pp. Tempus. Pounds 19.99. TLS Pounds 17.99. 0 7524 1779 7

MAKING THE BLACK ATLANTIC. Britain and the African diaspora. 180pp. Cassell.

Pounds 45 (paperback, Pounds 15.99). TLS Pounds 40; Pounds 11.99. 0 304 70216 1

In recent decades, the way we look at the end of slavery in the British Empire has changed, and interpretations of the events have been deepened, in a way which has few parallels for any other historical episode.

Historians in this field are far more thoughtful, wide-ranging and sophisticated than their predecessors two generations ago.

For well over a century after the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, historians agreed that one thing above all made it happen: British goodness of heart. To the Victorian author of A History of European Morals, W. E. H. Lecky, the crusade in Britain against slavery was "among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations".

National self-congratulation reached an even higher pitch when the Oxford scholar Sir Reginald Coupland, author of a biography of the movement's parliamentary leader, William Wilberforce, conducted a posthumous "interview" with Wilberforce, in another book in 1935. To Coupland's question on the meaning of abolition, the imaginary Wilberforce replied: "It was God's work. It signifies the triumph of His will over human selfishness".

Then, in 1944, the Trinidad historian (and later Prime Minister) Eric Williams boldly rained on the parade. In his path-breaking Capitalism and Slavery, Williams declared that slavery ended not because of British virtue but because sections of the rising capitalist class, after using the profits from slavery to finance the Industrial Revolution, had decided that it was inefficient. Wiliams had been influenced by an important book by another Trinidadian, C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938), about the huge slave revolts that led to Haitian independence. For decades, people had been writing about "the Age of Revolutions" without mentioning the victorious one in Haiti.

Ironically, today almost no one accepts Williams's thesis in its entirety. But his hard-edged de-mythologizing forced even those refuting him to study this patch of history more carefully.

They began to look, for instance, at just what were the profits, losses and debts of slave plantations and slave-ship owners over time.

Williams's and James's books, plus the ripples reaching academia from the American civil rights movement, the West Indian immigration into Britain and the end of colonialism in Africa, have had a lasting impact on how we view slavery and abolition.

A new generation of historians now pays much more attention to the fact that before the Royal Navy began patrolling the seas against slave traders, Britain was the leading slave-trading nation. Almost overnight, as Hugh Thomas put it in The Slave Trade (1997), Britain turned "gamekeeper to the world after having been its poacher-in-chief". A. J. P.

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