THE TRADER, THE OWNER, THE SLAVE: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery by James Walvin

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When in the 1760s Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, tried to imagine what it was like to lose his liberty, he thought of “the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery”, but found the vast numbers distracting. To focus his sympathy, he wrote, “I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture.”

In his deftly crafted new book on slavery, James Walvin has stolen a trick or two from Sterne. “The story of African slavery,” he writes, “is so unrelentingly bleak that it is sometimes hard to grasp the enormity of what took place.” Rather than overwhelm the reader with the chilling statistics of the Atlantic slave trade, Walvin opts “to tell a big story through what seem at first to be the small experiences of three men . . . a slave trader, a slave owner and a slave”.

His story begins on the Atlantic with John Newton, the slave-trade sea captain best known for writing the hymn Amazing Grace, who became a famous evangelical minister, then a supporter of abolition. It then moves to a remote part of Jamaica, where Thomas Thistlewood made a modest fortune from a small slave plantation, and ends with the travels of the African Olaudah Equiano, the author of a riveting memoir published in 1789 that recounted his experiences as a slave in the British Navy, the Caribbean and in England. Equiano became the leading black figure in the campaign against the slave trade.

Walvin uses Newton’s letters and pamphlets not just to tell the familiar story of the terrible sufferings of Africans crammed into the holds of slave ships — the sickness, deaths, suicides and occasional uprisings of a desperate people — but to convey the perils faced by the Europeans who placed them under this awful regime. Thistlewood’s diary, a meticulous account of the workings of slave society by a man who exploited its advantages to the full, reveals not just the horrific violence of the plantation — its floggings, hangings, burnings, mutilations and torture that helped fuel the abolitionist movement back in Britain — but the accommodations, compromises and chequered loyalties that were also a feature of slavery. Equiano’s experiences, as told by Walvin, are in part those of an astonishingly resilient and resourceful free black, buying, selling and bargaining for profit at every opportunity, even to the extent of working for those engaged in the slave trade. But they are also those of a man whose freedom was always under threat and who, despite his status, was often exploited and abused by white Europeans.

The power of Walvin’s stories lies in their details: their telling particularity and strange juxtapositions. Newton writes romantic missives to his wife, studies his Bible, yet casually uses thumbscrews to torture recalcitrant blacks. Thistlewood turns from his Enlightenment reading — Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Adam Smith — and his lovingly tended garden to mete out beatings and callous tortures, or to witness excruciating executions in which slaves were slowly burnt alive.

Why, Walvin asks, did such men behave in such a brutal and degraded manner? And why was such action so long overlooked or ignored? His answer is threefold: the brutalities of slavery, so palpable in the Caribbean, were obscured from much of the British population; slavery was, as the examples of Newton and Thistlewood show, profitable, even for those who were a failure back home; and the system of slavery itself had a cumulative and inexorably degrading effect both on those masters who chose to use it and the slaves who were coerced into it.

Slavery bred cruelty and could not survive without it, and, as Walvin reminds us, the exposure of its cruelty was its undoing. For some advocates of abolition, notably the Quakers and some radical politicians, ending the slave trade meant stopping an unChristian practice that denied Africans their humanity; it was the first step in abolishing slavery tout court . However, many other supporters of abolition skirted round the question (made more controversial by the French revolution) of the Rights of Man. They were happy to call for masters and whites to be humane, to cease to bear the stigma of cruelty by ending British involvement in the slave trade, but they stopped short of calling for an end to Caribbean slavery.

For one explanation for the endurance of slavery and for the willingness of otherwise “humane” whites to sustain its cruel practices was a persistent sense, either racial or cultural, of the inferiority of Africans. As Walvin points out, Equiano’s memoir tells the story of an African who possesses the two qualities — the capacity to worship a single Christian God, and the ability to trade and barter — that rendered him the equal of Europeans. In his unapologetic autobiographical narrative, especially in his controversial account of African societies, Equiano set out not just to expose the cruelties of slavery, but to claim an equality that has taken far more than the abolition of the slave trade to achieve.

By the grace of God

The next time a fashionable atheist wonders what religion has ever done for us, mention John Newton and Olaudah Equiano. In 1788, Newton was a nationally famous preacher, lionised for his godliness. His denunciation of his gruesome past as a slave ship captain was exactly what the abolitionist campaign needed to open the eyes of the masses. In the words of his hymn, Amazing Grace: ‘I once was lost, but now am saved/ Was blind but now I see.’ Equiano, a slave who bought his own freedom, was inspired to fight for the freedom of others by his Methodist faith. His best-selling 1790 memoir is a tale of spiritual, as well as physical, redemption.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Read on... books: Sold as a Slave by Olaudah Equiano (Penguin £4.99) Equiano’s memoir of his life as a slave

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