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A history of the world in 7 faces: from Tutankhamun to the Virgin Mary
From a Stone Age Venus and an Egyptian death mask to an unflinchingly challenging 21st-century sculpture, Fay Bound-Alberti introduces seven depictions of the face that track humanity’s ever-evolving relationship with creativity, hierarchy and self-image
1. The art of darkness This enigmatic head is a 25,000-year-old testament to the innate urge to capture the essence of a person in art In 1894, an archaeologist called Édouard Piette walked into a cave in the village of Brassempouy in south-west France and came face-to-face with humanity’s distant past. Lying in the darkness was a fragment of mammoth-ivory carved to depict a head. That head was tiny – so small that it could nestle in the palm of Piette’s hand – and yet it had survived for 25,000 years, carved by an artist deep in the Palaeolithic period. Piette couldn’t have been aware of it at the time, but he had just discovered one of the earliest known representations of a human face in art. That representation is both awe-inspiring – and deeply enigmatic. It would soon be known as ‘The Venus of Brassempouy’ – there were other Venuses in the same cave, with those rounded hips and breasts associated with fertility symbols – and yet we can’t even be sure if it depicts a woman. Despite these uncertainties, the fact that this rare and portable object exists at all tells us that it was important for the artist to capture something of the essence of a person – and with a level of detail that is unusual for a Venus figurine. That depth of detail is most evident in the intricate, chequerboard-patterned hair – possibly a wig or hood – from which the object derives its nickname, ‘La Dame à La Capuche’ (Lady with the Hood). The face, by comparison, is a blank canvas. It has a prominent forehead, nose and brow, but it lacks a mouth. Was this artistic decision influenced by convention? Religion? Personal style? Time? We do not know. What we do know is that the Venus of Brassempouy stands as a symbol of how representations of the face have evolved over 25,000 years. Today, we take it for granted that our face represents us – a phenomenon I have termed ‘facehood’. It is marked on our passports and unlocks our mobiles; it is captured in photographs countless times over our lifetimes. It has become a shorthand for a unique, individual person in a way that simply wasn’t the case with the Venus of Brassempouy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/dreamstimel48080984-74bcdd9-e1777286681457.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun with blue‑striped headdress, inlaid eyes, and royal cobra and vulture emblems." title="Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask presents an idealised, godlike face symbolising divine transformation in the afterlife (Image by Dreamstime)" /> 2. From death to deity Tutankhamun’s dazzling mask was designed to transform a mortal man into a god In ancient Egypt, memorialising people did not mean remembering what they looked like. It was wealth, power and similarity to the gods that mattered. For proof, look no further than one of the world’s most recognisable objects: Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask. Revealed in 1925 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, three years after he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, this dazzling artefact measures 54cm high – a fit for an average adult’s head. Weighing over 10kg, the mask is made of solid gold, with intricate inlays of lapis lazuli and carnelian. Yet the most intriguing feature is its 2.5kg golden beard. That beard, which is long and plaited, extends down from the chin with a formal, geometric appearance and rectangular shape. Look at the mask in profile and you’ll see that it is not intended to look naturalistic; the beard is held in place with a band beneath the chin – as it would have been in a ceremony. Tutankhamun died c1323 BC, aged just 18 or 19 – too young to grow such a beard. This – coupled with the fact that the mask has pierced earlobes, the preserve of women and children – has led some Egyptologists to argue that it was never intended to be used by Tutankhamun at all. It was, they argue, designed for his stepmother, Nefertiti. Yet for ancient Egyptians, faces had symbolic rather than literal, gendered meanings. Eyes, for instance, had mystical connotations – as illustrated by the ‘Eye of Horus’ and the ‘Eye of Ra’ (representing wellbeing, healing and protection). Both male and female rulers wore fake beards in ancient Egyptian ceremonies and art – to display divine power and royal authority. The principle was practical, but the practice was genderless. Hence Tutankhamun’s mask resembles the gods Osiris and Ra, whose bodies were made of gold and lapis lazuli. An inscription on the mask reads: “Your forehead is Anubis, your right eye is the night boat [of Ra], your left eye is the day boat, your eyebrows are in the company of nine gods.” The mask was intended to be seen by the gods, not by humans. Such images were theological objects that transformed a corpse into a deity. Read more | Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun: was the tomb really cursed? 3. Age before beauty The Romans believed that wisdom – and, therefore, fitness to rule – was etched in the lines of the face We do not know the identity of the artist, or indeed the subject, of this ‘Head of a Roman Patrician’. So what do we see when we look at it? We might conclude, from the richness of the drapery, that this was someone important. After all, plebs and slaves were not sculpted in marble. He is a serious man, with a poker-straight posture and a solemn expression, whose face and neck are wizened by age. The skin on his forehead and balding brow is deeply lined by years of thinking – and, perhaps, by responsibility. Earlier scholars suggested that the sitter was Cato the Censor, the famously austere Republican statesman. Yet we should beware making the mistake of thinking the sculptor aimed at realism, or likeness, as we understand it. This bust is an example of ‘verism’, a style of Roman portraiture that sought symbolic rather than literal truth. Roman sculptors and philosophers followed the rules of physiognomy that meant character was revealed in the lines and structure of the face. Why? Because Romans needed a visual language that demonstrated political legitimacy in a system where power was contested. In later centuries it would be important for monarchs to have individually recognisable portraits for propaganda and coinage. But their rule was assured by blood or war. In the Republic of Rome, rulers showed their fitness in the experience, wisdom and expertise etched on their faces. Women – wives and daughters of those rulers – were not depicted as aged and wise, because female value, then as now, was too often based on beauty, not intellect. Men could also be subject to gendered idealism. Since a Republican politician often needed to embody not only the wisdom and experience of age, but also the physical prowess of a warrior, some sculptural portraits had wizened faces but youthful, vigorous bodies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463895209-ee1b31f-e1777286825978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, surrounded by haloed saints and angels against a gold architectural backdrop." title="The medieval church developed a visual code that the entire population could recognise, as exemplified by Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. Why the long face? In the Middle Ages, religious portraiture relied on symbolism rather than realism to spread the word of God Patricians symbolising leadership in ancient Rome were concerned principally with their peers – the literate elite who read character in wrinkles. The medieval church faced a different problem: it needed to communicate to vast populations, most of them illiterate, many of them poor, none of them experts at what faces meant. So the church developed a visual language of symbols in portraiture. These symbols told viewers instantly who Jesus and the saints were, as well as religious martyrs, local landowners and wealthy donors who invested in the church fabric. Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned is one of the most famous examples of a symbolically laden portrait. Here, the Virgin Mary’s image lacks the emotionality and fleshiness of later artworks such as Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca (c1506–07). Painted around 1310, Giotto’s work was influenced by Byzantine tradition, which dominated Italian art, though he began introducing more naturalism. Gold leaf, bright colours, formal poses and slender, otherworldly faces were what people expected from divine images. What made Mary instantly recognisable were her symbols: the dark blue mantel, the white headscarf, the Christ child on her lap, the throne, the surrounding saints with their haloes and attributes, the gold trim and background. She might also be shown with a crown of 12 stars, roses, rosary beads and a heart pierced by a sword. In a world before consumer capitalism, bureaucracy and mass urbanisation, personal portraiture that showed an ordinary person simply wasn’t necessary. Read more | Medieval family planning: meet the strong-willed women who redefined motherhood in the Middle Ages 5. The man in the mirror By the 17th century, symbolism was being swept aside by portraits that sought to reveal the unvarnished truth In 1659, the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn sat before a mirror to capture his reflection. Unlike the Roman patrician, Giotto’s Madonna – or indeed Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of Henry VIII a century earlier – there is nothing idealised about Rembrandt’s self-portrait. What he produced was unflinchingly realistic. Rembrandt wears a dark coat and a black beret, and stares out from a dark, featureless canvas. Nothing distracts from the face, the centre of emotion, humanity and the self, with a posture and expression that reveals emotion in the creases round the mouth and eyes. His skin is weathered, his features irregular, his nose is prominent, his jowls sagging. This is a man who has suffered – Rembrandt was care-worn from a recent bankruptcy. His eyes meet ours, offering an invitation to connect. Unlike earlier self-portraits – Rembrandt created almost 100 during his lifetime – there are no elaborate symbols on display here: no artist’s palette, no jewels signalling status, no books to indicate learning or hourglass to warn of time’s passing. Self-portraits of his era reflect the fact that the status of the artist was becoming more important, as well as the idea of interiority and psychological individualism. Rembrandt’s portrait is an archetype of modern portraiture – it betrays a feeling face. We can see what he looked like as a specific, unique person, and the same face ageing across different self-portraits. In medieval portraits, faces had been more stylised and generic, and painters often re-used faces, because they were not the focal point of the painting. With its radical approach to symbols, identity and the face, the Renaissance changed all that. From now on, artists would seek to portray their subjects as distinctly individual and recognisable. Portraiture, then, did not only reflect a growing interest in the face, but also encouraged and perpetuated it – much as photographic portraits did in the 19th century. 6. What lies beneath Photography forced artists to look beyond the skin to the sitter’s core, with often unsettling results This Head of a Woman was crafted in 1909 by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is modelled on Fernande Olivier, an artist in her own right. Olivier is usually credited as Picasso’s muse, yet flattery was clearly not a consideration in this particular portrayal of her. Picasso’s ‘Head’ is roughly constructed, with no attempt at realism. But why? To answer that question, we need to consider the dramatic technological changes that had convulsed the art world between the ages of Rembrandt and Picasso. When Rembrandt plied his trade, artists could make a good living. Their success came from their ability to capture some essential truth about appearance – to reproduce the world as it really was. But between the 1840s and the 1870s, with the invention and popularisation of photography, everything changed. Once a camera could capture likeness with mechanical precision, the project of realistic portraiture became obsolete. If a camera could do in a few minutes what took a painter months, what was the job of the artist? For artists such as Picasso, the answer lay in achieving in their paintings what a photograph could not: penetrating the core of a person to capture what the mind feels. Picasso’s Cubist work embodies this approach. For all the head’s lack of realism, skill is not an issue here. Picasso was accomplished at realism in painting and sculpture. Rather, the focus was different. The face was now a problem to be solved and understood – a structural puzzle, rather than an object to be copied. For artists that followed, such as Francis Bacon and the surrealists, the artist’s job was to ferret out what could only be discovered through their special insight. In such hands, and increasingly after the crisis of confidence caused by the First World War, the portrait was a tool for psychological investigation rather than social documentation. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-489164501-21e92a2-e1777287214373.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large white sphinx-like sculpture with human features inside a vast industrial hall, with people standing nearby for scale." title="Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby features a towering sugar sphinx that confronts racism, exploitation and the politics of visibility (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. Sweet scents and rotting flesh This installation serves as a reminder that, over the history of portraiture, not all faces have been equal Today, the question is less how faces are portrayed, but rather, whose faces. For centuries, the canon of western portraiture has, for the most part, not included black people. And where they were included, it was as servants, slaves, exoticised presences in paintings made by, and for, white subjects. There are exceptions: Juan de Pareja, enslaved and painted by Velázquez; Frederick Douglass, photographed repeatedly after achieving freedom. But these instances are rare. For most of history, black people have appeared as exhibits, in the margins, in the background, or not at all. However, in the 21st century artists such as Kara Walker have begun to subvert Victorian artistic styles, such as the silhouette – a medium historically associated with genteel portraiture – to critique the racist depictions of black faces found in art and culture, from slavery advertisements to blackface. In 2014, Walker created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a monumental installation in the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the centre of that artwork stands a sphinx coated with 8 tonnes of sugar – the commodity that built American wealth on the backs of slaves. The face of the statue invokes that mammy archetype, Aunt Jemima, while the gaze stares straight ahead, as impassively as the Great Sphinx of Giza, on which it is modelled. But the body is exposed and sexualised, as black women’s bodies have been in history. Around the sphinx are smaller figures: molasses-covered children, whose bodies are deteriorating, some with missing limbs and empty eye sockets. The sweet smell of sugar gives way to the acrid stench of rotting flesh. What is beneath the surface here is not some secret interiority – as was the case for Bacon or Picasso – but the question of who is being looked at, and who is doing the looking. It is the nature of artistic production and consumption itself that takes centre stage. Fay Bound-Alberti is professor of modern history, and director of Interface at King’s College London. Her new book, The Face: A Cultural History, was published by Allen Lane in February This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back
It’s a tale of slavery, racism and naked imperial power. Barnaby Phillips traces the fate of the exquisite golden treasures looted by British forces from the kingdom of Asante 150 years ago
In a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London. What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi. Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Thomas Bowdich, wrote that Kumasi was a wealthy city with elegant architecture and sophisticated public hygiene. The Asantehene and his courtiers, he wrote, wore “massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction”. Bowdich’s descriptions caused incredulity and excitement in Britain. But his delegation failed to build a lasting friendship with Asante. By the early 19th century, Britain, hitherto an enthusiastic slave trading nation, had embraced abolitionism. The Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, worried about this threat to his wealth, and asked Bowdich whether the British king could “renew the slave trade, which will be good for me”. Over the following 50 years, as Britain tightened its control of the Gold Coast at the expense of European rivals, and as Asante maintained supremacy of the interior, there were sporadic tensions – notably in 1824 when a British invasion of Asante ended in defeat and the death and decapitation of the commanding officer, Sir Charles MacCarthy – but also decades of uneasy Anglo-Asante coexistence. This all changed in 1871, when Britain purchased Elmina, the largest trading castle on the coast, from the Dutch, despite Asante insistence it belonged to them. In January 1873, an Asante army swept south and invaded the British coastal protectorate, to the surprise of William Gladstone’s government in London. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2XKCKN2webready-5e7ae12-e1776944134163.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical battle illustration showing red‑coated soldiers with muskets and bayonets clashing with fighters armed with spears and varied weapons. Smoke fills the background." title="A lithograph shows British troops clashing with Asante fighters during the first Anglo-Asante War (1823–31). As Britain expanded its presence in the Gold Coast, tensions between the two powers escalated (Image by Alamy)" /> In May 1873, Earl Kimberley, the colonial secretary, said that any attempt to conquer Asante would be “mad”. But the ambitious officer appointed to lead the British response, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had other ideas. Wolseley, just 40 but already a veteran of wars in Burma, Crimea, India, China and Canada, was determined the British would march to Kumasi. If the Asantehene, Kofi Karikari, would not make peace, he would “destroy his palaces, burn his capital, and lay waste his country as well as I could”. While politicians prevaricated, Wolseley shaped events on the ground. By January 1874, he was leading three battalions of British soldiers, plus many African allies and carriers, into the Asante forest. Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum The Asante army – armed with muskets – fought bravely, but was outgunned by the British, equipped with new Snider rifles. At the battle of Amoafo, many hundreds or even thousands of Asante soldiers, but only four British, were killed. One British sailor wrote that it was “murder, not a fair fight”. On 4 February, the British entered Kumasi, only to find that Karikari had fled. Wolseley, concerned about disease and encroaching rains, decided not to linger. Instead, he would leave the Asante with “a wholesome fear of the British power”. He ordered his soldiers to take treasure from the unguarded palace, and then blow it up, and to set fire to Kumasi to ensure “its total destruction”. Then he abandoned the burning city. Wolseley wrote that Karikari was “a brutal and deceitful monarch”. The British sense of racial superiority – Wolseley wrote that black people were suited only for slavery – had been reinforced by the apparent discovery in Kumasi of evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1501979475webready-c12bcea-e1776944602447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A central figure dressed in richly patterned regalia sits surrounded by attendants in traditional clothing. Large decorative umbrellas shade the group, with crowds and palm trees visible in the background." title="On the centenary of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s expedition, the then Asantehene, Opoku Ware II (seen here in 1977), requested the return of the Asante regalia, but it would take 50 more years for just 32 objects to come back to Ghana (Image by Getty Images)" /> Gold is always pretty On 13 February, the Asantehene’s envoys caught up with Wolseley on his march back to the coast, and agreed to a humiliating surrender. They handed over 1,000 ounces of gold objects, a tiny fraction of the 50,000-ounce “indemnity” demanded by Wolseley, but which included a significant part of the Asantehene’s regalia, essential to his political and spiritual authority. A history of Asante, written by one of Karikari’s successors, laments that the British were so impatient “that it was not even possible to call any of the provincial chiefs into Kumasi to contribute what they could. So King Kofi Karikari was obliged to bear the brunt of this payment alone.” Wolseley, who had already witnessed notorious plunders by British soldiers of palaces in India and China, drew a distinction between disorganised looting, which undermined military discipline and was therefore undesirable, and the acceptable collection of ‘prize’, to be auctioned off with the income shared among the troops. In accordance with this philosophy, when the British reached their headquarters at Cape Coast they held an auction of treasure from the Asantehene’s palace. The Daily Telegraph wrote: “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold. The prize agent… had shown considerable taste in the arrangements of their stores… and gold is always pretty.” The auction was enthusiastically attended by many of the Cape Coast elite, delighted by the defeat of the feared Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/531631001webready-71902b9-e1776944785361.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A gold sheath decorated with embossed concentric circles, leaf‑like motifs, and dotted borders" title="The British Museum houses some 550 Asante objects taken during the Anglo-Asante Wars, including the golden knife-sheath above (Image by The British Museum)" /> Many of the most valuable items, however, were sold in London in the spring of 1874 at Garrard, the crown jewellers in the West End, which had paid £11,000 (about £1.4m today) for the collection. Wolseley returned to Britain a hero – cheered by crowds, feted by Queen Victoria and the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, parodied on stage as ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ – and so the sale of “the golden spoil from Ashantee” attracted considerable excitement. Queen Victoria took some pieces of treasure – presented to her by the soldiers – and this added to its prestige. For most of the aristocrats and others who crowded Garrard’s rooms, Asante objects were exotic souvenirs of a British victory, “treasured… as memorials of the recent struggle”, as The Times put it. William Cecil, the Marquess of Exeter, for example, bought two gold badges and mounted them on gilt-silver trays with his family crest and an inscription. In this way, what had been sacred objects in Asante – the badges, known as akrafokonmu, were worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul – became trophies. (One of Cecil’s mounted badges was bought by the British Museum in the 1970s, after passing through various wealthy owners). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/1010657001webready-ce6a8d3-e1776943998684.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A round gold ornament featuring a central raised dome, concentric beaded circles, and four smaller domes set within decorative motifs." title="This 19th-century gold akrafokonmu is now in the British Museum. In Asante, such items were sacred objects worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul (Image by The British Museum)" /> Hints of humility Amid the general triumphalism, there were some doubts. The Welsh nonconformist MP Henry Richard observed that “scarcely any Englishman could look back with pride” on what happened in Asante and other recent campaigns in Asia and Africa. “Those were not triumphs of Christian civilisation but of barbarism and brute force.” Newspaper reviews of the Garrard sale also contain hints of humility. Asante, and Africa more generally, was perceived in Britain as a place without culture. And yet, The Times wrote, the gold badges were “wonderful… it would be difficult for any skilled goldsmith in western Europe not so much to surpass, but even to equal them”. Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation Inevitably, Britain’s museums took an interest. It was the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) that reacted first. The keeper of its Art Library, Robert Soden Smith, recognised Asante goldwork as “the most striking illustration… of the art of an ancient race hitherto imperfectly known to us”, and bought an elegant gold pipe, several badges and pieces of decorated sheet gold. The British Museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks, bought 10 objects initially, but grumbled that “some of the more dramatic specimens have been secured by private individuals”. He was probably thinking of Richard Wallace, who bought not only the gold head but also 15 other Asante objects, including swords and a pair of cast eagles, for a total of £1,256 (about £155,000 today), making him the largest purchaser. His biographer Suzanne Higgott says that Wallace craved recognition, and the Asante objects, “exceptional, high status and intriguingly ‘Oriental’”, therefore had obvious appeal. All of Wallace’s Asante purchases are still in the Wallace Collection today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BMImages01077757001SuperReswebready-408fd12-e1776944349408.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A curved sword with a dark blade featuring triangular and circular cutouts. The gold‑coloured handle is engraved and covered with two rounded pieces of spotted animal fur." title="This Asante ceremonial sword was one of 32 pieces returned to Ghana – on a long-term loan – in 2024 (Image by The British Museum)" /> The British Museum was able to enlarge its collection of Asante gold regalia over subsequent decades. This was in part because the British government gradually released more pieces which had been taken by Wolseley’s soldiers, but also because in 1896 another British army ransacked the rebuilt palace in Kumasi, and again carried off as much treasure as it could find. Today the British Museum has about 550 objects taken in the Anglo-Asante wars, of which some 220 are made of gold. Some of the most important pieces of Asante loot, however, remain in private hands or are otherwise hidden from public view. The Royal Artillery officer’s mess, in Larkhill near Salisbury, has an exquisite golden ram’s-head mask – 19cm in width and weighing 1.2kg – which William Fagg described as “a marvel of ethereal eggshell thin-lightness…among the most striking examples of west African metallurgy”. It was taken from the Asantehene’s palace by officers who were close to Sir Garnet Wolseley. Rather than being auctioned off, he allowed them to buy it directly for £135 (about £17,000 today). When the officers returned to England, newspapers reported they had “the best trophy… very valuable”. In 1875, the Royal Artillery sealed the ram’s head in a glass dome and mounted it on a stand which is carried on the backs of three bowed African figures, dressed in loincloths. Once again, Asante regalia was transformed into a British military souvenir. Today the ram’s head is only accessible to officers and their invited guests. The Royal Artillery declined my requests to see it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/7770417-2webready-ea8e369-e1776944451359.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people dressed in brightly patterned kente cloth stand outdoors, some holding ornate staffs and one playing a drum. Large colourful umbrellas shade several members of the group." title="People celebrate the Gold Coast becoming the independent nation of Ghana, Accra, 6 March 1957. Nearly seven decades after the formation of this new nation, says Barnaby Phillips,“the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions” (Image by Topfoto)" /> Decades of campaigning The Asante people still refer to the 1874 war as ‘the Sagrenti War’, from the local pronunciation of ‘Sir Garnet’. It was a seminal moment in their kingdom’s decline. By the 1880s, according to their own histories, “Kumasi was losing its power and… falling into a ruinous state”. In 1901 the British formally annexed Asante territory. They sent the then Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh, into exile on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than two decades. Read more | Who should decide the stories museums tell? In 1957 the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, but the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions. They have campaigned for decades for the return of the regalia. In 1974 the Asantehene, Opoku Ware II, wrote that the centenary of Wolseley’s expedition marked an “auspicious occasion on which to press for the return of objects of the deepest significance” to the Asante. This set off a flurry of diplomacy. Some British diplomats argued in favour of returning regalia, and the British Museum’s director, John Pope-Hennessey, told his trustees “there is widely conceded to be some moral weight behind the Asantehene’s request”. But the negotiations floundered, in part because even British officials who favoured flexibility could see no way round the 1963 British Museum Act, which makes it almost impossible for that institution to permanently return, or ‘deaccession’, items in its collection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1252637177webready-448d938-e1776943890314.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people pose in an ornate room with gold columns and decorative furnishings. The person in the centre wears a blue suit, while the two on either side wear brightly coloured kente cloth garments." title="In 2023, the Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, and his wife Julia met with King Charles III as they continued to press for the return of the Asante regalia (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 2023 the current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, raised the matter again, when he visited London to attend the coronation of his friend, Charles III. This time, his appeal fell on fertile ground. Museums in the west were under pressure to address the legacies of the colonial period and, in particular, to return objects taken by force. In 2024 the British Museum and the V&A (also constrained by national legislation from making permanent returns) announced they would return on long-term loan (for probably six or nine years) 32 pieces of Asante regalia. The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles announced that it was permanently returning seven objects looted by Wolseley’s army. In response to these developments, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the director of the Asantehene’s museum in Kumasi, said: “We want to get back as many objects as is humanly possible… We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.” How many treasures the Asante people do get back – and for how long they get to keep them – is bound to remain the subject of intense debate for years. “What we have here embodies the soul of Asante” The return of 32 pieces of gold regalia in 2024 sparked joy – and anger – among the Asante people, writes Barnaby Phillips On 1 May 2024, I waited in the sweltering heat outside the Manhyia Palace Museum, in Kumasi, Ghana, alongside local chiefs, foreign diplomats and museum officials. The banners on the museum’s walls proclaimed: “Homecoming; Adversity and Commemoration”. This was the ceremony to mark the return of 32 pieces of Asante gold regalia – among them, sacred badges, a helmet, a ceremonial sword and bracelets – that had been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896. The Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, dressed in green robes and a golden headdress, arrived to the shouts of praise singers and the beating of drums, protected from the sun by a huge tasselled umbrella carried by his entourage. The director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, bowed low before the Asantehene and addressed the crowd: “We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.” It would have been difficult to imagine the director of a major British museum using these words anywhere, let alone in this context, just a few years ago. The Asantehene, for his part, said the British had returned a small part of what they had taken. “But what we have here embodies the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent.” People cheered and filed excitedly into the museum, where they admired the glittering gold treasure, beautifully displayed on green cloth in glass display cases. Not everybody in Ghana felt so positive. Many were upset that the British were only returning objects on loan. Nii Kwate Owoo, a Ghanaian filmmaker who attended the ‘Homecoming’ ceremony, told me: “It turns my stomach, to be quite frank. An armed robber comes into your house, mows down your family and grabs your valuables, and comes back later and says: ‘Okay, you’re making noises, I’ll give this back as a loan!’” Inside the museum, I encountered more nuanced reactions. A museum guide, Sammy Amoah, said the return of the regalia was “important because it confirms history. That what we’ve been taught in books about our own past is true.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1988198434webready-1a0a230-e1776945236127.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people stand closely together as a person in a leopard‑print headdress and ceremonial staff receives a white box from someone leaning forward. Others in traditional attire look on." title="Osei Tutu II receives artefacts returned by the Fowler Museum in February 2024. Three months later, the British Museum and the V&A returned 32 objects, on loan (Image by Getty Images)" /> Barnaby Phillips is a historian and conservationist. His new book, The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure, was published by Oneworld in March This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The Zong massacre | A murderous insurance scam that exposed slavery’s horrors
Scandals: The Georgians (podcast series)
In the 1780s, an extraordinary insurance claim made its way through Britain’s courts – against the lives of more than 130 enslaved people who had been intentionally thrown overboard a slaving ship in the Caribbean
In the 1780s, an extraordinary insurance claim made its way through Britain’s courts – against the lives of more than 130 enslaved people who had been intentionally thrown overboard a slaving ship in the Caribbean. In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne revisit the notorious Zong massacre, and explore how it exposes the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South America, many of them enslaved, over the preceding centuries. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, but slavery was not abolished there until 1888 – more than 65 years later. One of the first escolas de samba was established in 1928 in the barrio (district) of Mangueira, a little west of the city’s historic centre. More soon sprang up, enjoying strong community links – particularly in the poorer favelas (shanty towns), where they offered people a way to come together and organise themselves while avoiding police oppression. The schools’ theme songs and floats became outlets for political expression, voicing concerns about dictatorship, hunger, the environment, education – and, perhaps most tellingly, the Afro-Brazilian experience, social inequalities and indigenous rights. The schools have also used appearances in the competition – now held in the Sambadrome stadium built for the purpose in 1984 – to foreground overlooked histories. Last year, the Portela school highlighted the extraordinary story of Luíz Gama. Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman, he escaped enslavement and went on to become a lawyer (in fact, he is considered by many to be Brazil’s first black lawyer) and a leading abolitionist. His story was retold through four incarnations of his figure on a float. Watched live by tens of thousands of spectators in the Sambadrome and broadcast around the country, it introduced him to a vast new audience. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" The music, dance, costumes and extraordinary floats of carnival represent a huge source of local pride. The schools spend much of each year raising money, working in the communities, and planning and preparing for the next competition. Though a joyous and hugely fun event for all, Rio’s carnival plays an important role in highlighting long-neglected stories, histories and issues. This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday today
Each year on 19 June, millions across the US gather to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans finally learned of their freedom. Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith explores how the celebrations have evolved over the past 160 years – and the long campaign to have Juneteenth formally recognised as a federal holiday
Every summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time. Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? Resistance through celebration The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/PA0MJN-b2f1b9e-e1750347645459.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph depicting a band of African American musicians standing in a wooded area. They are holding various musical instruments, including guitars, a violin and a double bass. There is a Stars and Stripes flag behind them." title="617 Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900" /> In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim. To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories. A national phenomenon Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles. Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles. WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum View Green Video on the source website Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime. The pressure intensifies Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone. In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2150767015-7035ced-e1750347673444.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="President Joe Biden embraces Opal Lee after presenting the civil rights activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. Biden is wearing a black suit and white tie; Lee is wearing a a white suit and black suit. In the background, we can see attendees of the ceremony and two US flags." title="President Biden Hosts Presidential Medal Of Freedom Ceremony At The White House" /> “A heap of Juneteenths” There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots. Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.
Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
While most British radicals fought for the rights of the exploited white working class, one man saw such rights as entwined with those of enslaved black workers. Ryan Hanley tells the story of the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
One October evening in 1809, Robert Wedderburn was walking through London, one child asleep in his arms and his daughter beside him, when he saw a gang of about 20 drunks encircling a young man near his home on Peter Street, St Giles. Things were getting hairy; it was clear the man was in danger. Wedderburn tried to pull him away from the gang peacefully, but it was no good. If he wanted to help, he’d have to get his hands dirty. He handed the sleeping child to his daughter, took off his coat and “said he would fight one or two of them at a time”. Alas, they all set upon him at once and beat him with thick walking sticks. He might have died then and there outside his house, in front of his children, if a soldier had not happened by. But that was Wedderburn: he never could walk away from a fight – all the more so when the odds were stacked against him. When the gang members were rounded up and brought before the magistrates, Wedderburn was the chief witness for the prosecution. A journalist for The Star, hanging around the courts looking for a story, noted that “the witness having betrayed much violence of temper, during his cross-examination, was reprimanded by the court”. That, too, was typical of the man who became a leader in London’s working-class radical underworld. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? It is easy to see why Wedderburn had a problem with authority. Born in Jamaica in the early 1760s, he gained his most important life lessons from the rebellious black women in his life, notably his mother, Rosanna, and grandmother, Amy. His mother had been a ladies’ maid until his father, the Scottish planter James Wedderburn, had purchased her, as Robert later put it, “for purposes of lust”. James abused his legal status as the ‘owner’ of this beautiful and accomplished woman to try to compel her into a consensual relationship. She did bear at least two of his children but loathed her captor, and was not shy about showing it. Rosanna made James’s life such a misery that he eventually sold her on; he also signed manumission papers granting freedom to their sons, Robert and James Jr. That was lesson one: by being obstinate and difficult, and not shying away from confrontation, even apparently powerless people could negotiate a change in their circumstances and secure a better life for their children. Robert was sent to Kingston to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy. She was reputed to be an Obeah woman – a healer and spiritual guide with the power to communicate with spirits, hence her nickname, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn himself had no time for mysticism, leaving superstition to “silly Europeans”. But he always remembered that Amy’s ‘owner’, a man she had cared for when he was a child, whipped her mercilessly under suspicion of bewitching his father’s smuggling ship and causing him to be captured by the Spanish. That scene – a young man brutally beating a defenceless old woman accused of witchcraft and facing no repercussions – was seared into the young Wedderburn’s memory. Here was lesson two: he would never accede to the ‘legitimate authority’ of either religion or law – two means used by the powerful to justify trampling on the powerless. Listen | Gretchen Gerzina discovers the story of a forgotten revolutionary, Robert Wedderburn, in BBC Radio 4's Britain's Black Past Working-class insurrectionary Wedderburn worked as a millwright, a sailor and a soldier before crossing the Atlantic and forging a career as a tailor in England. In 1813, he was implicated in a scam involving pilfering excess fabric from the production of military uniforms. He escaped conviction partly because tailors were a notoriously tight-knit group, and prosecutors could find no one willing to inform on their brother tradesmen. It was probably through his trade club that Wedderburn first got into radical politics. Mentored by the renowned radical polymath Thomas Spence, he surged to the forefront of London’s militant political scene, rabble-rousing in smoky pub back rooms and setting the world to rights. By the end of the 1810s, Wedderburn was publishing pamphlets and running his own debate club, the infamous ‘Temple of Sedition’ at a chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. Listen | Black British history: everything you wanted to know One of the most distinctive things about Wedderburn’s politics was his ability to see the working-class struggle in global perspective. Most radicals of his generation were fixated on Britain: how to improve conditions for British workers, how to reform the British parliament, how to save the children of the British poor from the factories. Wedderburn addressed all of these issues, but also saw the cause of exploited white workers in Britain as inextricably entwined with that of enslaved black workers in the Caribbean and Africa. As he asked his predominately white readership in 1816, “should the receivers and stealers of Africans become rich, and buy one of those seats in the House of Commons, which is sold at noon-day, ought they to be called the representative of a free people? Ought they to be obeyed, when there is an opportunity to oppose with success?” Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity He even went so far as to encourage enslaved people to rise up and kill their ‘masters’, calling to mind the successful insurrection that led to the establishment of the free black nation of Haiti in the former French colony of Saint Domingue: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you,” he wrote. “O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remains – of necessity similar effects must take place.” No other British abolitionist had previously been so bold as to suggest that the enslaved should take their freedom for themselves. Such hot rhetoric about rebellion in the empire was alarming for the Home Office, increasingly paranoid about the rise of all forms of radicalism during the bitter recession that followed the Napoleonic Wars. But Wedderburn’s domestic politics were what really landed him in hot water. At a debate in 1819, he proclaimed that the Prince Regent deserved to die for failing to protect his subjects, shouting: “My motto is assassinate stab in the dark.” He had already made a name for himself and, his actions reported by several government spies, came under the unforgiving scrutiny of the very highest ranks of the British establishment. In August 1819, the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, personally wrote to the Prince Regent about “a man of the name of Wedderburne, a notorious firebrand”, reassuring the future George IV that the troublemaker would soon be arrested. In February 1820, Wedderburn was convicted of seditious blasphemy for one of his Hopkins Street speeches, and served two years in Dorchester Jail. Listen | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery Radical abolitionist Prison proved extremely hard for Wedderburn. His hypervisibility as a black man, as well as his notoriety as an enemy of the state, meant that he was singled out for especially harsh treatment by the guards at Dorchester. After his release, Wedderburn’s life was marked by a steady decline into destitution and vice, including multiple convictions related to running brothels. Yet Wedderburn remained committed to the abolition of slavery. In 1824, he wrote his most famous text, The Horrors of Slavery, in which he described the injustices faced by his mother and grandmother. He wrote another anti-slavery tract, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, from a jail cell in 1831. When he died in the winter of 1834–35, Wedderburn left behind some of the most uncompromising anti-slavery and anti-racist writing of the 19th century. Despite every conceivable disadvantage in life, he led the vanguard of the struggle for workers’ rights across the empire, regardless of colour or creed. At its most utopian, his work dared readers to imagine a world in which solidarity, not profit or self-interest, could determine the course of history. Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Wedderburn’s final descent into criminality and vice forms a bitter coda to a grittily inspiring story, but in his final year he did at least get to see one of his cherished dreams become a reality. On 1 August 1834, after years of uprisings in the Caribbean and activism in Britain, the enslaved celebrated the first day of their legal freedom. Among them were several members of Wedderburn’s immediate family. He might have derived some satisfaction from knowing that – though he also would have understood that legal emancipation was only the first step. The fight for equality was just beginning. Read more | Black Victorians: the hidden Britons who helped shape the 19th century Ryan Hanley is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, and author of Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press, 2025). This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A “desperate leap for liberty”: how Ellen and William Craft made a daring escape from slavery
Born into slavery in the 19th century, Ellen and William Craft made a daring bid for freedom when they disguised themselves as a white man and his manservant and travelled 1,000 miles across America. Historian Ilyon Woo shares the extraordinary story of the husband and wife team with HistoryExtra podcast editor Ellie Cawthorne
On 21 December 1848, a young white-passing man going by the name ‘Mr Johnson’ boarded a train in Macon, Georgia, assisted by his enslaved manservant. With his slight frame, eyes shaded by green-tinged spectacles, and arm in a sling, this young man cut an unusual figure. But what no one else in the carriage knew was that Mr Johnson and his servant had a secret. They were not, in fact, master and slave, but wife and husband – Ellen and William Craft. In a bid to flee enslavement, the Crafts had donned disguises and were embarking on an epic 1,000-mile journey across America. It was, William later recalled, a “desperate leap for liberty”. Listen on the podcast: A audacious escape from slavery The Crafts’ story began in Macon, Georgia, where both had been enslaved since birth. Ellen’s first enslaver had been her own biological father, and by 1848, she was ‘owned’ by the husband of her half-sister, forced to work as a maid and seamstress. Meanwhile, William had struck an agreement with his enslaver to hire himself out as a skilled cabinetmaker. “Disappointingly, there’s no record of how the couple first met, but we do know that they thought about the idea of escape before they were even married,” says historian Ilyon Woo, who in 2024 appeared on the HistoryExtra podcast to discuss the Crafts’ extraordinary journey, which she reconstructed in her book Master Slave Husband Wife. Having seen loved ones torn apart by slavery, Ellen was initially hesitant to start a family of their own. “She wanted to wait to get married and have children until they were free,” says Woo. “Ultimately their love prevailed, and they decided to marry first, run later. But over the two years of their marriage, they were constantly thinking about how to get out.” Read more | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery The decision to run was a serious one; William and Ellen would have been all too aware of what might await them should their escape attempt fail – public punishment, torture, and death. According to the Crafts’ 1860 account of the escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, they hatched their final escape plan only four days before launching it. Those were tense and busy days. William had saved up some money from his cabinetry work and the couple obtained passes for a few days’ absence to “visit a sick relative” of Ellen’s. Meanwhile, they gathered items of clothing for Ellen’s disguise. The plan was for Ellen to play on her light-skinned complexion in order to pass as a wealthy white man called Mr Johnson, accompanied by his enslaved manservant (William). As a small and slight black woman, it was long shot. “When Ellen first tried the clothes on, William looked at her despairingly – he thought there was no way the plan was going to work,” says Woo. “The vest was huge, the clothes drowned her, she looked ridiculous. But, as an expert seamstress who knew about men’s fashion, Ellen calmed William down and took control of the situation.” As part of her disguise, Ellen had stitched her own trousers. She topped the outfit off with a top hat, green-tinged glasses, bandages around her face, and a sling. As she couldn’t read or write, the sling provided the perfect cover to avoid signing any documents. The overall impression was of a stylish but sickly young man of leisure. “What’s extraordinary is that person after person who observed Ellen in this disguise remarked on what a stylish man she was,” says Woo. “That’s testament to her powers of performance.” Despite their meticulous preparations, the journey itself got off to a bumpy start. After buying tickets for Savannah, the Crafts boarded different carriages on the segregated train. But before it had even pulled out of the station, the first challenges emerged. To his horror, William spotted his employer from the cabinet workshop on the platform, talking to the ticket master and peering through the carriage windows. He had had a strange feeling his apprentice had run away, but luckily, both William and Ellen went undetected. Meanwhile, the porter who helped Ellen with her bags was an acquaintance of hers, but again, she avoided suspicion. Unbelievably, a third man who knew Ellen then sat down beside her – this was Scott Cray, a close associate of her enslaver who had come to the house for years. Cray even spoke to Ellen, but she avoided interacting by pretending to be deaf, and miraculously, he left her alone. “People ask how Ellen was able to pull off this performance,” says Woo. “But when you look back at what she had endured since childhood, it begins to make more sense.” As the mixed-race daughter of her enslaver, “Ellen was forced to observe the markers between black and white, enslaved and free, because any failure to do so would invoke the wrath of her mistress. She was constantly observing and performing from a very young age. So, in some ways, she had prepared for this performance for a lifetime.” After three close shaves before they had even made it out of Georgia, the pair must have been relieved when they finally pulled into Savannah around dusk. The first leg of the journey was over – but a mammoth journey still lay ahead. From Savannah, they boarded the General Clinch steamer, bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Ellen spent much of the journey in her cabin, claiming to be ill, while William slept on deck. But when they reached Charleston, more trouble lay in store. The steamer they had intended to take to Philadelphia had stopped running – meaning they would need to take a more convoluted route, with many more changes than planned. To make the onward journey even more difficult, they would have to navigate this complex new route without the aid of maps or timetables. After passing some time at the Planter’s Hotel – one of the finest in Charleston – the Crafts headed for the first available steamer to Wilmington, North Carolina. But before boarding, Ellen was asked to write their names in the register. When she claimed she was unable to do so due to her injured arm, the ticketmaster objected. But in yet another stroke of luck, another traveller stepped in on ‘Mr Johnson’s’ behalf and the Crafts were let on board. From Wilmington, the couple then boarded another train to Virginia, then yet another steamer to Washington DC, before travelling overland via Baltimore, and on to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. During every leg of the journey, Ellen had to make it through various interactions with other passengers, and even a steamboat captain; being interrogated about her ailments, challenged over her ownership of William and keeping her cool while witnessing several debates about the hot-topic of the day – abolition. The journey was fraught with danger for William too, with slavecatchers and kidnappers in operation on the route. But at every stage, they managed to bypass all the usual checks. The disguise may have been audacious – but that is likely part of the reason why the pair got away with it. “No-one imagined that a woman would even put on a pair of pants, let alone that an enslaved woman would disguise herself as a white man,” explains Woo. “Ellen took the markers of class, ability, gender, and race, and manipulated them to transform herself, and catapult from the very bottom of the social hierarchy all the way to the top. She used these signs of power to take power.” By the time the Crafts reached Pennsylvania on Christmas Sunday, they had been travelling for four days. William later recalled that when they arrived in the free state he “felt that the straps that bound the heavy burden to my back began to pop, and the load to roll off.” Yet, according to Woo, while this was “definitely a celebratory moment,” things weren’t so simple. “In many ways, even once they had arrived in the northern so-called ‘free states’, they were not free,” says Woo. “The United States Constitution mandated that when someone owed labour (the word slavery wasn’t used) in one state, they continued to owe that labour even if they moved to another state.” This meant that, by law, the Crafts’ enslavers were entitled to try and recapture them. Their absence passes had expired, and telegraph technology meant that the news of their disappearance may have even reached Philadelphia before they did. This compelled the Crafts to keep moving. With help from abolitionist networks, they lived for two years in Boston. But when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed (which required all enslaved people to be returned to their ‘owners’, even from free states), the pair decided it would be safer to leave America altogether. William and Ellen had originally planned to head to Canada, but instead turned to England, where their remarkable backstory made them celebrity speakers on the abolitionist circuit. And Ellen’s dream of having children who were born free came true – the pair would go on to have five. After abolition, they returned to America in the 1870s to establish a school for people recently released from slavery, and continued their activism. “Many of the issues the Crafts battled against are still issues now,” says Woo. “I look at them as American heroes, but also heroic citizens of the world, who repeatedly challenged their communities and nations to fight for better. When there's so much turmoil in the world right now, we can look back to them and draw inspiration. That's what I do.” Ilyon Woo is the author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Bonnier books, 2024)
The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also led to significant changes for the countryside and its people of the ‘motherland’
For an encounter with one of the most eye-opening legacies of Britain’s colonial projects, take a drive along the A31 in southern Dorset. On the stretch between the delightfully named villages of Winterborne Zelston and Sturminster Marshall, the road kinks nearly 90 degrees; lining the verge here you’ll notice a wall – not hugely tall, but impressively long. Reputedly stretching for 3 miles and comprising nearly 2 million bricks, it was almost certainly built with profits from slavery. This is the so-called ‘great wall of Dorset’ – one of England’s longest, built around 1841 to encircle the vast Dorset estate of Charborough Park. It belongs to the Drax family, an old propertied clan who owned tobacco and sugar plantations in Barbados – and who massively increased their wealth by boosting profits through the use of slave labour. Read more | Slavery's painful legacy: the British empire's role in the trade of enslaved people It is easy to forget that colonial governors, slave-owners and East India Company employees and their heirs commonly became rural magistrates, customs officials, industrialists and politicians in Britain. The newly acquired land and social networks of these men allowed them to hold sway over other Britons in countryside regions. So it’s important to understand that, when it comes to exploring rural history, it’s not enough to ask where the money came from to buy country houses or fund village schools. What also matters is how these figures and their descendants exercised their power, wealth and influence in such areas. Back in 2020, I undertook an audit of published academic research about National Trust properties and their colonial links. So I already knew that country estates such as Basildon Park in Berkshire and Harewood House in Yorkshire were built and landscaped with colonial profits, and that Speke Hall near Liverpool was bought and restored with money from Jamaican slavery. I’d found, too, other architectural stories of places not managed by the National Trust that are also linked to Britain’s colonial projects – including that statement wall around Charborough Park. These all highlighted the point that many of the ubiquitous colonial links in our countryside have been overlooked or forgotten. Read more | The colonial secrets of Britain’s stately homes British rural history is invariably depicted as a domestic affair that has very little to do with the empire. You don’t find many references to colonial history in local history pamphlets, for example, nor in the nature writing of many popular authors. To address this oversight, I set out to research a book of walks through regions with less-familiar histories of empire. As I ventured deeper into the countryside, empire’s impact on rural Britons was revealed in all its nuance and variety. My aim was to identify connections that were genuinely consequential to Britons who lived and worked in these places during four centuries of colonial activity. From servants to slavery That search led me, among other things, to revisit the Drax story – and I began to wonder about the family’s relationship with the ordinary inhabitants of Dorset. In the early 17th century, people from that county were shipped to Barbados plantations to work as indentured labourers, selling their employers a set number of labour years and receiving at the end of their contract a lump sum or its equivalent in sugar or land. By the middle of that century, such indentured servants were being replaced by enslaved African labourers – a system ‘pioneered’ by the Draxes. Notably, one member of the Drax family pops up in the historian EP Thompson’s account of the 1830s Swing Riots – protests by agricultural workers against poor pay, working conditions and mechanisation that threatened their jobs. In 1830, the average farm worker’s weekly wage of somewhere between seven and nine shillings was nowhere near enough to cover rent and the purchase of basics – tea and sugar, bread, potatoes, butter and cheese, candles, soap and wood – which typically came to around 13 shillings. During this period of recession and depressed wages, the Swing Riots spread west from Hampshire, and agricultural labourers in Dorset then rose up in protest. John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge Erle-Drax (1800–87) boosted his wealth by marrying into the family, and received compensation for the loss of slave labour after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. He met protesting labourers with beer, and offered to raise their wages – then reneged on that promise. He led an armed group of landed proprietors to quell the resultant protests and to ensure that his labourers felt the full force of the law. That episode recalls the actions of people elsewhere in Dorset who also campaigned for fairer conditions – notably the villagers from Tolpuddle, whose story became one of the most celebrated in British labour history. These six men, known today as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, started the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers – in effect, a union fighting wage cuts – led by Methodist lay preacher George Loveless. Under an obscure law prohibiting the swearing of secret oaths, they were unjustly found guilty of sedition in 1834 and sent to some of the furthest reaches of the British empire: the penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Loveless and his fellow ‘martyrs’ were among 4,000 British political prisoners and social protesters who, between 1787 and 1868, were transported to penal colonies as punishment for fighting for their rights. Loveless wrote about his experience in Van Diemen’s Land, and his words represent a powerful indictment of the colonial system. Working on menial tasks throughout daylight hours, convicts were inadequately clothed and often stripped to the waist. Punishments were severe – 50 lashes for attempting to escape, for example. Unsurprisingly, most prisoners’ health deteriorated, and suicide attempts were common. One of Loveless’s observations was that penal colonies exposed the dangers of unfettered power wielded by the British authorities. Enslavement and enclosure The system of forced labour that caused the suffering of so many enslaved people in Britain’s colonies was also linked with hardship at home. With this in mind, I planned a walk along the Norfolk–Suffolk border. I call this route my ‘enclosure walk’, because it reveals the intertwined history of land ownership and slavery wealth. For centuries, people grazed livestock amid the water meadows and lowland lakes of the East Anglian fens, and fished the wetlands that teem with fish and eels. The names on old maps reflect the management of these landscapes: First Fen, Second Fen, the Thirteen Acres. Others, such as Bullock Shed Close and Duck Lands Lane, suggest how land was used. Names convey observations of the natural world, too: Toads Lane, Birds Hill, Thistly Close. All of these reveal people’s intimate relationship with land that was known and loved long before it was enclosed with hedges. Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity Enclosure – private landowners erecting barriers to deny local people access to formerly common land – is massively significant to British rural history. Over the centuries, it effected a slow transformation from peasant husbandry to capitalist farming. Enclosure was responsible for removing landless people’s right to graze livestock, catch rabbits and collect firewood on the commons. Instead, the land was allocated to a proprietor who controlled its use. This process accelerated rapidly in the 18th century: between 1750 and 1820, over 21 per cent of England was enclosed by parliamentary decree. East Anglican injustice It is no coincidence that this period coincided with the era of transatlantic slavery. A vast amount of land was purchased or enclosed using wealth from the West Indies or investments in the slavery businesses. Enclosure is not just of local and national significance – it is a global story. My enclosure walk began in the north-east Suffolk town of Bungay, from where I ambled along waterways and quiet lanes to Earsham Hall, a red-brick residence once home to Sir William Windham Dalling, an absentee slave-owner. Between 1799 and 1840, Donnington Castle, the Jamaican plantation inherited by Sir William, produced a staggering £150,000 (equivalent to well over £10m today). Together with two neighbours – George Sandby and George Day, also absentee slave-owners – he dominated the lives of 811 enslaved people. But these men’s dominance did not begin and end on their Caribbean plantations. Read more | Success, sugar and slaves: the uncomfortable story of slaveholder Simon Taylor Local Norfolk enclosure maps show that Sir William used his slavery-derived profits to consolidate and expand his East Anglian estate. He was a petitioner on the 1812 ‘Act for Inclosing Lands in the Parishes of Earsham, Ditchingham, and Hedenham, in the County of Norfolk’. The lands to be enclosed under this act included Outney Common and Dole Meadow, where the word ‘dole’ suggested lands that had been habitually given over to people without a stable income as an act of charity. With distinctly colonial overtones, and in keeping with enclosure rhetoric throughout England, Sir William and the other petitioners argued that this was “uncultivated… wasteland” that would be “improved” through enclosure. That claim is undermined by their promise to award appropriate costs to displaced land users. Compensation would, the petition stated, be awarded to the owners of cottages or buildings who could provide evidence of ongoing land use. Any objectors were instructed to employ an attorney – which was, of course, beyond the means of most ordinary country folk. Commissioners’ judgements were always final in the enclosure process, and any who disputed an unsuccessful appeal outcome would be evicted. The 1812 enclosures were, indeed, contested by locals after notices were placed on church doors and printed in the Norfolk Chronicle. A public meeting was held to hear any objections put by an attorney – but only a handful of complainants could afford such legal representation. Among those who could was a local man called Alexander Adair, who claimed 2 acres (less than a hectare) in the Dole Meadows as his by right; his claim was overruled. The enclosures went ahead, and the commissioners allocated just 5 acres (2 hectares) as “poor allotments”. These small plots were to be leased to tenants who would now be required to pay rent twice a year, having previously paid nothing. Hand-drawn enclosure maps showing Sir William’s new land resemble dense webs. Spindly demarcation lines show the proposed new plots – numbered in red – and existing buildings shaded in dark pink. Within these plots, the names of the new and former landowners are written in tiny, immaculate letters. The 1812 map shows that Sir William bought – using wealth derived from slavery – 280 acres (113 hectares) around the perimeter of his estate, gobbling up tracts around Earsham Hall that were deemed by the commissioners to have “unfixed and uncertain” boundaries. The map shows two private roads for the use of Sir William, his heirs, and two other landowners. Walking along the old Norwich Road today, thin hedges mark the edges of the Earsham estate, with its flowerless meadows and gigantic oaks. In the 18th century you could have used more direct footpaths across fields, but these were blocked during Sir William’s enclosures. Read more | Did the British royal family support slavery? Five public lanes and footpaths that previously passed through the estate were rendered off-limits to locals, who were then forced into time-consuming detours as they walked the long way round. To this day, you still have to take longer, indirect routes. Clearly, such inconveniences can’t be compared to the horrors of chattel slavery, but Sir William’s Jamaican profits were used to set in motion a series of smaller injustices in Norfolk. Thanks to that wealth, formerly common land became strictly off limits, and people could be prosecuted or fined for using it. Anybody caught fishing with nets in the broads, cutting turf or carrying off rocks or flagstones would be in trouble. Non-payment of fines would result in bailiffs recovering the full amount. Sir William also claimed exclusive rights to all timber, standing or fallen, on the enclosed commons. This was a blow for anyone who had previously collected firewood there, or used logs for building or furniture-making. Sugar and slate Another story linking slavery-derived profits with labour history can be found at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor, north-west Wales. Now owned by the National Trust, its interconnected histories of sugar and slate are persistently told as separate stories. As soon as Richard Pennant inherited his Jamaican sugar wealth in 1781, he turned local slate producers off his land and, the following year, opened Penrhyn slate quarry. Within a decade, 500 men were employed there, and it became one of the world’s largest slate quarries. In a sinister echo of conditions in Jamaica, the quarry-workers’ barracks were modelled on huts built for enslaved people on the family plantations; we know this from the work of historian Marian Gwyn, who studied regular letters that Richard Pennant received from the manager of his West Indian estates. Read more | 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered In 2022, the BBC Radio 4 series The Museums That Make Us stated that Penrhyn Castle was “built on money from slavery, the abolition of slavery and then the slate quarry nearby”. That wording is misleading, because it implies two distinct, unconnected phases of money-making – yet the slate quarry was created with slavery-derived profits in the first place. The resultant combined sugar and slate wealth funded roads, railways, schools, hotels, workers’ houses and the local port. Bitter dispute The Pennants’ slate mines were at the centre of the great strike of 1900–03 – one of the bitterest disputes in British industrial history – sparked by the family’s opposition to the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union. The strikers lost, and 2,000 hungry, impoverished quarry workers left for south Wales. This mass movement of labour was the long-term outcome of both histories. I learned of one further local connection not too far from Penrhyn, on the sheep-grazed hillsides of north Wales. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/PXJ4F6-e98e157-e1742213030277.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Welsh wool weavers in a 19th-century illustration. Slave-owners bought Welsh ‘woollen plains’ to clothe their labourers in order to maintain productivity" title="Welsh wool weavers in a 19th-century illustration. Slave-owners bought Welsh ‘woollen plains’ to clothe their labourers in order to maintain productivity" /> In the old county of Meirionnydd, part of Eryri (Snowdonia), local people produced a rough fabric called woollen plains, which was used to clothe enslaved people in North American and West Indian plantations. In the callous minds of the enslavers, this coarse Welsh textile was desirable because it bolstered productivity: proper clothing prevented enslaved people from becoming ill, and kept them alive for longer. Listen | Browse our archive of HistoryExtra podcasts on the history of slavery Far-away transatlantic slavery was thus directly linked to the livelihoods of Welsh sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that wool-workers were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harsh. The money was being made by people far higher up the economic ladder: wool merchants and landowners with sheep-grazing pasture. Once again, two unrelated groups of people, separated by heritage and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean, were linked by their circumstances – bound within the colonial system of the British empire. Corinne Fowler is professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, and founder of the Colonial Countryside research project. Her latest book is Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Allen Lane, 2024) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine