Only a few years ago, we in Britain were congratulating ourselves that, in 1807, our country became the first to ban the trade in slaves. Gradually, however, it has become clear that our long relationship with slavery was distinctly unheroic.

Few institutions were untainted by slavery and a vast number of families profited from the trade – not only the owners of slaves and plantations in the Caribbean and those who sold their rum, sugar and tobacco, but also suppliers, ship owners and builders, colonial administrators, bankers, lawyers and manufacturers of textiles, guns, whips and chains, many of whom never crossed the Atlantic. 

The list of famous people who benefited directly or indirectly from the slave trade includes the novelist Tobias Smollett, who served in Jamaica as a ship’s surgeon, Sir Humphry Davy, whose marriage to a woman from Antigua enabled him to focus on his scientific research, and Sir Hans Sloane, who