My friend Nini Rodgers, who has died aged 86, was a historian of Ireland’s involvement with slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and the abolition movement.
In 2007, at the end of a four-decade career as a history lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, she published Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865. In it she meticulously unmasked the reality behind the island’s self-image as an unfailing “lover of the oppressed”. While eventually some in Ireland did campaign against slavery, for most of the 17th and 18th centuries, Nini demonstrated that “the Irish behaved according to the European norm”. “As far as the slaves were concerned,” she wrote “they were indistinguishably white.”
