“I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea,” wrote the cultural critic Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born descendant of enslaved Africans. But today he’d have trouble convincing those who still couch Britain’s imperial past in terms of its civilising mission that a refreshing cuppa is an act of complicity in the Atlantic slave trade.
Research increasingly reveals, however, the extent to which Britain’s wealth was predicated on the centuries-old rapacious plunder of millions of African people. It was not confined to bank accounts and bequests. There are charged traces of slavery’s legacy throughout the land, in fine art and botanical gardens, and in stately homes and museums, such as Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam.
