An early 20th-century West Indian response to slavery was to state that it had been worldwide and was not something that only happened to people of African descent. The British meanwhile, in an attempt to portray themselves in a positive light, emphasised the campaigns to end slavery and the slave trade, and spent little time on the institution itself.
The opening of Liverpool's International Slavery Museum (ISM) and the various events to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade this year have returned slavery to public discussion.
On 23 August, the day the museum opened, television viewers could see the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, weeping as he apologised for the role of the capital in slavery. Visibility and remembrance, rather than absence and forgetting, have become the order of the day.
The ISM evolved from the 1994 Transatlantic Slave Trade gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum and now occupies the third floor of that building.
Visitors first see a striking Haitian freedom sculpture and then move into the African section, which focuses mainly on west Africa. A partial reconstruction of an Igbo compound is an interesting, if not wholly successful, attempt to show how ordinary people lived, as it relies mainly on the captions to give it meaning. These reconstructions are reminiscent of the "native" villages of 19th- and 20th-century imperial exhibitions and, without the participation of the "natives", somewhat sterile.
Far more impressive is the rest of this section. Beautiful cloths, masks and sculptures introduce visitors to the high level of African cultural artefacts and provide a link to the last display in the museum, the carnival costumes. The museum is strong on demonstrating cultural influences.
The centrepiece of the museum is the slavery section. Here there is a good explanation, with some indigenous American material, of why Africans became the enslaved. This section is very good at explaining the links between the trade in people with the engine of that trade - the plantation system in the Americas.
The setting of the maritime museum makes the ISM particularly strong on the shipping side. Alongside the excellent ship models, there are two interesting paintings by William Jackson: one is of a rare example of a slave ship and the other of a sugar ship in the Jamaica trade. The slideshow of the transatlantic slave trade from 1501 to 1867 clearly illustrates the trade networks, the European countries involved and the changing origins in Africa and the destinations in the Americas of the enslaved.
A good audio visual follows the voyage of the slaving ship Essex, which left Liverpool on 13 June 1783. There are also extracts from the voyage of the Liverpool slaver Enterprise in 1794-95, views of Liverpool, crew lists, examples of currencies such as cowrie beads used in the trade, and audio accounts from the enslaved and slavers on the middle passage.
Lingering influence
An attempt is made to discuss the wealth generated by the slave trade and its effects on Britain, including the historically controversial claims about the effects on industrialisation.
The influence that colonial products had on British life is well illustrated by the exhibit containing an 18th-century mahogany chair; a coffee cup from Liverpool made in the early 1760s, featuring the image of a couple being served by a black servant; a bottle of ginger powder from Jamaica; a sugar loaf and tongs; and a clock with a satinwood case.
The importance of sugar - a cheap source of energy substituting for more expensive food - to the diet of the poor in Britain could perhaps have been emphasised.
Moving across the Atlantic, there is a model of a sugar plantation with audio extracts from people who were field or domestic slaves, as well as those who lived as guests or mistresses in the great houses. The more brutal side of slavery is illustrated by manacles, instruments of torture and pictures. Slave rebellions and defiance forms part of the exhibit, which gradually changes into the Legacy section.
This section, comprising mainly pictures and captions, provides detailed coverage of the many ways the enslaved fought back, from the armed resistance of the Maroons and Palmares in Brazil, and the Underground Railroad from the southern states of the US to Canada (this consists of various flaps that reveal answers to questions about this method of fleeing slavery) to the open rebellion culminating in the success of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.
The place of race
The 1789 autobiography of former slave Olaudah Equiano is on display and marks one aspect of resistance and legacy, as both an anti-slavery tract and a publication by a black person in Britain.
One important legacy is, of course, racism; earlier, the point is made that racism was created, in large part, by slavery. The museum features a Ku Klux Klan costume dating from 1920, a short film showing, among other things, lynchings in the US and racist incidents.
The film culminates with the racially motivated murder of the young Liverpudlian Anthony Walker in 2005, a mention of the 2001 declaration by Anti-Slavery International about the continuing existence of slavery, and the conference in Durban, South Africa, on racism, also in 2001.
The continuing legacy of global inequality - surely not simply a result of slavery - is dealt with in films on countries such as Haiti, Brazil and Guyana. The positive side of the legacy is shown in photographs of black achievers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Maya Angelou, Bessie Smith, Miriam Makeba, Kelly Holmes, Desmond Tutu, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Viv Anderson and WA Lewis. A music desk and carnival costumes bring the museum display to a spectacular close.
Liverpool, of course, appears as a slaving port, but also in its connection to the American civil war through building ships for the Confederacy. A collection of street names that have links with the slave period are also highlighted. The black community of Liverpool has an exhibit to itself. The local is well meshed into the international.
The main areas of the exhibition, Africa, the trade and slavery, and the legacies of slavery, flow into each other, although the final section seems at the moment relatively spacious - or, to be unkind, empty - compared with the earlier sections. The captioning is good, although the height of some descriptions may be a problem to wheelchair users.
But there were two main problems: time and noise. On the day after its opening, there were timed entries every hour. In effect, this meant that visitors had about 50 minutes, since zealous museum attendants started to usher people out about 10 minutes before their hour was up. Thankfully this system was not retained for the first week of opening. The noise is generated not only by people speaking to each other, but also by the numerous audio sources. These often compete with, and therefore nullify, each other.
Not only transatlantic
The comments wall suggested that visitors in the first couple of days after the museum opened had enjoyed their experience. More importantly, the history was sound, so no myths about slavery should be perpetuated.
The name of the museum does, however, raise deeper questions. Transatlantic slavery was international, but "international slavery" does suggest more than slavery in the Americas. A letter from lawyer Gbenga Oduntan, which was printed in The Times in August, gets straight to the point:
"…the word 'slave' is being assigned to connote the black man. How possible is it that we could all have forgotten that slavery has existed throughout the ages, everywhere? Of course, the slavery of the black Africans is the most recent in time and perhaps the best recorded… If we are going to have an International Slavery Museum, let it reflect all these realities in the world."
Even if restricted to Africa, the trade towards the Middle East and Asia is missing. This involved possibly as many people (about 12 million) as the transatlantic trade over a period almost twice as long (although, significantly, two-thirds were female - almost exactly the reverse of the transatlantic trade).
The Liverpudlian woman who complained on a radio programme that the emphasis on Liverpool was depressing might have been less unhappy and better informed had the museum's scope lived up to its title. This is a museum of transatlantic slavery, not international slavery.
Peter Fraser is attached to Middlesex University and the Centre for Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University
Project data
Cost: £9.5m
Main funder: Heritage Lottery Fund
Curator: Angela Robinson
Exhibition design: Redman Design
Project management: Turner and Townsend
Architectural consultant: Austin Smith Lord
Lighting design: Lighting Design and Technology
Exhibition fit-out: Scena Projects
AV hardware: Electrosonic
Models and interactives: HB Source
Showcases: Click Netherfield
The opening of Liverpool's International Slavery Museum (ISM) and the various events to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade this year have returned slavery to public discussion.
On 23 August, the day the museum opened, television viewers could see the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, weeping as he apologised for the role of the capital in slavery. Visibility and remembrance, rather than absence and forgetting, have become the order of the day.
The ISM evolved from the 1994 Transatlantic Slave Trade gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum and now occupies the third floor of that building.
Visitors first see a striking Haitian freedom sculpture and then move into the African section, which focuses mainly on west Africa. A partial reconstruction of an Igbo compound is an interesting, if not wholly successful, attempt to show how ordinary people lived, as it relies mainly on the captions to give it meaning. These reconstructions are reminiscent of the "native" villages of 19th- and 20th-century imperial exhibitions and, without the participation of the "natives", somewhat sterile.
Far more impressive is the rest of this section. Beautiful cloths, masks and sculptures introduce visitors to the high level of African cultural artefacts and provide a link to the last display in the museum, the carnival costumes. The museum is strong on demonstrating cultural influences.
The centrepiece of the museum is the slavery section. Here there is a good explanation, with some indigenous American material, of why Africans became the enslaved. This section is very good at explaining the links between the trade in people with the engine of that trade - the plantation system in the Americas.
The setting of the maritime museum makes the ISM particularly strong on the shipping side. Alongside the excellent ship models, there are two interesting paintings by William Jackson: one is of a rare example of a slave ship and the other of a sugar ship in the Jamaica trade. The slideshow of the transatlantic slave trade from 1501 to 1867 clearly illustrates the trade networks, the European countries involved and the changing origins in Africa and the destinations in the Americas of the enslaved.
A good audio visual follows the voyage of the slaving ship Essex, which left Liverpool on 13 June 1783. There are also extracts from the voyage of the Liverpool slaver Enterprise in 1794-95, views of Liverpool, crew lists, examples of currencies such as cowrie beads used in the trade, and audio accounts from the enslaved and slavers on the middle passage.
Lingering influence
An attempt is made to discuss the wealth generated by the slave trade and its effects on Britain, including the historically controversial claims about the effects on industrialisation.
The influence that colonial products had on British life is well illustrated by the exhibit containing an 18th-century mahogany chair; a coffee cup from Liverpool made in the early 1760s, featuring the image of a couple being served by a black servant; a bottle of ginger powder from Jamaica; a sugar loaf and tongs; and a clock with a satinwood case.
The importance of sugar - a cheap source of energy substituting for more expensive food - to the diet of the poor in Britain could perhaps have been emphasised.
Moving across the Atlantic, there is a model of a sugar plantation with audio extracts from people who were field or domestic slaves, as well as those who lived as guests or mistresses in the great houses. The more brutal side of slavery is illustrated by manacles, instruments of torture and pictures. Slave rebellions and defiance forms part of the exhibit, which gradually changes into the Legacy section.
This section, comprising mainly pictures and captions, provides detailed coverage of the many ways the enslaved fought back, from the armed resistance of the Maroons and Palmares in Brazil, and the Underground Railroad from the southern states of the US to Canada (this consists of various flaps that reveal answers to questions about this method of fleeing slavery) to the open rebellion culminating in the success of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.
The place of race
The 1789 autobiography of former slave Olaudah Equiano is on display and marks one aspect of resistance and legacy, as both an anti-slavery tract and a publication by a black person in Britain.
One important legacy is, of course, racism; earlier, the point is made that racism was created, in large part, by slavery. The museum features a Ku Klux Klan costume dating from 1920, a short film showing, among other things, lynchings in the US and racist incidents.
The film culminates with the racially motivated murder of the young Liverpudlian Anthony Walker in 2005, a mention of the 2001 declaration by Anti-Slavery International about the continuing existence of slavery, and the conference in Durban, South Africa, on racism, also in 2001.
The continuing legacy of global inequality - surely not simply a result of slavery - is dealt with in films on countries such as Haiti, Brazil and Guyana. The positive side of the legacy is shown in photographs of black achievers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Maya Angelou, Bessie Smith, Miriam Makeba, Kelly Holmes, Desmond Tutu, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Viv Anderson and WA Lewis. A music desk and carnival costumes bring the museum display to a spectacular close.
Liverpool, of course, appears as a slaving port, but also in its connection to the American civil war through building ships for the Confederacy. A collection of street names that have links with the slave period are also highlighted. The black community of Liverpool has an exhibit to itself. The local is well meshed into the international.
The main areas of the exhibition, Africa, the trade and slavery, and the legacies of slavery, flow into each other, although the final section seems at the moment relatively spacious - or, to be unkind, empty - compared with the earlier sections. The captioning is good, although the height of some descriptions may be a problem to wheelchair users.
But there were two main problems: time and noise. On the day after its opening, there were timed entries every hour. In effect, this meant that visitors had about 50 minutes, since zealous museum attendants started to usher people out about 10 minutes before their hour was up. Thankfully this system was not retained for the first week of opening. The noise is generated not only by people speaking to each other, but also by the numerous audio sources. These often compete with, and therefore nullify, each other.
Not only transatlantic
The comments wall suggested that visitors in the first couple of days after the museum opened had enjoyed their experience. More importantly, the history was sound, so no myths about slavery should be perpetuated.
The name of the museum does, however, raise deeper questions. Transatlantic slavery was international, but "international slavery" does suggest more than slavery in the Americas. A letter from lawyer Gbenga Oduntan, which was printed in The Times in August, gets straight to the point:
"…the word 'slave' is being assigned to connote the black man. How possible is it that we could all have forgotten that slavery has existed throughout the ages, everywhere? Of course, the slavery of the black Africans is the most recent in time and perhaps the best recorded… If we are going to have an International Slavery Museum, let it reflect all these realities in the world."
Even if restricted to Africa, the trade towards the Middle East and Asia is missing. This involved possibly as many people (about 12 million) as the transatlantic trade over a period almost twice as long (although, significantly, two-thirds were female - almost exactly the reverse of the transatlantic trade).
The Liverpudlian woman who complained on a radio programme that the emphasis on Liverpool was depressing might have been less unhappy and better informed had the museum's scope lived up to its title. This is a museum of transatlantic slavery, not international slavery.
Peter Fraser is attached to Middlesex University and the Centre for Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University
Project data
Cost: £9.5m
Main funder: Heritage Lottery Fund
Curator: Angela Robinson
Exhibition design: Redman Design
Project management: Turner and Townsend
Architectural consultant: Austin Smith Lord
Lighting design: Lighting Design and Technology
Exhibition fit-out: Scena Projects
AV hardware: Electrosonic
Models and interactives: HB Source
Showcases: Click Netherfield
