SOURCE: Walvin, James. “Ignatius Sancho: The Man and His Times.” In Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, edited by Reyahn King and others, pp. 93-113. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

[In the following essay, Walvin provides the contemporary economic and legal context of slavery and its effects on Sancho, analyzes Sancho's contribution to what would later become the abolitionist movement, and contends that Sancho's writings take readers to the heart of the Black experience at the height of the enslaved African diaspora.]

Ignatius Sancho was born a slave in 1729, to a slave mother (who died shortly afterwards) on board an Atlantic slave ship heading for the Americas. At the time of Sancho's birth, the British had become the most successful and most prosperous of European slave-traders. Though that maritime trade in Africans was initiated by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and developed by the Dutch, it was perfected by the British. The British shipped more people than any other nation, transforming the enslavement of Africans, and their sale in the Americas, into a major commercial operation. On the backs of imported slaves—and of their locally-born descendants—the British waxed prosperous. Trade and profit flowed from the Caribbean sugar islands and from the tobacco colonies of the Chesapeake. Sugar transformed the nation's tastes, sweetening the newly acquired passion for tea, coffee and chocolate, while tobacco provided those familiar rituals of manly sociability in the tavern and coffee house. From elaborate tea-drinking rituals in fashionable homes, to the sharing of cheap, re-used tea leaves among the labouring poor, British social life was reshaped by products of distant empires. When we look at the flow of material benefits and profits from the enslaved Americas it is hard to imagine British life without slavery. Its social and economic benefits had seeped into most corners of the nation. But the human cost of these profits and pleasures was a catastrophe visited upon large regions of Africa, and upon those Africans violently scattered around the edges of the British Atlantic slave system. There were millions, like Sancho's mother, who were plucked from African homelands to toil in the Americas.

It is tempting to think that the slaves' efforts—on the far side of the Atlantic—were out of sight and therefore out of mind. Yet Sancho's life is a reminder that the slave experience was often more obvious and direct than we might sometimes imagine. For a start Sancho, like many other slaves and black domestics, made his home in Britain. In the course of the 18th century a noticeable black community developed, especially in London, a reminder of Atlantic slavery itself and of the more sizeable black communities in the Americas. All was made possible by British maritime trade and commerce. During the course of the 18th century, some 11,000 ships left Britain (one half of them from Liverpool, the rest mainly from Bristol, London and Glasgow), for the ‘triangular trade’ to Africa and thence to the Americas. The slave trade was thought to be so lucrative that even the smallest and remotest of ports dispatched ships to trade in African humanity; from Poole and Lyme Regis, from Lancaster and Whitehaven. The ports thrived, and so too did their immediate economic hinterlands, as produce and manufactured goods from inland regions and towns filled the departing slave ships. Metalwares from Birmingham and the West Country, textiles from Yorkshire and Lancashire, foodstuffs from Scotland and Ireland, commodities crafted by workmen from the length and breadth of Britain, all found their way to the African coast and to the slave plantations of the Americas. It was a massive, expansive (though generally risky) trade, whose profits silenced any isolated voice of moral objection.

Like millions of others, Ignatius Sancho inherited his mother's slave status—to be bought, sold, bartered and bequeathed—and all in order to tap the wealth of the Americas for European gain. Something in the region of eleven million Africans were landed in this way, the very great bulk of them destined for the sugar colonies. Many others simply did not survive, either on the trade routes within Africa or on the horrific sea crossing. Given the vast numbers involved, it was inevitable that some, like Sancho, would find their way to Britain.

Sancho was brought to Britain as a small child, where he worked for three sisters in Greenwich. This was the period when fashion decreed the use of black domestics, both enslaved and free. In the homes of wealthy Londoners, fashionable spas and stately homes, black pages or servants were commonplace, a fact amply confirmed in any number of 18th-century portraits. Black servants were trained in the domestic skills and social graces expected by their owners and were often dressed in elaborate (sometimes bizarre) attire, both to catch the eye and to impress visitors and friends. Sancho was one such. Like other blacks, he also took the opportunity to improve himself, with the help of friends and the support of those who had noticed his abilities and industry. The Duke of Montagu, who spotted early on his potential, gave him books and Sancho quickly took to studying. But, to the horrified disapproval of his female owners, he also loved female company. At the age of twenty Sancho ran away from the sisters, seeking refuge in the Montagu household. There, working as a butler, he flourished, reading voraciously, writing prose, poetry and music. He became an avid theatre-goer and a fan of Garrick and became a figure in fashionable London society—friendly with actors, painters and, most interestingly, with Laurence Sterne.

By the late 1760s Sancho had made the progression from being a decorative black domestic to a man of refinement and accomplishment, penning letters to friends and sympathisers around the country. In 1773 he quit the life of a domestic servant and set up as a shopkeeper in Westminster, thanks to a small allowance bequeathed by the Duke of Montagu. With this modest backing, Sancho moved into a shop in Charles Street, Westminster, with his black wife Anne and their expanding family, eventually of six children whom he affectionately called his ‘Sanchonettas’.

Such shops were relatively simple and cheap affairs. An investment of a mere £10 could yield an annual income of £50, and though London—especially Oxford Street—quickly established a reputation for its dazzling array of extravagant shops, much more typical was the humble local store, often little more than a counter in a front room, such as Sancho acquired. By the end of the 18th century, there were more than 20,000 shops like these in London. The basic trade was in sugar, tea and tobacco—all intimately linked to slavery of course.

As Sancho tended to his counter and customers—taking tea with favoured or famous clients—his wife Anne worked in the background, breaking down the sugar loaves into the smaller parcels and packets required for everyday use. Slave-grown sugar, repackaged and sold by black residents of London, themselves descendants of slaves—here was a scene rich in the realities and the symbolism of Britain's slave-based empire. Among the prominent visitors to Sancho's shop was Charles James Fox, leader of contemporary parliamentary radicals. We know that Sancho voted for Fox at the 1780 election, having acquired the right to vote by his property rights as a shopkeeper in Westminster. From what we know of Sancho's views, it is not surprising that he voted for Fox, but it is surely remarkable that at the high watermark of British slavery a black should cast a vote in a British election.

In the increasingly competitive world most 18th-century shopkeepers promoted their wares in various ways: through advertisements in their windows, above their doors and in local handbills and newspapers. Sancho was no exception. He also used a trade card, depicting his most important commercial item—tobacco. His card provides a telling picture, portraying all those elements of tobacco production which proved it so exploitative for so many people. It contains images of an American Indian, and of black slaves gathering the tobacco. On closer inspection, however, the image of slave work looks much more like slaves gathering sugar than tobacco. Yet the precision of the image is not the key point. What matters is the message. Here was a product—tobacco—which was brought forth by slaves for the pleasure and profit of Europeans, and was sold by an ex-slave shopkeeper in London. Sancho's trade card is another reminder, if we need one, of the centrality of slavery to 18th-century British trade commerce and prosperity.

The ironic images of slavery were there for all to see, and could be caught in other scenes of British domesticity. Black servants carried the tea services, including the sugar bowls, and fetched their masters' pipes, just as their contemporaries toiled in the fields in distant colonies to bring forth those same natural products. It was also customary for slave ships to carry pipes and tobacco to distribute to, and to pacify, African slaves as they crossed the Atlantic. Tobacco was also used to fumigate the holds of the slave ships. Yet who produced the tobacco in the first place?

Ignatius Sancho is better known as a correspondent than as a shopkeeper. He made himself known to men and women of sensibility throughout the country. He contacted Laurence Sterne, for example, to praise his work, and to bring to Sterne's attention the plight of enslaved Africans. In fact, Sterne had already taken up the issue. Moreover, the problems of slavery had already surfaced in a series of celebrated slave cases in English courts and newspapers. In the year Sancho was born, 1729, an important legal ruling had issued from the Attorney and Soliciter Generals following a petition from West India interests, concerned about their rights over slaves imported into England. The law officers decreed that: ‘a slave, by coming from the West Indies, either with or without his master, to Great Britain or Ireland, doth not become free … We are also of opinion, that the master may legally compel him to return to the plantations.’

For some years past, English law had wrestled with the legal and social problems created by the movements of slaves from the Americas to Britain. Were slaves freed when they landed in a free land; were they free when baptised? Or did their enslaved status—confirmed by a host of parliamentary acts governing the colonies and the slave trade—remain applicable to Britain?

Twenty years later, in 1749, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, reaffirmed the earlier York/Talbot judgement; ruling that slavery was legally sanctioned in England. He ruled that the common belief that, ‘the moment a slave sets foot in England he becomes free, has no weight with it, nor can any reason be found, why they should not be equally so when they set foot in Jamaica, or any other English plantation’. Yet judgement continued to be confused, and other judges made contrary rulings. Of course the legal fraternity was aware that any definitive freeing of slaves in Britain would form a breach in the previously secure British slave system. If slaves were to be freed in Britain, why not in the colonies? But those slave colonies continued to be the hub of unquestioned British material well-being; remove slavery which underpinned those colonies, and British economic interests would be damaged.

In practice slavery did exist in Britain and could be seen in the number of slave sales and slave runaways announced in 18th-century newspapers. How could it be otherwise, with such large-scale movements of people and ships between the African slave coast, the slave colonies of the Americas, and Britain? Not surprisingly, then, Africans and American-born blacks began to appear throughout Britain. Most, however, found themselves in London; the heart of Britain's maritime empire and the centre of the political and social culture which sustained Atlantic slavery and all that flowed from it.

Sancho was, then, one of many blacks in 18th-century Britain, though precisely how many remains uncertain. Yet it is clear enough that these reluctant black settlers in London developed into a genuine community. Black servants and slaves gravitated towards each others' company, meeting in the homes of their masters, in their favourite local tavern, celebrating together and, most crucially, passing on news and information which reached them from the dockside and from the slave colonies of the Americas. It was here, in the black community, that voices were raised against slavery.

Though criticisms of slavery were few in the early 18th century, by the 1760s a small band of critics in London—men of sensibility horrified by what they learnt of slavery—began to raise their doubts. Some of what they learnt about slavery was often gleaned from blacks living in London. Granville Sharp, a government clerk, began to agitate and write against slavery after 1765, following a chance discovery of cruelties inflicted on slave servants in London. Sharp researched into their legal status and, anxious to defend them, realised that the best way to ensure their freedom in England, to prevent their enforced return to the colonies, was to secure writs of habeas corpus on their behalf. This formed the genesis of the broader (and better known) British campaign against slavery. And in all this, the experiences and information of local, British-based blacks proved crucial.

Ignatius Sancho had already added his voice to the campaign against slavery. And the voice of an ex-slave had a resonance all its own. His most effective role was that of quiet agitator, raising the issue of slavery—the sufferings of what he called the ‘thousands of my brother Moors’—with his various correspondents. More eye-catching, in the short term however, was the agitation of Granville Sharp, which culminated (but did not end) in the well-known—though often misunderstood—Somerset case of 1772. Sharp sought to prevent a slave's enforced removal back to the Caribbean by securing a writ of habeas corpus (i.e. forcing the slave owner to justify before a court the detention of the slave). Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, aware that his decision had major implications for the slave lobby, was hesitant and slow to decide. But his judgement, delivered on 22 June 1772, was a turning point. Mansfield ruled that no-one had the authority to remove a slave from England against his/her wishes: ‘No master ever was allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatsoever’.

He did not decide, however, that slavery was illegal in England, though many continued to believe it was. As if to confirm the point, advertisements for slaves continued to appear in English newspapers, as did infamous cases of pursuit and capture of runaway slaves. Whatever the limitations of the 1772 Mansfield verdict, London's blacks—a group of whom were present throughout the Somerset hearings—celebrated in some style. It was a limited, partial victory, secured by a unique political/legal alliance of black and white. Yet it left much to be done. What dawned on that small band of white anti-slavery supporters (which found a focus in the remarkable, influential Quaker community) was that nothing less than black freedom tout court (i.e. an end to the British slave empire itself) could resolve the matter.

In the decade before his death in late 1780, Sancho, now in his forties, became an inveterate letter-writer. He had made earlier attempts at writing but his subsequent reputation was founded in the letters he penned in the 1770s. Was it mere accident that the very great majority of his letters were drafted when he had quit domestic service and had become a shopkeeper? Or perhaps the life of a simple grocer allowed Sancho the time and circumstances to dispatch letters to all and sundry, prompted no doubt by that world of political and polite gossip which passed through his shop. He was now party to a social world previously denied him as a domestic. The status of servitude had been left behind and Sancho was free to communicate directly with customers, and in his spare moments by letter with distant correspondents. The nature and style of his letters suggest that Sancho had disciplined himself in a style he thought appropriate for the intended correspondents, and there seems little doubt that his basic literary style was greatly influenced by Laurence Sterne.

Sancho's reputation as a letter-writer had first been established by the publication of Sterne's own letters in 1775. Sancho's initial contact with Sterne (in 1766) had been to praise Tristram Shandy in a letter which mixed praise with excessive sentimentality. From the first, Sancho described himself as ‘one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call ‘Negurs.’; a man whose feelings were aroused by Sterne's own barbs against slavery: ‘Of all my favourite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren—excepting yourself and the humane author of Sir George Ellison.’ Sancho urged Sterne to speak out on behalf of ‘the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors’. Sterne's response to Sancho's elaborate approaches seems to have encouraged the subsequent wave of letters which Sancho dispatched right and left, once he had more time on his hands as a shopkeeper. These letters form a rare insight into the life and times of an ex-slave living in 18th-century England.

Sancho's writings provide much more than a glimpse of an interesting, if distinctive, late 18th-century figure. They take us to the very heart of the black experience at the height of the enslaved African diaspora. Time and again, Sancho speaks about—speaks for—his fellow Africans, and about slavery ‘as it is at this time practiced in our West Indies’. But Sancho also spoke about the fate of the British black community, a community which was itself forged by slavery. The sole reason for the black presence in Britain was the Atlantic slave system. Blacks arrived in Britain as a consequence of the movement of Africans into the Americas. People returning from the slave colonies—planters, officials, soldiers, as well as the sailors on the slave ships—often returned home with personal slaves. But as the 18th century advanced, it proved more difficult to maintain control over slaves in England, especially in London. Sancho himself was a case in point. With the passage of time many were lured away by local free blacks, or were freed by their owners. We do not know how many, or what proportion, of the British black population were slaves and how many were free. Yet slave owners regularly tried to take black domestics back to the slave colonies against their will. Indeed it was such incidents which provided the early abolitionists led by Granville Sharp with their first breakthrough in the campaign against slavery. Slavery in England itself continued, however, sustained, as before, by the movement of peoples back and forth across the Atlantic and by the continuing use of slavery in British colonies.

For much of the 18th century, as the material bounty yielded by slavery increased and diversified, any initial worries about the ethics of slavery were simply swamped. What would Glasgow have been without tobacco; how would Liverpool have fared without the slave trade? Economic self-interest simply overwhelmed whatever moral scruples contemporaries might have had about the enslavement of legions of Africans and about their immiseration on the far side of the Atlantic. It was a process which distance rendered more comfortable for the British. But the evolution of a black community in London, and the legal difficulties periodically thrown up by slave cases in English (and Scottish) courts, ensured that the broader problem of slavery became progressively more troublesome. Blacks in Britain, the slave cases in courts, the occasional black voice raised in anger—all this and more determined that the problem of slavery would not go away. It was this domestic British debate about slavery which formed the genesis of the early campaign against slavery. Although the Quakers had been opposed to slavery since the late 17th century, they remained, despite their growing commercial power, a marginalised sect with little overt political influence. The first people in Britain to ponder and agitate effectively how best to undermine the Atlantic slave system became aware of the problem by events and individuals in Britain itself. It was the black British slave, the black British voice—the lot and the fate of blacks living in Britain—which made the first important dint in the previously untroubled defences of the West Indian slave system.

In this, Ignatius Sancho played an important role. Always willing to raise the question of slavery with his friends and acquaintances, his letters touched on the plight of Africans everywhere and of the problems facing blacks in Britain. At times Sancho was open—even extravagant—in promoting the black cause. His letters to Sterne were perhaps the most blatant example of this mode of address, though he may have adopted Sterne's exaggerated mode of expression to make a point—‘Consider slavery—what it is—how bitter a draught—and how many have been made to drink of it!’ More usual, however, was Sancho's passing references to the black experience; throwaway remarks about the occasional racial slur, the public insult and contemporary racist culture. Describing a family night out in London, he wrote: ‘we went by water—had a coach home—were gazed at—followed, &c. &c.—but not much abused.’ [my emphasis]

Why should Sancho make such a point? Why describe something which had not happened—except to show that the opposite was much more common? Sancho regularly reminded his correspondents about the abuse blacks were likely to receive in public. He reminded Soubise, another African servant (to the Duchess of Queensberry), of the ‘ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar’. At one point, despite a lifetime in England, Sancho described himself as: ‘a lodger—and hardly that.’ At times he clearly despaired: ‘to the English, from Othello to Sancho the big—we are either foolish—or mulish—all—all without a single exception.’

Like his fellow blacks, Sancho could not avoid the periodic barbs of hostile, vulgar abuse, much of it directed at his colour. In private letters, however, he sometimes turned this on its head, revelling in his racial difference and taking as a badge of pride what others used as an insult. In his late years, as he grew fatter, he described himself as ‘a man of a convexity of belly exceeding Falstaff’ but adding, ‘and a black face into the bargain’. In another letter he spoke of being ‘a coal-black, jolly African’. At other times he described himself as ‘a poor Blacky grocer’ and ‘only a poor thick-lipped son of Afric’. This jocularity in letters to his friends (to whom he sent ‘Blackamoor greetings’) never dimmed his sense of the wrongs done to unknown armies of his fellow Africans; ‘my brother Negroes’. Nor did Sancho lose his sense of indignation of what Britain had done—and continued to do—to native peoples in Africa and other parts of the globe. And all for the pursuit of money: ‘The grand object of English navigators—indeed of all Christian navigators—is money—money—money’. In pursuing this global commercial greed, the British had been ‘uniformly wicked in the East—the West Indies—and even on the coast of Guinea’.

Understandably, Sancho was especially grieved about the fate of Africa and its slaves (‘a subject that sours my blood’) but he also blamed African rulers as well as European traders for the evils visited upon the continent: ‘the Christians' abominable Traffic for slave—and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings’.

From his first letter to Sterne in 1766 until his death fourteen years later, slavery hovered over Sancho's correspondence. And it was precisely in these same years that the question of slavery began that long complex process of gestation as a political and ethical issue in Britain, driven forward by a small band of indefatigable abolitionists and aided by the experiences of London's black community.

After years of apparent indifference, anti-slavery was launched by the slave cases in English courts and by the attendant publicity and controversy. The campaign to secure black freedom in Britain, though fought initially on a narrowly defined front, had major implications for the slave empires. The West India lobby, long prominent in London as political and economic spokesmen and lobbyists for slave-traders and planters, indeed for all involved in Atlantic slave trading, began to appreciate that their position was under threat. There thus began that political and publishing skirmishing—pitching friends of black freedom against supporters of the slave-trading lobby—which was to continue, with varying degrees of intensity, for the next fifty years.

The cause of black freedom needed the periodic injection of publicity. Events conspired to bring home to the British public the scale and the horror of life—and death—on the slave ships and in the slave colonies. Outrages against slaves were skilfully manipulated by emergent abolitionist groups, but nothing could exaggerate the murderous details of slavery itself. A year after Sancho's death, events on board a Liverpool ship, the Zong, surpassed even the worst stories purveyed by the abolitionists. In September 1781, the Zong left Africa bound for Jamaica with a large cargo of African slaves. By the end of November more than sixty slaves and seven of the crew had died. Many other slaves were sick and seemed doomed. The master, Luke Collingwood, decided to throw overboard those slaves who were likely to die, and to claim them as an insurance loss; slaves who died ‘naturally’ formed a simple commercial loss for the ship's backers. Collingwood selected 133 sick Africans, and the crew threw them overboard in batches. Despite some resistance (one slave managed to clamber back on board, another ten threw themselves overboard), over three days they were all killed. To compound this outrage, the ship's owners subsequently claimed for the deaths on their insurance, alleging that only by jettisoning the sick was it possible to maintain enough water to save the healthy, and the crew. In fact the ship arrived in Jamaica with more than 400 spare gallons of water. The insurance underwriters refused to pay—and thus the case surfaced as another legal dispute which hinged on the question of slavery.

Even by the standards of a society apparently immune to the horrors of slavery, the Zong caused an outcry. Granville Sharp—primed for any further slave cases which might advance his earlier argument against slavery in England—was alerted to the case by Olaudah Equiano, the African later to establish himself as the most prominent black spokesman in Britain. Here was proof of the link between black and white which was to become increasingly important as the campaign for black freedom developed on both sides of the Atlantic. When the Zong case came to court, the case was simply stated by the Soliciter-General:

This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so; it is the case of throwing over goods; for to this purpose, and the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property: whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it.

Granville Sharp had other ideas, attending the hearing and determined to publicise both the murderous event and to expose the sanitised posturings of those English legal officials who claimed, throughout, that the incident was not a question of mass murder.

Despite persistent pressure and lobbying at the highest level, no action was taken against the men who perpetrated this crime. To raise the principle of African deaths and sufferings in an English court, was to expose the very heart of slavery itself. If every death, torture, brutality or outrage against Africans on board a British vessel, or on a plantation, were to find its way to court, the legal system would rapidly grind to a halt. And so too would the lucrative slave system itself. It was, after all, an economic system which needed Africans to be uprooted from their homelands and cultures, reduced, for the sake of British utility, to the level of chattel, and stripped—in law if not in social reality—of their humanity. The threats by Granville Sharp and his growing band of friends to use the law to secure the rights of blacks living in England, though narrowly focused was, potentially, corrosive of the whole Atlantic system.

The Zong case seems simply to have faded from English courts. But the details made a lasting impression and it heralded the awakening of political opinion to the wider problems of the British slave trade. What brought the issue into focus was the aftermath of the American War of Independence (1776-1783). As that war lapped through the North American slave colonies, the loyalty of local slaves was crucial to both sides in the conflict. The British had periodically used slaves in the fighting and as support labourers (often linked to the promise of freedom). When the defeated British finally quit, they escaped north to Canada or back to Britain with those former slaves who had sided with them in the war. These ‘black loyalists’ formed the origins of new black communities in Canada; those sailing to Britain swelled the ranks of London's ‘black poor’. The commissioners dealing with claims for compensation for losses in that fighting looked much less favourably on black claims. The investigating commissioners felt that it was sufficient that the supplicant blacks had secured their freedom. But most of them slid quickly into abject poverty, their numbers sufficient to prompt a debate in 1785 in the English press about their condition.

In 1786 a committee was formed to provide relief for London's black poor and within months more than 400 had been provided with food, clothing or lodging. Bit by bit, the government was drawn in to solve the ‘problem’ of the black poor. There evolved a bungled and disastrous scheme to encourage London's blacks to return ‘home’ to Sierra Leone. Not surprisingly, only a relatively small number took up the offer of repatriation, not least because Sierra Leone was not in any sense ‘home’ to London's black population. The greatest fear was that resettlement was in the heart of the slave-trading region. In the words of an African resident in London, ‘can it be readily conceived that government would establish a free colony for them nearly on the spot, while it supports its forts and garrisons, to ensnare, merchandize, and to carry others into captivity and slavery.’ Groups of blacks organised and protested and Olaudah Equiano—the most prominent African used by the government to liaise with the black community—struggled to make black anxieties known to the organisers.

When the convoy sailed in April 1787 it carried only 350 blacks. Some 300 landed in Sierra Leone, to face a litany of disasters which were no less awful for having been predicted. Four years later, a mere sixty survived. Later, under a new scheme, more than 1,100 black loyalists quit their temporary refuge in Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone; this settlement thrived and formed the basis for the modern state of Sierra Leone. But the problems of London's black community could not be solved by the efforts to ‘repatriate’ them. Knots of poor blacks were to characterise the expanding city of London throughout the late 18th century. Periodically their plight surfaced, usually when yet another slave case broke surface in an English court and in the press. But by then the political climate had begun to change.

Late 18th-century Britain remained wedded to a slave-owning culture. But that culture found itself progressively attacked and undermined by evermore powerful forces. The legal and published debate initiated by Granville Sharp had taken off in the 1770s and 1780s, periodically stimulated by news of fresh outrages, or by the most recent legal dispute about slavery. The Abolition Society, launched in 1787, in the immediate wake of the Zong case and the Sierra Leone scheme, was dominated initially by Quakers, with their own nationwide network of contacts which formed the framework for the rapid growth of abolition throughout the country. Abolitionist petitions flooded Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s. One petition from the emergent textile town of Manchester contained more than 10,000 names. By the mid-1790s more than 500 petitions from across the country demanded an end to the slave trade. The intellectual roots of anti-slavery reached back to the writings of the French Enlightenment. But after 1789 the movement was galvanised by the ideas of the French Revolution. The concept of the ‘Rights of Man’ transformed the wider debate about human and political rights—for black and white, for men and women, and was promoted by a vast flow of cheap publications—among them writings by black authors. Abolitionists pressed home the attack, arguing in Parliament that abolishing the Atlantic slave trade would bring the end of slavery in the Americas a little closer. Progress was hindered by the excesses of the French Revolution. But abolition was driven forward by massive public agitation, in print, in crowded local meetings and through a visual and material culture of anti-slavery; in pictures, prints, plaques, medallions and pottery. Some of that material left a permanent mark on the collective British memory, notably the plan of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, and Wedgwood's medallion of the kneeling slave—‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’

Throughout this campaign the slaves played a key part. Their collective voice was heard—and heeded—as never before. Black writers found their work adding to the groundswell of abolitionist sentiment. It was at this point that Ignatius Sancho found a posthumous fame and influence. His letters had been collected and published two years after his death, in 1782. Over the next twenty years they were reprinted five times (ensuring handsome royalties to his widow, who continued to run his Westminster shop). It was a book which brought a tone of educated civility to the abolition debates. Here was an African—an ex-slave—confronting contemporaries on terms they recognised and admired. Literate, sophisticated (however stylised), Sancho provided evidence of black attainment and potential. In a world grown accustomed to thinking of the African as a beast of burden, suited only to the physical demands of colonial labour, Sancho's cultural and literary style caught the eye. Nor was he alone.

The abolition activists clearly appreciated the importance of employing black activists and writers in their campaign. One was Ottobah Cugoano, another London-based African, who added his personal experience to the abolition cause in a book first published in 1787. Cugoano pushed the abolitionist case further than anyone else to date. He demanded total black freedom—not just an end to the slave trade—and the employment of the Royal Navy to prevent further slave trading. The most prominent and best remembered African abolitionist of these years was, however, Olaudah Equiano, whose memoirs of 1789 quickly became the African text in English in these years. His Interesting Narrative rapidly became a best-seller, its author soon established as the best known African in Britain, campaigning with radical friends in London and with abolitionist colleagues throughout Britain, to add the voice of personal experience to the broader abolitionist agitation. It is fitting that his book sells better today than ever before.

Equiano and Cugoano were friends and clearly worked together on their writing. Along with Sancho they formed a triumvirate of African writers whose personal experience of slavery infused abolition with an incalculable force. Their publications were utterly different. Sancho was the most polished—posed even; Cugoano a simpler, rougher voice; Equiano the more politically alert and specific. Yet Sancho's remained the most curious volume, not least because it was posthumous. But Sancho's letters were important in being able to appeal precisely to the people abolition needed to woo: the educated, the propertied and the influential.

The swelling tide against slavery was inspired of course by a host of factors. Slaves in the West Indies played a key role in loosening their own chains, most spectacularly in a series of slave revolts, led by the successful slave revolution in Haiti (St. Domingue). At the same time more and more people began to doubt the previously unquestioned economic benefits of slavery. New economic orthodoxies, notably a debate about free trade (prompted primarily by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776), disputed the protected economic system which buttressed slavery. Moreover, as the British economy changed and moved into the early phases of industrialisation, there were many other opportunities beckoning investors; opportunities which lacked the dangers (and the moral problems) of the slave system. Thus it was, by the early 19th century, that morality and economic utility began to unite in an increasingly strident campaign against slavery itself.

The slave trade was ended in 1807. Though slavery survived in the British West Indies for another thirty years, to more and more people it seemed a throw-back to a bygone world; a grotesque contrast to contemporary British economic and social values and a stain on the British character. When the British finally ended colonial slavery, between 1834 and 1838, they changed tack dramatically, henceforth boasting about their national and communal virtue in ending slavery (with little mention of their role in perfecting slavery in the first place). The cult of anti-slavery became an element in that British cultural imperialism which was to characterise much of British behaviour towards the wider world throughout the 19th century.

This was far removed from the world of Ignatius Sancho and the black community of the 1770s and 1780s, a mere two generations earlier. At the time of Sancho's birth, few people questioned the slave system. At the time of his death, it had begun to attract its first serious ethical and economic scrutiny. For much of his life, Sancho lived in a community accustomed to regarding Africans and their slave descendants as mere beasts of burden; destined to be the hewers of wood for the betterment of Europeans. Though he could scarcely have imagined it at the time, Sancho was to become one of the early African voices demanding freedom and equality for blacks scattered throughout the Atlantic diaspora. His life, from slave ship to London shop, provides a reminder of the remarkable upheavals and variety in the life of one African, cast around on both sides of the Atlantic by forces beyond his ken or control. Yet it should also remind us of an alternative world; of Africans demanding their freedom, of rising against the odds, of seeking help and comfort among fellow blacks, and forging important links with sympathetic local whites. From such small, apparently insignificant, events were laid the foundations for the ultimate dissolution of Britain's mighty slave empires. As he wrote his rather grandiloquent letters, Sancho could hardly have imagined the importance we would later attach to his words.