Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born around 1753 in SeneGambia, Africa, Wheatley was captured by slave traders in 1761 where she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent. 

In 1773, at the age of 20, Phillis accompanied Nathaniel Wheatley to London in part for her health (she suffered from chronic asthma). Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, became interested in the talented young African woman and subsidized the publication of Wheatley’s volume of poems, which appeared in London in the summer of 1773. After her book was published, by November 1773, the Wheatleys emancipated Phillis. 

In 1779 Wheatley issued a proposal for a second volume of poems but was unable to publish it because she had lost her patrons after her emancipation publication of books was often based on gaining subscriptions for guaranteed sales beforehand. Wheatley believed that the power of poetry was immeasurable. 

Image By Unknown author - Phillis Wheatley, Margaretta Matilda Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834. This is a cropped version of File:Phillis wheatley frontpiece 1834.jpg, which was copied from "Documenting the American South"., Public Domain

In September 2008, the monument sculpted by Michael Visocchi with poetry by Lemn Sissay was unveiled by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The sculpture is composed of 17 granite columns, in the form of the stems of sugarcane, which also suggest a group of people. They are arranged in front of a podium, symbolising both a pulpit and an auctioneer's platform. They could be seen as representing a congregation, a group of buyers at an auction, or even the enslaved people offered for sale at the auction.commissioned by the City of London and initiated by Black British Heritage and the Parish of St Mary Woolnoth, the monument commemorate the 2007 bicentenary of abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807. 

Image obtained from https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/gilt-of-cain-slave-trade
 

Sarah Remond, came to Britain on her United States of America passport and worked for various anti-slavery societies between 1859 and 1867. While in England she wished to travel to Paris but the American embassy denied to fix a French visa into her American passport because she was black. Her letters of complaint were published by The Times on January 7 1860. The British press strongly supported her stand, and the US Ambassador felt so vilified that he threatened to return to America.

Image : Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society obtained from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/about-us/sarah-parker-remond

The Royal African Company (RAC) was established in 1660 by King Charles II who granted the company a royal monopoly to trade with Africa. The Company had a number of wealthy investors including the King’s brother James, Duke of York (later King James II) who became its Governor; his cousin, Prince Rupert, various Dukes, Earls, former Lord Mayors of the City of London, the philosopher John Locke and the diarist Samuel Pepys among others. The Royal African Company had a London base at Africa House on Leadenhall Street in the City and on the coast of west Africa at Cape Coast Castle - a slave trading post - which is in modern day Ghana. In all, the company trafficked almost 200,000 people across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. Shareholders and those who worked for the RAC were enormously enriched by the sale of the enslaved.

Twelve men gathered here on 22nd May 1787 to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Among them was Thomas Clarkson who carried out extensive research for the abolition campaign and argued for a trade that involved goods, not people. William Wilberforce became involved officially from 1791 and led the abolition of the slave trade campaign inside Parliament introducing his first bill to abolish the slave trade in that year. 

Acts of resistance by the enslaved were a constant and took place at all stages of enslavement in Africa continuing on to the European colonies in the Americas. They could be small acts of resistance such as working slowly and putting down or breaking tools, through to major collective acts of resistance such as uprisings. One of the most serious uprisings in the British Caribbean began on Christmas Day in Jamaica in 1831 and raged for 11 days. Known as 'The Baptist War’, it was led by an enslaved African Baptist preacher called Samuel Sharpe.

Black abolitionists in Britain included a number of people who had been formerly enslaved such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottabah Cugoano. Their contribution to abolition was of vital importance. Both men highlighted the horror of slavery by writing letters, writing in newspapers, lobbying government and were two of the fifteen founder-members of a Black pressure group known as the Sons of Africa. They were able to convey the misery of their former enslavement to engage with the hearts of the public and thus foster support for abolition. Similarly, Mary Prince, the first formerly enslaved African woman to author an autobiography was able to encapsulate through her work that even though the slave trade had been abolished in 1807, the institution of slavery itself was still causing untold suffering. Mary’s book gave the British public an insight into the perspective of an enslaved African woman including her harrowing account of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of one of her enslavers.

After the slave trade was abolished, a successor organisation to the earlier abolition society was established in 1823 and called the London Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery (later shortened to the Anti-Slavery society), In contrast to the gradualist approach favoured by some members, women’s abolition groups across the country demanded an immediate end to slavery. Elizabeth Heyrick was a woman prominently involved in the abolition campaign who organised boycotts of West Indian sugar.

Image By Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) 

The Jamaica Wine House stands on the site of London’s oldest coffee house, built in 1652. It became known as the ‘Jamaica’ Coffee House shortly after 1655 when Jamaica was acquired as a colony by England. 

Coffee houses stimulated demand for some of the products of slavery, principally sugar but also coffee itself. The Jamaica Coffee House became a place frequented by slave traders, West Indian slaveholders like James Drax as well as insurers and financiers of slave ships and Caribbean plantations. News about the Caribbean could be obtained here and the coffee house was known to display posters advertising rewards for the capture of enslaved people who had escaped in London whilst newspapers found within the establishment carried advertisements for the sale of enslaved people within London. 

(Image By Elisa.rolle - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

At least five Lord Mayors of the City of London were involved as investors in the voyages of John Hawkins, England’s first slave trader. Later City officials including Lord Mayors, Aldermen, Sheriff and Common Councilmen invested in organisations such as The Royal African Company, the slave trading fort ‘Bunce Island’ and the West India Docks. The slaveholder and planter William Beckford Sr became Lord Mayor of the City twice and is memorialised in the Guildhall. The City also benefited from port and cargo as it had responsibility for the conservancy of the River Thames. 

The Zong Massacre was the massacre under the orders of a slave ship captain called Luke Collingwood of 132 enslaved Africans in 1781 for the purposes of claiming insurance. The insurers disputed the claim and a court case between the ship’s owners and the insurers (Gregson v Gilbert, 1783) was heard at Guildhall by Lord Chief Justice, William Murray. Initially, he found in favour of the ship’s owners but after an appeal they lost the case. The abolitionist and formerly enslaved man Olaudah Equaino had followed the first case and was shocked. He brought it to the attention of fellow abolitionist Granville Sharp who unsuccessfully tried to bring a charge of mass murder against the ship’s owners to court.

(Image By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Buried at this former church graveyard is James Drax, one of the first men to introduced sugar onto the island of Barbados in the 1640s and established the plantation system of industrial scale, sugar production using an enslaved African workforce. Earlier workforces had included indigenous people and indentured Europeans. This event became known as the ‘sugar revolution’ and Drax became one of the wealthiest slaveholders and planters in the Caribbean. So called ‘slave codes’ were introduced in 1661 which deprived the enslaved of basic human rights and formalised a system of terror, brutality and dehumanisation that would continue for over 200 years. In the 17th and 18th centuries, individuals like ‘historian’ Edward Long attempted to justify enslavement by claiming that Africans were inferior to Europeans highlighting the connection between Transatlantic enslavement and racism. 

The Treaty of Utrecht which was signed at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 resulted in Britain acquiring the contract to supply Spanish America with enslaved Africans. This contract was known as Asiento de negros. The recently formed South Sea Company was given the contract and was responsible for trafficking an estimated 34,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. Queen Anne was allocated 22.5% of the company stock and 25% was allocated to King Philip V of Spain. When Anne died, her successor King George I inherited the shares and purchased more. He later became governor of the company. 

(Image By Elias Gayles - https://www.flickr.com/photos/elias_daniel/7728957800/, CC BY 2.0)

In the 18th century a number of sugar bakers existed in this part of the City which the name and sign of this pub allude to. Sugar bakers refined the imported slave-produced muscovado sugar into cone-shaped ‘sugar loaves’. These came in various grades and sizes. Wrapped in paper for preservation, they could be sold whole or pieces could be ‘nipped’ off by grocers and sold that way. Imported West Indies produce was worth over 25% of the value of all goods arriving in England and Wales by the end of the 18th century - sugar being principle among them - illustrating the enormous value of enslaved-grown goods to the British economy. Sugar ‘factors’ or agents such as the firm Lascelles & Maxwell (Lascelles Clarke & Daling after a merger) handled the distribution of sugar in the City from its offices on Mark Lane, and were involved in supplying credit to those engaged in transatlantic enslavement. 

For the enslaved, sugar cultivation and production was hard, backbreaking and unforgiving work. The enslaved were usually organised into ‘gangs’; first, second and third based on age and strength. The strongest and younger of the enslaved adults would form the  ‘first gang’, slightly less strong adults made up the ‘second gang’ with older people and children comprising the ‘third gang’. Tasks varied throughout the year and depended on the crop being grown but in the case of sugar the enslaved usually worked from dawn until dusk, dusk until dawn, or 12 hours. Work was supervised by a white ‘overseer’ and sometimes an enslaved Black ‘driver’. Either could possess a whip which would be used to beat enslaved people as a means of speeding up the work rate of the enslaved or as punishment for a presumed offence. The work conditions and brutality of a plantation were so bad that the death rate on plantations of the enslaved was high.

(Image By SugarLoaf Management)
 

In 1765, Jonathan Strong, a 15 or 16 year old enslaved African boy was brought to London by his enslaver, David Lisle. One day he was beaten so severely he could hardly walk or see and was left for dead on the streets. The brothers William and Granville Sharp arranged hospital treatment for Jonathan and they also put him in touch with an apothecary where he found employment. Strong was later seen by his former enslaver who had him kidnapped, imprisoned at the Poultry Compter and sold to a Jamaican plantation owner called James Kerr. Strong appealed to his friend Granville for assistance who brought the matter to the attention of the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Kite who determined that he had been unlawfully detained and therefore was free to go.

Research carried out by the Bank of England in 2021 revealed that in the early 1770s, the Bank took ownership of two plantations in Grenada and 599 enslaved Africans when one of their slaveholding borrowers defaulted on their loan. The plantations were later sold on. The Bank of England also had at least 25 governors or directors connected in some way to transatlantic slavery. Humphry Morice, who became Governor of the Bank in 1727 was responsible for the dispatch of 103 slave trading voyages to Africa, trafficking over 30,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. John Sargent, Director of the Bank of England between 1778-79 was an investor in the notorious slave trading fort in modern-day Sierra Leone, known as Bunce Island. 

(Image By Diliff - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)