White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain's Legacy of Slavery
200 years after the 1823 uprising by enslaved people in Demerara, now Guyana, Thomas Harding drew on this event to explore Britain’s legacy of slavery and his own family's historical ties to slave plantations.
Thomas Harding is a bestselling non-fiction author. On his father's side, Harding is from a German Jewish family that left Berlin in the 1930s as the Nazi party came to power. He wrote about his family's experience during World War II and after in two of his earliest books, Hanns and Rudolf, the story of how his great-uncle had tracked down and arrested the Commandant of Auschwitz, and The House by the Lake, about his home his family had been forced to leave when they escaped Germany. "So in my family, when I was growing up, I was always told that we were the victims of history", he explained.
The discovery that his mother's family had made money from slave plantations through their 19th century tobacco business triggered a personal re-evaluation of himself and his family's place in history. "The shoe was on the other foot", he said. "We were now the perpetrators of history".
Harding quickly realised how much he didn't know about British colonial history. While looking deeper into Britain's history with slavery, he came upon the subject for his new book: the 1923 uprising of a group of enslaved people in Demerara, now Guyana. Harding explained that the uprising was led by Jack Gladstone, an enslaved man living on a plantation owned by John Gladstone, the father of British Prime Minister William Gladstone. Somewhere between 10 to 15,000 people took part in the uprising, which was the largest up to that point in the British Empire. Between 200 and 500 of those people were killed when the uprising was brutally suppressed by the militia.
The subsequent trials of those involved in the uprising, including Jack Gladstone, became national news in Britain, bringing to light the conditions enslaved people were living under in the colony and galvanising British abolitionist groups. It would still take another ten years, however, for the abolition of slaves to begin in Demerara.
In telling this story, Harding was interested in not just what happened in 1823 and the years immediately after, but in the legacy of what happened. "How does it impact us today?" he asked the audience. "How does it impact me? How does it impact you?"
The book that emerged from these questions, White Debt, explores this legacy both from the perspective of descendants of enslaved Africans and from the perspective of the descendants of slaveholders, like Harding himself. This personal aspect of the story led Harding to ask some difficult questions, both of himself and of his wider family. "How much should we be putting ourselves forward?" he asked of people's whose families, like his, had historically benefitted from slavery. "Even talking about it now, should I not be talking about it now?" On the other hand, he argued, "if you don't talk about it, then where's the accountability? Where's the role modelling? How do you try and make this more of a society-wide endeavour?" Though Harding acknowledges that these are hard conversations, ultimately, he believes, they are "conversations that need to be had".
The event was the second of three public lectures in the Legacy of Slavery Working Party lecture series, which is taking place during November 2023. In the final event, on 22 November, Prof Catherine Hall will explore the profound mark that Caribbean plantation slavery left on Britain. All are welcome to attend this final event, which is free of charge.
