Inhuman Traffic: The Business of the Slave Trade
24 May 2007 – 6 April 2008
Room 69a Coins and Medals display
Admission free
In 1778, Londoner Ignatius Sancho, who had been born almost 50
years earlier on a slave ship en route between West Africa and the
Americas but later won his freedom, wrote a letter to his friend
describing his anger at the Slave Trade:
The grand object of English navigators - indeed of all
Christian navigators - is money - money - money… In Africa, the
poor wretched natives - blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant
soil - are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence
meant as a blessing: - the Christians' abominable traffic for
slaves - and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings -
encouraged by their Christian customers - who carry them strong
liquors - to enflame their national madness - and powder - and bad
fire-arms - to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and
kidnapping.
The new exhibition explores this Inhuman Traffic by
looking at how the trade functioned, and at how it was ended. Gold
and ivory first brought European traders to West Africa, and
tobacco, guns, textiles, sugar and rum enabled the trade to
flourish. The small display examines these and other commodities
involved in the slave trade, and the way Africa, Europeand the
Americas became linked in a global trade network, featuring objects
from the museum’s collection of coins and medals, alongside objects
from other parts of the museum, many of which are rarely or never
seen on display.
Some objects in the display showcase new research into the
provenance of objects in the Museum’s collections. For example,
four cowrie shells which have been in the collection for almost 200
years, but which we now know were given by Mansong Diara, ruler of
the slave-trading empire of Bambara, to Scottish explorer Mungo
Park. Park’s account of his travels in West Africa, published in
1799, could not avoid discussing the slave trade, and was used by
campaigners arguing both for and against the trade. These shells
look like any other cowries, but they have a remarkable story to
tell.
Stories of the people involved in the trade and its abolition
are central to the exhibition, featuring resistance leaders
including Toussaint l’Ouverture, Olaudah Equiano and Nanny of the
Maroons alongside others (including some whose names we don’t know)
whose acts of resistance and rebellion were crucial to the turning
of European public opinion against the trade.
In 1787, the Society for Effecting
the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London. A
campaign began, with petitions, pamphlets and protests organised
across the UK, and tokens were issued bearing the now-famous image
of the kneeling African, asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” The
parliamentary spokesman for the group was William Wilberforce, MP
for Hull, who in a parliamentary speech in May 1789 said,
“Let us put an end at once to this inhuman traffic—let us
stop this effusion of human blood.” The end came, gradually,
beginning with the passage in 1807 of the parliamentary bill
banning the slave trade. But this was just
one small part of dismantling the trade, which had been lucrative
and profitable for the traders, but at a terrible cost to so many
people. Slavery was legal in the British colonies for another 30
years, and legal and illegal trading continued. Speaking in 1852,
14 years after his escape from slavery in Maryland, and 13 years
before slavery would be banned in the United States, Frederick
Douglass condemned the trade as an “inhuman traffic, opposed alike
to the laws of God and of man.”
For further information or images please contact Hannah Boulton
on 020 7323 8522 or hboulton@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk