Slavery - The Hidden History

Date: Thursday 8th March 2007
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: The Cube
Price: £2
Speakers: Adam Hochschild, Richard Hart

Adam Hochschild: A multi-award winning author, his first book Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. His widely read books have won numerous awards.

Click hear an NPR National Public Radio interview with Adam Hochschild on the subject of abolition in Britain here (streaming audio, 8 minutes).
Click hear an NPR review of Adam Hochschild's book Bury The Chains here (streaming audio, 5 minutes).

Richard Hart: Key figure in the politics of the Caribbean of the 20th century. Trade Union and political activist in Jamaica, Guyana and Attorney General of Grenada; a post he held until the American invasion in 1983. As an academic, Richard Hart taught at Northwestern University, USA, and has also been a visiting lecturer at a number of Canadian and American universities, the University of Guyana, University of Havana, University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad and the University of Paris. He has continued to be a prolific author and speaker on Caribbean history, politics and economics.

March 2007 marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. William Wilberforce, for most of us, is the only name associated with this movement, indicating that the salvation of West African slaves rested on the shoulders of one MP. What of the nation wide abolitionist movement? Why is so little known about this first modern mass political campaign? Slaves are typically represented as brutalized victims of an immoral trade. What of the numerous slave revolts throughout the Caribbean? Did slaves themselves abolish slavery?

Toussaint L'Ouverture

Adam Hochschild discussed how and why this history has been misrepresented.

Richard Hart analysed the impact of armed slave uprisings on the abolition of the slave trade and on slavery itself.