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5 min read"My Family Owned Slaves"
On the Rosel Sugar Plantation in Jamaica, between 1769 and 1811, nearly three hundred enslaved people died. Their names were recorded in plantation ledgers: Agnes, "first blood vessels," Deborah, Inchild, Bed, Lawrence, "Being Long Bad with Leprosy," Tedita, "a small box," Violet, "child fever and worms," Hamlet, "of a nervous fever," Fortuna, "she has been useless two years past." These were the human property of two Scottish families—the Fergusons and the Hunter Blairs—who owned that land for over a century.
Journalist and historian Alex Renton is a descendant of those families. In his book Blood Legacy, he set out to understand how apparently intelligent, cultured, and enlightened people could enthusiastically trade in, own, and brutalize fellow human beings. He joined the podcast Trapped History to tell that story.
Discovering a Hidden History
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:06) **Introducing Alex Renton and the Question** - A campaigning journalist and descendant of slave-owning families joins to explore how "apparently intelligent, cultured, kind and enlightened people" could own and brutalize fellow human beings.
- 2 (08:41) **Guilt, Shame, and the Legacy of Racism** - Alex distinguishes between guilt (for something he had no say in) and shame (for feeling proud of ancestors who also committed atrocities, and for doing nothing about present-day systemic racism).
- 3 (13:45) **A Personal Discovery in the Basement** - Alex reveals he was 55 years old when he accidentally discovered his family's slave-owning past in his grandparents' basement, and describes the shock of seeing the prices listed for enslaved children.
- 4 (17:38) **James Ferguson's Venture in Tobago** - In 1773, Alex's six-times-great-uncle, 26-year-old James Ferguson, sailed to Tobago, bought seven enslaved Africans at market, and began clearing raw jungle to start a cotton plantation.
- 5 (20:36) **The Meaning of "Seasoning"** - Alex explains the horrific process of "seasoning" enslaved Africans, which involved torture, savagery, and the removal of their birth names to break their spirit and reduce them to docility.
- 6 (24:28) **The Scottish Connection to Caribbean Slavery** - The episode explores why Scots were disproportionately involved in slave ownership, with 34,000 Scots making the journey to the Caribbean between 1750 and abolition.
- 7 (26:48) **The Compensation Scandal** - The British government paid £20 million (40% of its annual budget, equivalent to £17 billion today) to compensate slave owners, not slaves, for the "loss of property" when slavery was abolished in the 1830s.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
As we close out Season 7, Trapped History takes a long dark walk down one of the most uncomfortable roads in history, going deep into the story of one British family which owned and traded in slaves.
We are joined by the journalist and writer Alex Renton who has tried to make sense of his family's past ever since he uncovered the shameful history. It is a hard story, a painful one but it is a story which we all need to hear – Black and White, British and Caribbean – if we are ever to free ourselves from the history which traps us.
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