William Waldegrave

The Senior Service to the rescue

There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our successors will see as incomprehensible moral blindness on our part than to be taking easy shots at the morality of two centuries ago. What will look as foul to Britons of 2306 as slavery does to us now? We don’t really want to know, because the answers might well be inconvenient. Abortion? The eating of animals?

It is the people who get it right at the time who deserve celebration. Which is why we should honour the remarkable people who put Britain in the lead in suppressing first the slave trade and then slavery itself after thousands of years of acceptance of both by all significant societies in all continents. Tom Pocock’s latest lively and well-researched book describes one aspect of the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery in the first decades of the 19th century. He broadens his canvas, justifiably, to include wider issues involving the Muslim Near East (this slave trade was conducted by Muslim North African potentates). This allows him to include a wide range of wonderfully flamboyant characters, from Sir Sidney Smith — self proclaimed (and how he proclaimed!) vanquisher of Napoleon at Acre, and prime mover of the campaign to stop this aspect of the Arab slave trade — to Byron, Cochrane, Codrington and the liberation of Greece.

It was Smith who stirred up Europe, starting at the Congress of Vienna, in opposition to the age-old ruthless slave trade organised by Algerian and other Arab rulers, whose sea-borne raids had terrorised the Mediterranean coastline and coastal villages as far afield as southern England and Ireland for centuries.

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