I have been interested in Admiral Lord Nelson for about as long as I can remember. I knew him first as the heroic victor of the Battle of Trafalgar. Famously, Nelson gave his life to help win that battle, against the rival combined fleets of Napoleonic France and Spain. Badly wounded at the height of the fighting, Nelson died aboard his flagship HMS Victory shortly after the last shot was fired. His signal to the British fleet at the start of the battle is as vivid in my memory as any of the lines from Shakespeare that I had to learn at school: ‘England expects every man will do his duty’.

But in later years I have come to know a different Nelson. My research and teaching have focused on the history of the British empire, and my particular focus has been on the British sugar colonies in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century. I learned that Nelson’s first long sea-voyage as an adolescent boy was to the sugar colonies of the West Indies, that he served in the region as a young Naval officer during the War of American Independence, and that he met his wife while stationed in the eastern Caribbean during the 1780s.
The transatlantic slave trade and the wider institution of slavery drove the plantation economies of the British Caribbean. But beginning in the 1780s, a nationwide British campaign, spearheaded by William Wilberforce, helped bring an end first to slave trading between Africa and the Caribbean (in 1807) and then to slavery itself (during the 1830s). The debate over the future of slavery divided Britons. Wilberforce personified one type of British patriotism—arguing for an end to slave-trading on the basis that it was a blot on the reputation of a proud and Christian nation. Slaveholders offered their own patriotic arguments—maintaining that the trade was so instrumental to the imperial economy that Britain could ill-afford to stop it.
Nelson had befriended several slaveholding colonists during his time in the Caribbean. Privately, he came to sympathise with their political outlook. It is clear that, by the time of his death at Trafalgar, he despised Wilberforce and stood in staunch opposition to the British abolitionist campaign.

My article in BBC History Magazine, published this month, explores that part of Nelson’s story. It does so in part to try to show that Nelson was a complicated individual. Since his death, he has been elevated to the status of an almost god-like imperial, patriotic hero. But though uniquely gifted in command of a fleet, he was in other ways as fallible and flawed as any human being—shaped by his own experiences, friendships and prejudices.
By looking at those things, the article offers a new slant on the Nelson story. But it also does much more than just that. It shows how Nelson, the navy, and Trafalgar were all linked to the bigger British political struggle over the future of slavery—a struggle that Nelson’s actions at Trafalgar helped to resolve, albeit in unintended ways.
The article is one product of extensive new research in the History department at the University of Southampton about the Royal Navy and the British Atlantic Empire of the eighteenth century. This has resulted in book that I co-edited with Dr John McAleer, The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World.
‘Nelson’s Dark Side’ is a distillation of my chapter in the book, ‘The Royal Navy, the British Atlantic Empire and the Abolition of the Slave Trade’.
For the BBC History Magazine article, click here.

The title of the book was decided late on. ‘Slavery and Revolution’ was my working title throughout the writing process. But with the manuscript completed, the press wanted a change, and we eventually agreed on White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution. The book, as the title makes clear, is about a slaveholder. But it also about more than that—it seeks to examine British slavery and the late eighteenth-century revolutions that undermined it. Still, it is Simon Taylor, the richest colonial slaveholder of his generation and a prolific letter-writer, who remains the main point of focus. In fact, a big part of what I wanted to achieve was to explain how a man like Taylor was able to perpetuate the world of Caribbean slavery, and how he came to defend it—right down to the last weak scratchings of his pen. Here, I reflect on why White Fury is an appropriate title for a history book about this man, and I add a few thoughts about why I think understanding Taylor’s white fury matters to us in the present.

By the year 1807, Simon Taylor’s anger was running hot. This old white slaveholder was, by then, approaching seventy, and the abolitionist campaign, which he had vehemently opposed since it first began two decades earlier, was on the brink of a major success. After many years of debate, the imperial parliament in London was poised to put an end to the transatlantic slave trade. It pitched Taylor into a state of incandescent fury.
‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ was the slogan of the abolition movement, always accompanied by the image of a kneeling African, begging for help—a message that grabbed imaginations and changed perceptions. And, for a man like Taylor, whose wealth was based on buying, selling, and exploiting enslaved Africans, it was nothing less than a disaster. From his home in the British colony of Jamaica, he had long raged against abolitionists. To him the figurehead of the anti-slave-trade campaign, William Wilberforce, was a ‘hell-begotten imp’, spreading ‘infernal nonsense’. Taylor continually expressed outrage that such a man had misguidedly taken up the interests of ‘negroes’ against those of white colonial slaveholders. Taylor had never been able to understand Wilberforce.
Taylor’s view of empire was built around the principles of white supremacy and white solidarity. To men like him, the only people who could be considered ‘natural born subjects’ of the British Empire, and therefore deserving of its care and protection, were whites; and he considered black people merely as items of property. He struggled to understand how any truly patriotic Briton could see things differently. How could the British public and parliament fail to see that colonial slaveholders were the most precious and useful inhabitants of the empire? How could they prioritise the welfare of black slaves over the interests of their fellow white Britons?
Taylor was born in Jamaica in 1740, into a family of slaveholders and into an empire that seemed to belong to such people. The eldest son of a Kingston merchant, he was packed off to school at Eton before returning to Jamaica in 1760, taking over the family firm, and branching out into the sugar business. He was investing in the most lucrative and dynamic part of the eighteenth-century British imperial economy. Sugar planters were notoriously wealthy, Caribbean sugar was Britain’s most valuable overseas import, and the enslaved Africans whose labour made all of this possible were treated as a disposable resource. Taylor bought and developed three huge plantations—which, like all British sugar estates, were worked by hundreds of enslaved workers, imported to the Caribbean colonies from West Africa via the transatlantic slave trade. He was poised to become one of the richest British sugar planters of his age. He had the world at his feet.
And Taylor prospered, and his influence grew. He was middle-aged by the time that the abolition movement emerged. At first, he saw it as a naïve and sentimental outpouring of emotion that would soon wither, once sensible men of business exposed its absurdity. But by the time he entered his sixties, abolitionism (coupled with revolutionary uprisings by enslaved people throughout the Caribbean) had forced him to accept that the world of plantation slavery that he had worked all his life to sustain was more vulnerable than at any time he could remember. ‘I am glad I am an old man’, he grumbled in a letter to an old friend, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, and confessed he was ‘really sick both in mind & body at scenes I foresee’.
A few years after, on receiving the long-anticipated news that parliament had reached its momentous decision to put an end the slave trade, his reaction was predictable. He felt ‘really crazy’—‘lost in astonishment and amazement at the phrensy which has seized the British nation’. Of course, parliament had only abolished the trade in slaves across the Atlantic. (By the time concrete plans were laid to end slavery itself, Taylor had been dead for two decades.) But the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was, nonetheless, a major political setback for Taylor that dealt a significant blow the wider system of slavery. It might be tempting, then, to view Taylor’s rage as the behaviour of a man failing to come to terms with inevitable, irreversible defeat. Perhaps, we should try to take comfort in the knowledge that Taylor and the world of slavery that he built with such self-confident conviction and defended with such venom are now safely in the past. That, however, would be unjustifiably complacent.
When we look at it carefully, we see that Taylor was angry not because he believed that defeat was certain but because he believed that it could, and should, be averted. And privileged, vocal, outraged men like him can be influential even when major decisions go against them. In the political wrangles over the dismantling of the British slave system, slaveholders won large concessions and retained significant privileges. What is more, the kind of angry reaction to change vocalised by a man like Taylor is not simply a thing of the past. Instead, Taylor’s fear and outrage are often chillingly recognisable. Again and again between his times and ours—through unfinished struggles over emancipation, decolonization, and civil rights—those who have grown up as beneficiaries of white privilege have responded to pressure for equality, increased diversity, and even the most basic of reforms, as though those were types of oppression. Institutionalised racism rooted in colonialism and slavery proves stubborn in the face of challenges, partly because when old white privileges are confronted, indignant white fury—of the sort that Taylor so luridly expressed—is rarely far behind.
Christer Petley
White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution is published by Oxford University Press (£20, ISBN 9780198791638) click here to buy

Hamilton is ‘the musical of the Obama era’, according to Adam Gopnik in a recent article in The New Yorker. It is a story about one of America’s Founding Fathers, brought to the stage via the medium of hip-hop, along with many other modern musical styles—from R&B and soul through to boogie-woogie and Britpop. And it is clear that the show’s prodigiously talented creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is keen to be associated with Obama, and vice versa. Continue reading →

How do we make sense of slavery? How can we represent its legacies? Historians try to do those things through the acts of writing and speaking. But how could the work of bearing witness to the part-hidden histories of enslavement, forced movement, suffering and renewal be transformed by other modes of performance? Mixing the words of a historian of slavery with other types of sound and movement, our ‘Sweet Tooth’ project explores new ways of confronting and feeling a past that continues to groan and shift, restlessly in our present.
Continue reading →

This seems to be a year of multiple anniversaries in British history. If last year was all about the First World War, this year sees the centennial commemorations of Agincourt, Waterloo and Magna Carta, and—of course—of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.
Sir Robert Worcester, chairman of the Magna Carta 800^th Anniversary Committee has called the document signed by King John at Runneymede in June 1215 ‘the foundation of liberty, the end of divine rule by kings’, the foundation ‘of the rule of law, and the beginning of human rights’. It is undeniable that the signing of Magna Carta—part of a process by which the English monarchy tried to make peace with a set of rebellious Barons (landed elites with their own private armies)—was an important moment in English history. It was an episode in which the power of the monarch was questioned, when a king chose to make concessions to his subject. As such it is often interpreted as a part of a process of democratisation—particularly by those who want to see that process as a peculiarly British one. In that vision, the voice of the people against the great and the powerful is heard with increasing force through the centuries and the rights and liberties of the people gradually enshrined into law.
The difficulty, of course, is that the Magna Carta was a limited and temporary agreement in a feudal struggle between elites. Elected parliaments let alone democratic political principles were not yet dreamed of. Those keen to position Magna Carta in the history of the rise and progress of British democracy are, however, inclined simply to ignore such difficulties. Taking issue with troublesome historians and lawyers who have tried to understand Magna Carta in its thirteenth-century context or trace its actual juridical legacy, the Conservative Eurosceptic MP Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that the real significance of Magna Carta lies elsewhere than in the detail: in ‘how important it’s become in our national legend’.
This is a candid admission of how Magna Carta has been referenced and mobilised as part of different British political folklores. Throughout the centuries Magna Carta has carried a heavy symbolic weight in various political narratives—by those resisting royal power, those seeking to extend parliamentary authority, those calling for electoral reform or those defending British legal and political structures from foreign threats (real or perceived). In the eighteenth century, it was a touchstone for abolitionists. For instance, in May 1789, as Wilberforce sat in a friend’s house in the village of Teston, penning his first long speech in Parliament against the slave trade, Hannah More told him that she hoped that Teston would turn out to ‘be the Runnymede of the negroes’—the birth-place of a ‘great charter of African liberty’.[1] Magna Carta has been a symbol of liberty and of Britishness that may be mobilised in in various contexts to do different sorts of political work.
The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica is another event that shoulders a heavy burden of symbolic meaning. And one persuasive way of making sense of the events of 11 October 1865, and of their aftermath, undermines several of the myths surrounding Magna Carta. Morant Bay and the response to it by the British imperial state in Jamaica saw the denial and reversal of English liberties in the Caribbean.
The rebellion began with a march, led by Paul Bogle, a former slave who was a smallholder from the village of Stoney Gut in the hills of the parish of Saint Thomas in the East. This began as a vocal demonstration for the interests of humble labourers and peasants against the oppressive power of the planter class; it ended in a violent clash with the local militia and the murder of several leading white landowners, including the chief magistrate. Extreme dissatisfaction among ordinary Jamaicans with the difficulties of surviving and securing justice in a society that was supposedly free but still profoundly unequal helped to fuel the uprising that spread across eastern Jamaica in the days that followed, before it was brutally repressed by the colonial government under Governor Edward John Eyre. Bogle was among the black Jamaicans tried and executed by a military court.
In the aftermath, the rule of law was denied to the hundreds of victims of arbitrary justice, meted out without due process in the district of the uprising. The victims included George William Gordon, a vocal critic of the governor and of the planters, who Governor Eyre held responsible for inspiring the uprising. Another upshot of the events of October 1865 was that the Jamaican Assembly decided to abolish itself. A representative institution—a local parliament that for two centuries had modelled itself on the House of Commons in England—ceased to exist. White assemblymen feared that a representative legislature provided a platform for black and mixed-race politicians: what had once been seat of white power and for the defence of white colonial liberties, they now perceived as a risk to their privilege and security. Instead, Jamaica was to be ruled until the 1940s as a Crown Colony—directly from London and without a legislature chosen by the local population.
The colonies have, conveniently, often been left out of cosy whiggish legends of British liberty. That particular folklore of political progress is reserved for the British Isles, with the focus squarely on England. But generations of historians, working from different directions and in different traditions, have presented us with a more accurate and broader conception of British history. Notably, J. G. A. Pocock and Bernard Bailyn called on historians to look at linkages between the British Isles and at the British Atlantic world.[2] More recently, Kathleen Wilson and other proponents of the New Imperial history have explored the imperial and global links that forged modern Britain.[3] Catherine Hall—working in that New Imperial mode—has highlighted the stark contrast between the extension of representative politics in Britain (where in 1867 the Second Reform Act doubled the English electorate) and the retreat from representative politics in Jamaica, where racist politics in the aftermath of the Morant Bay Rebellion denied the very rights extended to white Englishmen to black Caribbean men.[4]
This historical work makes the road between Runneymede and twenty-first century political and legal structures look less straightforward, and—perhaps predictably—it underscores the apparent incompatibility—or at the very least the profound tensions—between predominant nationalistic founding myths in Britain and in postcolonial Jamaica.
Those tensions are reflected in the practices of memorialisation—and of forgetting—in the district of the Morant Bay Rebellion in the parish of Saint Thomas. Branching off from the main coastal route in Saint Thomas is a narrow road. About a hundred yards up, before it leads into the mountains, you can turn onto a yet smaller dirt track—single-story homes on one side, an electricity sub-station behind a chain-link fence on the other. There is a rusted car without its wheels; the track opens into a patch of ground too small to call a field. This is where you can find Simon Taylor. A plaque still reads:
Here lie the remains of
the Honourable SIMON TAYLOR:
a loyal Subject, a firm Friend, and an honest Man:
Who after an active Life,
during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest Offices
of CIVIL and MILITARY duty in this island,
died April 14th. 1813,
Aged 73.
The grave stone speaks the truth, in a way, but its overall presentation of the deceased is a lie. It is a ‘white lie’: a set of half-truths that adorn almost any kind of obituary, presenting its subject in a good light—positive qualities and achievements, omitting flaws. It is also a more sinister type of ‘white’ fiction about the natural integrity of Simon Taylor, a leading member of his self-styled ‘master race’, with its loudly proclaimed civilising benevolence, its supposedly inherent ability to govern and rule. There is a bitter contrast between the high-flown words of a pompous epitaph and the life of the man it celebrated.
The grave site is dilapidated, and finding it is not easy. The place is anonymous—unmarked on maps, unmentioned in tourist guides. The plaque that remains formed one part of what was once an impressive monument—an ornamental tomb bearing sculpted images of the family’s coat of arms which were supported by two carved leopards, ‘chained and collared’ with the motto ‘in hoc signo vinces’: in this sign you will conquer.[5]
Taylor was once the richest inhabitant of Jamaica, one of the wealthiest men in the British empire and an extremely influential politician. He dominated the local legislative assembly and helped orchestrate the white Jamaican defence of slavery against the abolitionists in Britain. Subsequent historians have reckoned that he ‘may have exercised greater influence in Jamaica, and for a longer period, than any other individual’. As a sugar planter in Britain’s most important colony, Taylor’s political standing in the British empire bore more weight than that of elites from other colonies. Locally, he was of as much consequence in Jamaica as, say, a man like Thomas Jefferson in Virginia or John Adams in Massachusetts.
Just like Hannah More, Simon Taylor had a sense of the importance of Magna Carta as a touchstone of British liberty, but he saw things very differently to her. Taylor led the parish vestry at Morant Bay, and presided over courts there as Chief Magistrate—the institutions that Bogle and his supporters attacked in October 1865 because they were, in practice, bastions of white privilege, iniquity and injustice. Taylor also served throughout his adult life as a member of the Jamaican Assembly, and, as Jack Greene and others have shown, planters like him were among the most vocal proponents of British liberty.[6] The Jamaican Assembly fought hard in the eighteenth century to assert its power against the crown, the planter historian Edward Long describing it as ‘the epitome of the house of commons’ and the act of 1728 which gave it financial independence as ‘our great charter’.[7]
Planter-politicians from Jamaica were just one part of a transatlantic culture that connected British liberty with Magna Carta—part of an extended polity that needs to be understood, as Steve Pincus has recently argued, ‘not as a nation state with subordinate colonies but as an imperial state’.[8] References to the charter were fundamental to the constitutional debates of the American Revolution, and to the framing of the American Bill of Rights. (It is that association that led to a memorial to Magna Carta at Runnymede, paid for by the American Bar Association). Before and after the American Revolution, British colonial slaveholders invoked Magna Carta—and the principles of British liberty—in their constitutional defence of slaveholding, pointing out, for example, that the Great Charter of 1215 did not apply to feudal serfs and could not therefore be applied to enslaved people: just one of many manoeuvres slaveholders used to try to defend their own liberty while presenting enslaved people as property—as something other than British subjects protected by the rule of law.
Nowadays at Lyssons there is no longer a plantation; no carved leopards; no coats of arms. But the traces that Simon Taylor’s life has left behind, including those half-truths on a marble memorial and the ideas that he and his class mobilised in defence of slavery, are tenacious and nagging reminders of the fact that the planter class and all that they stood for still haunts Jamaica. Taylor is, or was, as Vincent Brown has recently argued, a sort of founding father of modern Jamaica.[9] Yet it is understandable that he is now forgotten there. Memorialising people and events in the landscape typically entails some kind of celebration—and most Jamaicans of the twenty first century feel disinclined to extend this to someone like Simon Taylor, whose main economic achievements were won through the murderous exploitation of enslaved people and whose political endeavours served to defend slavery and its exclusive racial privileges.
In Saint Thomas, Taylor’s old parish, it is instead Paul Bogle who is remembered. At the village of Stoney Gut, up in the hills behind the parish town at Morant Bay, there is a visitor centre and small park dedicated to Bogle’s memory. In 1969, over a century after his death, the government of Jamaica, independent from British rule since 1962, made Bogle one of the first three Jamaican National Heroes—a formal honour in recognition of his role as leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion. A plaque, created and erected by the Jamaica National Trust Commission, near to Bogle’s birth-place in Stoney Gut reads:
HERE
WAS LOCATED THE CHAPEL AND HOUSE OF
NATIONAL HERO, THE
RIGHT EXCELLENT PAUL BOGLE
IT WAS FROM THIS SPOT, ON OCTOBER 11, 1865
THAT DEACON BOGLE LED HIS PEOPLE TO MORANT
BAY TO PROTEST AGAINST THE OPPRESSION OF THE
HUMBLE JAMAICANS BY THE PLANTOCRACY. THIS
MARCH AND SUBSEQUENT EVENTS BECAME KNOWN
AS THE MORANT BAY REBELLION.
During the twentieth century, Bogle emerged as a central part of the Jamaican national myth. He is remembered not only in the parish of Saint Thomas, but across Jamaica, as a standard bearer for the common sort of Jamaicans—black men, women and children like him who were born into slavery or into postemancipation poverty. Bogle is one expression of what Kamau Brathwaite called ‘the collective memory of the people’ within a Caribbean-wide historical narrative of a popular struggle against the plantation system—against the plantocracy—in conflict therefore with men like Taylor and with the things that men like Taylor stood for.[10] As such, the Morant Bay Rebellion works as a sort of Jamaican Magna Carta—a defining or foundational moment in a national legend. Stoney Gut is a site like Runnymede. It symbolises, or stands for, the counter-culture nurtured by ordinary Jamaicans who were prepared to stand up to white oppression.
Simon Taylor and Paul Bogle symbolise two groups that shaped this district—and the wider island—during the nineteenth century: the white plantocracy and the freed people. They are representatives of what Philip Curtin once described as ‘two Jamaicas’—of racist oppression and of black resistance.[11] It is difficult to see how memorialisation of these two groups could be reconciled into a coherent national narrative. Bogle is a popular figure, in both senses of the word. His story resonates with large numbers of people, and he represents, or performs the role of, a surrogate for the masses—for ordinary Jamaicans. Taylor has none of that appeal. To suggest celebrating his contribution to the development of Jamaica would be contentious to say the very least.
Perhaps he is best left where he is. But Taylor and men like him not only made the West Indies, they shaped the modern world. The shadow of the plantation system in the form of racist oppression and inequality (including class division) persists—In Saint Thomas, in Jamaica and across the Atlantic in Britain. To challenge those legacies we need to find a way to remember and make sense of people like Bogle and events like Morant Bay. But we also need to reckon with a man like Taylor—a man who talked a lot about freedom, who believed in the idea of Magna Carta as a foundation for British liberty, but who practiced slaveholding. A critical evaluation of Magna Carta, and of Morant Bay, requires that we shed light on the ideas of those who believed that their freedom rested on the denial of that right to others—part of a process that might help us to understand the roles that both of these iconic events have played in entwined narratives of freedom and resistance on either side of the Atlantic.
Christer Petley, October 2015
 
[1] William Roberts (ed), Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Hannah More (1836) (2 Vols), Vol 1, 432.
[2] J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47/4 (1975): 601-621; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005).
[3] Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2002).
[4] Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002).
[5] J. H. Lawrence-Archer, Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies from the Earliest Date (1875), 297-8.
[6] Greene, J. ‘Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth‐Century West Indies’, Slavery and Abolition 21/1. (2000).
[7] Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774), Vol 1, 11.
[8] Steve Pincus, ‘Reconfiguring the British Empire’, The William & Mary Quarterly 69/1 (2012).
[9] Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008).
[10] Quoted in David Lambert, ‘“Part of the Blood and the Dream”: Surrogation, Memory and the National Hero in the Postcolonial Caribbean’, Patterns of Prejudice 41/3-4 (2007)
[11] Philip Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830-1865 (1968).

Listen to podcasts by Christer Petley, interviewed by Christopher Prior, about slavery in the British Empire, the abolition of the slave trade and the ending of slavery.
We have created these as part of a wider series in response to the choice of Jeremy Paxman’s book, Empire as the book for a University of Southampton initiative designed to encourage staff and students across students to read a book and discuss its themes.
To find out more, click here. While in some ways, this book provides a readable introduction to selected themes in British imperial history, aimed at a popular audience, it’s focus and assertions are also often problematic, as these discussions show:
The first podcast is about the history of slavery:

 
The second is about abolition and emancipation: