Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

That is an important point, because the campaign was not just a parliamentary campaign. Thomas Clarkson played an enormous part in the powerful extra-parliamentary campaign. In a world with so many recording devices of every kind, it is hard for us to imagine a political world without film or photographs, and no documentary of what was happening. The campaigners of the time had to establish facts that had never been nailed down and come up with statistics that no one had ever assembled. They had to persuade people of something that was true even though other people were prepared to say that the opposite was true. People would not have known initially whom to believe, and that makes the scale of the abolitionists’ achievement all the greater.