called Success, where the uprising began.
The second character is John Smith, a white missionary from
Britain, who found himself in a situation he didn’t like in Demerara.
Over the years he was there with his wife, Jane, he kept an almost
daily diary, expressing his feelings about events in the colony.
Next is John Cheveley, who ended up in Demerara almost by
happenstance. His family back in Britain was quite poor, he was
unemployed and, as the eldest son, felt a responsibility to make
money. Like so many British people, he saw Demerara as an economic
opportunity, and ended up there working as a store clerk. Later, he
was conscripted into the militia tasked with suppressing the uprising.
Extraordinarily, his memoir survived, revealing his emotional
response to what happened – his alarm and disgust at the brutal
suppression of the uprising by the British militia.
The fourth person is John Gladstone, the largest owner of enslaved
people in the colony. As well as being the father of the future prime
minister William Gladstone, he was one of the leading voices of the
West India Association – a lobby group for traders and importers of
commodities from the West Indies. So he had a political role back in
Britain and was at the centre of the fight to stop abolition.
Telling a story through four characters, you get four points of view
that often don’t agree with one other, which makes things all the more
interesting. It also requires an enormous amount of original material- memoirs, letters, newspaper articles. After the uprising there were
hearings, in which the colonists prosecuted those who took part. I was
extremely lucky to have court transcripts containing dialogue. That
really helped bring the story to life, and offered an enslaved person’s
perspective, which is incredibly rare.
How and why did the enslaved people decide to launch
the uprising?
Jack Gladstone’s motivation was to abolish slavery. I chose to call him
an “enslaved abolitionist” rather than a “rebel” or “insurrectionist”,
because that felt like a better reflection of his agency and decision
making. He was a considered and intelligent man, who wanted to
bring about change in the colony. And crucially, he wanted this
change to be achieved in a non-violent way.
For Jack, the key factors in triggering the uprising were the horrific
conditions. But he’d also heard of other rebellions – the Haitian
revolution, about 20 years earlier, and uprisings in Jamaica, Barbados
and the USA. He would pick up news of these events from newspa-
pers, from his friends who worked in the governor’s office, or at the
docks where he delivered barrels and hogsheads.
I assumed, wrongly, before starting my research that the uprising
was spontaneous – an instinctual response. But in fact it took a lot ofINTERVIEW / THOMAS HARDING
“The suppression of the Demerara
uprising is a stain on British history”
THOMAS HARDING speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his new account of a rebellion of
enslaved people in 1823, which elicited a brutal response from the colonial authorities
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Ellie Cawthorne: In 1823, the British colony of Demerara was
the scene of a huge slave uprising. Where was Demerara and
what was the situation there in the early 19th century?
Thomas Harding: Before I started looking at this story, I only
knew the name “Demerara” from the sugar that I put in my tea.
It’s the country we now call Guyana, just to the east of Venezuela,
with a northern edge on the Atlantic coast. Even though it’s part of
South America, it considers itself part of the Caribbean.
In the 1820s, Demerara was a relatively new British colony, known
for the incredible productivity of its slave-worked sugar plantations.
There were about 90,000 people living there, around 2,000 of whom
were European colonists, with a similar number of mixed-race people.
There was a small indigenous population, but the vast majority of the
population – around 70,000 – were enslaved. Most had been captured
and transported in that generation, so they still remembered life in
Africa. The majority worked on the sugar plantations along
Demerara’s north Atlantic coast.
Due to growing consumer demand back in Europe, these planta-
tions reaped enormous profits. But life in Demerara was barbaric,
partly because of how hard it was to grow, cultivate and process sugar,
all of which would be done on the plantations. The enslaved labourers
would work through the night, especially in the boiling houses. The
conditions were horrific; life expectancy was as low as five years.
It’s important to remember that the 1823 slave uprising in Deme-
rara happened after the British parliament abolished the slave trade in- Growing up, I was taught about Brit-
ain’s supposed role as the “great emancipa-
tors”. But I was never taught that slavery
continued after 1807. It wasn’t until 1834,
more than two decades later, that a second act
to abolish slavery in the empire came into
force. In that intervening period, slavery and
the slave trade continued in colonies like
Jamaica, Barbados and Demerara.
You tell the story of the uprising through
the experiences of four real people. Can
you introduce us to them?
The first person who I follow, Jack Gladstone,
was a leader of the uprising, along with his
father, Quamina. Thought to be in his 20s at
the time, Jack had been born in Demerara
(his grandmother Tonisen had been
transported from Africa by the British). He
was an enslaved cooper on a plantationWhite Debt: The
Demerara Uprising
and Britain’s
Legacy of Slavery
by Thomas Harding
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
320 pages, £20)ON THE