Though 2007 marks the bicentenary of the British abolition of the slave trade, nobody seems quite sure how to commemorate William Wilberforce's momentous Act. Should we compensate the slaves' descendants as well as apologising to them? And are we in danger of glamorising white abolitionists while ignoring the agonies of ten million Africans transported to the Americas in floating pigsties?
James Walvin is less interested in blame and recrimination for history's wrongs than in the mindsets of those who made it. The Trader, The Owner, The Slave (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) examines the impact of the slave trade on three personalities.
John Newton may have ended up as an evangelical preacher, writing the hymn Amazing Grace while lobbying Pitt the Younger on behalf of 'captive negroes', but he found Jesus while landing human cargo on St Kitt's, taking several years to link his own spiritual agonies with those of the men and women chained in the fetid hold of his ship. Thomas Thistlewood alternated reading Hume,
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Locke and Gibbon in an elegant Jamaican plantation house with regularly raping, beating and torturing his slaves. In his diaries, uninflected by any sense of irony or remorse, notes on gardening and the Edinburgh Review jostle entries such as "Had Derby well flogged and pickled" or "2am. Negro girl at north bedfoot in east parlour".
Walvin's even-handedness avoids demonizing Thistlewood or underestimating the egoism which coloured Newton's change of heart. He is equally dispassionate towards Olaudah Equiano, the slave whose Interesting Narrative of his experiences became an abolitionist classic. Was Equiano, something of a fixer and chancer as a free man in London, a tad economical with the truth about his early life as a tribal prince?
The fallible humanity of these men raises our awareness of 18th-century slavery as a species of commercial addiction. Simply by being the creatures they were, all three of them helped Britons to kick the habit. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 1, 2007
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