From Guinea to Guernsey and Cornwall to the Caribbean: Remembering Slavery in the Western English Channel

‘From Guinea to Guernsey and Cornwall to the Caribbean: Remembering Slavery in the Western English Channel’ synthesises evidence from a wide range of primary and secondary sources concerning slavery and the slave trade in the Western English Channel. It argues that Cornwall and the Channel Islands, despite their special claims to distinctiveness and detachment from the slave trade, were not in fact innocent bystanders, remote from the centres of trade and power, but were instead as fully involved in the slave economy as any other part of the British Isles. It shows that enslaved and free Africans visited both regions, and that Channel Islanders and Cornish people invested in the slave trade, owned slaves, participated on both sides of the abolition debate, and wrote about slavery in a wide variety of literary and other publications. It concludes that the experience of Cornwall and the Channel Islands serves as a powerful reminder that no region or community in Britain had a special exemption from the nation’s imperial project.