To the London Museum in Docklands for a bit of research on the history of the docks for my forthcoming online talk.
The museum’s building is Grade I listed, being the former “No. 1 Warehouse” of West India Quay. From 1997 to 2020 there stood outside the warehouse a statue of Robert Milligan, the driving force behind the construction of the West India Docks.
The statue is now in storage. A wooden box covers the plinth on which it stood (see below).
Milligan made his money from the buying and selling of enslaved Africans, and from the labour of enslaved people working in his Jamaican sugar plantations. The West India Docks were built for the trade from the British West Indies – primarily sugar – this trade almost entirely dependent on slavery.
The “triangle trade” took goods to Africa where they were exchanged for the human cargo that was transported (in literally inhuman conditions) to the Americas, where the products of the plantations were then shipped back to Europe. It is estimated that over 12.5 million people were victims of this traffic, with close on 2 million of these not surviving the “middle passage”, the journey across the Atlantic.
Britain – and particularly London – were big players in this trade, deriving huge financial benefits. Between 1640 and 1807 British ships are thought to have carried over 3 million men, women and children to our Caribbean colonies and to other countries in the Americas, and London was the fourth most important slave trading port in the world.
The profits from the slave trade and the goods produced by enslaved labour made the merchants directly involved (such as Milligan) very rich, but also profited banks, insurance companies, shipbuilders and others. Some of our most venerable financial institutions filled their coffers from the trade. “An incalculable proportion of London’s wealth, business and buildings was founded on the profits of slavery.” says the Museum.
We, as a nation, tend not to reflect on our historical role in this appalling inhumanity, preferring to focus on the 1807 Act that prohibited the slave trade in the British empire. This came about after a decades-long campaign by parliamentarians, particularly Wilberforce and Clarkson, and the writings of freed slaves such as Equiano and Cugoano, but behind the moral arguments economic motives also played a part. Contemporary economists argued that slavery was inefficient, and free labour and free trade would encourage commercial development.
And although the Act abolished the slave trade in the empire (and resulted in the Royal Navy stopping slave ships in the seas off the west coast of Africa) it didn’t stop the ownership of slaves, with slavery continuing until the Abolition Act of 1833. After this act there was a £20 million compensation package (about £17 billion in today’s money) paid to the slave owners (over 1,000 of whom were London based). Newly freed people receiving nothing, and in fact were forced into a period of ‘apprenticeship’ that tied them to the plantations for several more years.
This is the context for the removal of Milligan’s statue, which had been re-erected on the quayside in front of Warehouse No. 1 in 1997 (it was previously at various gates to the Dock, and had been out of sight in storage since 1943). One doesn’t have to be “woke” (the insult of choice of the semi-thinking right) to believe that we should not be honouring a man who profited from this disgraceful traffic, and anyone interested in history should be educating themselves in the full culpability of Britain in the trade.
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