Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can’t help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight.
Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects, Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba unpick the threads of the history that we never learned in school, revealing the truth of how Britain’s present is bound to a darker past.
Taking us from art galleries to football stands, banks to hospitals, from grand country houses to the backs of our kitchen cupboards, Human Resources is an eye-opening inquiry that gives a voice to the enslaved people who built modern Britain.
This book was inspired by a podcast, also called Human Resources. We wanted to create an accessible entry point into this history, and we thought the best way would be to show people the links between their own lives and the (not so) distant past. So we took modern (or familiar) people, items and companies and explored their direct – or indirect – links to the slave trade. We soon discovered that, far from being a closed historical chapter, the slave trade continues to shape our lives: from the food we eat to the clothes we wear; from the way our workplaces are structured to the financial products we use; from the statues we put up in our towns and museums to the gyms and holiday resorts of our leisure time, the transatlantic slave trade is completely enmeshed with modern life.
However, it still often seems that the subject of slavery is regarded as a Black issue. You can anticipate the familiar eye roll when Britain’s history of slavery is brought up – and those of us who are descendants of slaves are often made to feel as if it’s something we should just move on from and forget. It’s not a history we tell, or which is taught, in any detail in school; knowledge is either assumed or you must seek it out yourself. The nuances of this history are rarely explored in a way that considers the narratives of the enslaved themselves, as opposed to those who bought, sold and exploited them. It’s also a history that is completely divorced from the lives we currently live. This separation comes from the difficulty in acknowledging that many of us now benefit from systems developed within the slave trade – and that slavery still exists today.
Why is this, then? Two things we noticed during our research might provide part of the answer.
There is a lack of Black British historians in the formal academic world, especially among experts in this field, although there have been some positive developments in recent years. Systemic problems in education and academia have a lot to answer for. Black children, particularly those of Caribbean heritage, often find themselves punished and discouraged – and eventually written off – for even minor acts of misconduct such as talking in class, when their white counterparts are given opportunity after opportunity to turn around bad behaviour. An exclusive analysis by the Guardian found ‘exclusion rates for Black Caribbean students in English schools are up to six times higher than those of their white peers in some local authorities’. A report into the underachievement of Black Caribbean students in English schools found that poor leadership on equality issues, a low expectation of Black students and a lack of a diverse workforce were just some of the factors that contributed to poor outcomes for Black Caribbean students. We can’t ignore the fact that Black Caribbean children in the UK may be disconnected from their history, which is why we believe that this book is important as an entry point to the complexities of the past. Systemic biases that see Black students excluded from lessons where they might learn more about their past, and that doubtlessly contribute to fewer of them entering higher education, have certainly played a big part in preventing more of us from knowing about the legacy of slavery. Following the shocking case of ‘Child Q’, a Black child who was strip-searched by police at a Hackney secondary school in 2020, the Children’s Commissioner released a report that found ‘Black children are now four times more likely to be strip-searched compared to the national population figures’. Statistics like these recall the stereotypes used to justify slavery and racial inequality, and the fact that, in the eyes of the authorities, Black people are somehow more violent and less trustworthy than the white population.
For Arisa, being a British Indian historian of race, empire and migration is political, and stakes a claim on a subject that people like her were told was not for them. But the aim of this book is not the uncovering of contentious information. Rather, it hopes to enrich the story of Britain, bringing the whole country, including Scotland, Wales and the North of England, as well as Ireland, into the narrative of how the modern UK was made. The podcast gave us a chance to work with scholars who are women, people of colour and early career researchers from Britain and the US, but also, importantly, from Africa and the Caribbean. A focus of the project was also to speak to community workers, activists and local historians, to diversify the types of historical research typically considered reliable and valid. It has been an honour to highlight such new and innovative research and the fresh stories uncovered by all the incredible people involved.
The other thing we noticed was a squeamishness around how organisations describe their links with the trade, if they disclose them at all. An imaginary border seems to have been established, between indirect and direct involvement in slavery. A direct link would mean that a company or organisation actually owned enslaved people, whereas an indirect one would involve more general financial entanglement – trading merchandise that was produced on plantations, for example. This is frustrating, because it suggests that profiting from slavery at one remove is somehow more acceptable than, say, owning a plantation, and because it seems to gloss over one of the most important reasons why Europe grew vastly richer and more developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – its trade in human beings. In fact, slavery was so fundamental to the way British society then worked that, in many cases, it simply wasn’t possible to separate yourself from it. From factory workers in remote Scottish villages to the politicians, scientists and religious leaders of the time, everyone was involved (and often benefited) in one way or another from slavery. An analogy might be the internet today: you might not work for Apple, Meta or Google, but you wouldn’t be able to get through your day without using their services, and they make life easier, simpler and cheaper than if you were to cut them out entirely. It’s all too easy to ignore the hidden costs of modern life to the environment, to global democracy, or simply to the person who made your smartphone or mined the minerals in your laptop. We have no idea what our luxuries rely on, just as those during slavery pleaded ignorance to the realities of what happened on plantations.
Leaving aside distinctions between direct and indirect involvement, however, we can understand why many people today feel more comfortable speaking about their connections to the trade as long as they are situated firmly in the past. It’s a history that no one wants to be associated with – but it’s one that we have to reckon with. We need to find a way to deal with the discomfort, so that we can truly understand what these traumatic histories represent, and perhaps then begin to dismantle their toxic legacies in the modern day. If we do not, we continue the harm to those whose lives the slave trade destroyed, and we fail to recognise the true consequences of this history for present-day Britain. We are not here to reprimand or condemn companies for their pasts. We’re here to reveal our shared history so that we can properly understand our present and future.
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