CORNWALL AND SLAVERY

The history of slavery makes uncomfortable reading, but it is best that we face the realities of the past.

In Cornwall, as everywhere else in the eighteenth century Britain, there were families whose wealth came from Caribbean slave plantations, and a few who were directly involved in slave trading. There were also abolitionists, and those who resisted abolition.

This book is an attempt to understand how and why such an evil could exist for so long, scarcely questioned even by the Church, but it also introduces individuals - an Penryn schoolboy who (like hundreds of other Cornish people) was captured by 'Barbary pirates' and enslaved for 23 years in North Africa; the former slave Olaudah Equiano whose autobiography and lecture tours were an inspiration to the abolition movement; and Joseph Emidy from Guinea, who became leader of the Truro Philharmonic Orchestra.