Interpreting the Bicentenary in Britain

This article compares historians’ debates about the abolition of the slave trade with the representation of abolition in British public history, including museums, parliamentary debates and newspaper articles. It argues that shifts in the politics of race in Britain since the 1970s led to official institutions such as museums focusing on previously excluded issues such as the resistance of enslaved people, but that some elements of historians’ interests in abolition received little attention. These included the political context of the decision to end the British slave trade, and the impact on Africa of that decision.