On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery, was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a trial lasting just under five hours, he was found not guilty.
This book is a micro-history of this important trial, reconstructing it from accounts of what was said in court and setting it in the context of pro- and anti-slavery movements. Rogers considers contemporary questions of culpability, the use and abuse of evidence, and why Kimber was criminally indicted for murder at a time when kidnapped Africans were generally regarded as 'cargo'. Importantly, the book also looks at the role of sailors in the abolition debate: both in bringing the horrors of the slave trade to public notice and as straw-men for slavery advocates, who excused the treatment of enslaved people by comparing it to punishments meted out to sailors and soldiers. The final chapter addresses the question of whether the slave-trade archive can adequately recover the experience of being enslaved.
NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at York University, Toronto.
Industry Reviews
This was the cold and callous pragmatism that informed so much of British imperial policy; there was no room for sentiment here, and this is the world that Rogers exposes in recounting the death of a teenage girl. It is this history - and not the triumphalist accounts of abolition and later emancipation - that we must heed; it is this history that reveals the darker, shameful, but essential truths of our imperial past. * GUARDIAN *
In this absorbing book, distinguished social historian Nicholas Rogers uses the 1792 trial
of Captain John Kimber for the murder of a young woman on board Recovery [...] Rogers honors this thoughtful, respectful refusal to project his own politics onto victims of slavery who are silent in the archive, instead building a world around the murder case while drawing attention to the silence at its center. * JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY *
Roger's well-written forensic account of a notorious murder on a slave ship is much more than a case study. It is an important revelation about the very nature of slave trading and the first flush of British abolition. Here is a micro-history exposing the wider realities of Atlantic slavery. JAMES WALVIN is Professor emeritus of History at the University of York and author and editor of over thirty books including Freedom: The Overthrowing of the Slave Empires, Sugar: The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity and Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits. * . *
This work will benefit the field for years to come. . . . This microhistory allows readers a deeper understanding of not only the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, but further of how a ship's crew was held to ship's standards even within the perimeter of a port city. By doing so, Rogers demonstrates a glimpse into the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. -- Jane Plummer * The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord *
