Emma Christopher draws attention to this wider, imperial, geo-political structure in her fascinating account of African slaves and white slavers in the early nineteenth century. In 1813, six years after the end of the British Atlantic slave trade, a British naval vessel burst upon an illegal slave-trading operation run by two Britons, Robert Bostock and John McQueen, freed more than two hundred slaves, and arrested the two British slavers and the five African men who had assisted them in preparing slaves for transport across the ocean. The event led, as was common in this period of empire, to a large body of documents that demonstrated the guilt of the two British slavers, both of whom were transported as convicts to the new colony of New South Wales. In addition, the court documents collected numerous firsthand accounts from African factory slaves, notably a remarkable man called Tom Ball, who worked as a factory slave for Bostock at Gallinas in West Africa and who subsequently became a soldier in the Caribbean before returning to settle in Sierra Leone. One of the great virtues of this compelling book is that it contains much testimony from Africans like Ball, giving us the only known account of what work was like in Sierra Leone’s slave factories.

An illustration showing the stowing of slaves on the lower deck of a Guinea-Man cargo ship, 1854, by Andrew Hull Foote (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Christopher’s account is cinematic, which is not surprising: the author is an accomplished filmmaker. But Australian audiences might wonder why this relatively obscure episode should be of interest to them. What does villainy in Africa have to do with colonisation in Australia? Quite a lot, it seems. Christopher is an expert on the African slave trade, having written an important first book, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (2006), on the terrible lives of British sailors caught up in the horror of the Middle Passage. Her next book, A Merciless Place (2010), deservedly prize-winning, brought to light something previously unknown: that the mission to Botany Bay happened in the aftermath of a failed plan to settle British criminals in West Africa. This third book should be read as further confirmation of the ways in which the early history of European colonisation in Australia is inextricably linked to imperialism in Africa and to larger patterns of British involvement – official and unofficial – in an increasingly integrated world. Slavery was crucial to that world. Australia may have been founded without slavery; it is one of our prouder boasts that slavery has always been illegal in Australia since 1788, even if the treatment of non-white people in Australia often verged upon slavery in practice if not in law. But slavery shaped just about everything that the British did in other parts of its late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century empire. One of the main missions of the British navy was to stop slaving expeditions from West Africa. The West Indies remained crucial to imperial prosperity. And, whatever the British government did, many Britons, like Bostock and McQueen, did not accept that engaging in African slavery was all that bad.

Fig. A-H: Various illustrations of different iron hand-cuffs used to fasten the slaves together on slave ships. Fig. K: A manner of stowing in a slave ship. Illustrations from An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria ChildThe accounts of Bostock and McQueen are among the best parts of the book, although the information Christopher has about them is limited. They never come fully to life as flesh-and-blood people. Some of the Africans who testified against Bostock and McQueen are more vividly portrayed. One of the great virtues of Christopher’s book is that she shows that African lives are often more complicated than we imagine, with several of the Africans she describes being implicated in slavery and in its eradication. Sierra Leone was then, and probably is still, a morally complicated place (Christopher has some telling aperçus about life in the vibrant but troubled contemporary West-African nation). There are no heroes in this rollicking story, but there are lots of fascinating villains. What is interesting about the white villains is how limited were the consequences that they faced from their conviction as illegal slave traders. Bostock was sentenced to serve a term of fourteen years’ transportation, but his conviction was relatively quickly overturned as he became a man of substance in Sydney and then in Tasmania. Indeed, Bostock did well enough in Sydney to return to his native Liverpool three years after being sentenced for transportation. The mercantile skills he had learned as a dealer in slaves were highly valued in small antipodean colonies. McQueen worked for Bostock and then became a businessman. He was poised to do very well but died young. Bostock, however, became a wealthy pastoralist. His crimes – which do not seem to have been even considered as such in colonial Australia – were soon forgiven.

Christopher shows that Australia was part of a global world, which included Africa and which was associated with slavery from the start of European settlement. More importantly, she provides a parallel picture of Australian colonies that prospered and an African one, Sierra Leone, which struggled. She doesn’t do more than point out the differences between these places, but readers will speculate why colonies full of white settlers and ones full of black subjects, often fleeing from enslavement in the Caribbean, had such contrasting historical trajectories. Australia is now one of the wealthiest nations on earth; Sierra Leone is one of the poorest. Earlier generations of historians would have attributed such different results to the inherent qualities of the colonists in both places – a racist interpretation, in short. As Christopher argues, the explanation for why colonies succeeded or failed is due to the imperial policies, based on race, that the British followed in developing its empire. Slavery and Africa are more important to colonisation in Australia than we might think.