“The suppression of the Demerara uprising is a stain on British history”

THOMAS HARDING speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his new account of a rebellion of enslaved people in 1823, which elicited a brutal response from the colonial authorities

-  Ellie Cawthorne

PROFILE

Thomas Harding

is a bestselling author and journalist. His books include The House by the Lake: A Story of Germany (Penguin Random House, 2015), and Hanns and Rudolf (Penguin Random House, 2013), which won the JQ-Wingate Prize for Non-Fiction

Ellie Cawthorne: In 1823, the British colony of Demerara was the scene of a huge slave uprising. Where was Demerara and what was the situation there in the early 19th century? Thomas Harding: Before I started looking at this story, I only knew the name “Demerara” from the sugar that I put in my tea. It's the country we now call Guyana, just to the east of Venezuela, with a northern edge on the Atlantic coast. Even though it's part of South America, it considers itself part of the Caribbean.

In the 1820s, Demerara was a relatively new British colony, known for the incredible productivity of its slave-worked sugar plantations. There were about 90,000 people living there, around 2,000 of whom were European colonists, with a similar number of mixed-race people. There was a small indigenous population, but the vast majority of the population - around 70,000 - were enslaved. Most had been captured and transported in that generation, so they still remembered life in Africa. The majority worked on the sugar plantations along Demerara's north Atlantic coast.

Due to growing consumer demand back in Europe, these plantations reaped enormous profits. But life in Demerara was barbaric, partly because of how hard it was to grow, cultivate and process sugar, all of which would be done on the plantations. The enslaved labourers would work through the night, especially in the boiling houses. The conditions were horrific; life expectancy was as low as five years.