A fisherman in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa. By the 1850s, many of the charges brought by Sancho had been dealt with: slavery was ended in the British Empire at any rate, and the repeal of the Navigation Acts and the Corn Laws had liberalised British trade. Sadly, despite the tireless efforts of reformers the people-trafficking, arms deals and lack of honest free trade which so dismayed Sancho are still with us.
Introduction
In 1778, Ignatius Sancho (1729-1782) wrote a letter to Jack Wingrave, son of his friend John, a London bookseller. Jack’s experiences in Bombay had prejudiced him against the locals, but Sancho reminded him that Britain had promised her colonies free trade and Christian principles, and given them neither.
I AM sorry to observe that the practice of your country* (which as a resident I love and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes—prayers, and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East—West Indies, and even on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators, indeed of all Christian navigators, is money, money, money; for which I do not pretend to blame them.
Commerce was meant, by the goodness of the Deity, to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part, to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love, society, and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace, with the commodities of his respective land. Commerce, attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched at.*
Ignatius’s feelings towards his adopted country were a mix of affectionate gratitude (he was a strong monarchist, who opposed the American Revolution) and a nagging sense of alienation, repeatedly stirred by being an object of open wonder and frequent scorn. Yet he was very much an active citizen, and in his circle a popular one. He campaigned tirelessly in the press against slavery, under the name ‘Africanus’, and made friends among Britain’s political and literary establishment from Charles Fox, later the Foreign Secretary, to actor David Garrick and violinist Felice Giardini. He is believed to have been the first black person to vote in a British Parliamentary election (twice in 1774 and again in 1780), and to receive an obituary in a newspaper.
Sancho thus anticipated by half a century the slogan ‘Christianity, commerce, civilisation’ made popular by two great Christian anti-slavery campaigners of a later generation, Fowell Buxton and David Livingstone.
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