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In last of "New Yorker Nights" series, David Remnick interviews superdon Simon Schama
What would motivate an historian known for his works on European art and the French revolution to turn his attention to the founding of the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the struggle to abolish slavery? That was the question New Yorker editor David Remnick posed to Columbia history and art history professor Simon Schama in a discussion of the latter's most recent book, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco Press, 2006).
Remnick talked with Schama at Miller Theatre on April 25 ( audio ), during the last of " New Yorker Nights," a series hosted by the CU Arts Initiative and The New Yorker that featured interviews with leading thinkers such as Oliver Sacks and writer Malcolm Gladwell.
Schama replied that he'd been inspired not by a single event but a chain of events, beginning with a memorial service he attended in New York for British victims of the 9/11 attacks.
The service, he said, at once reawakened his scholarly passion for British history and filled him with the desire to explore the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain in a way that would be neither clichéd nor sentimental.
He then recalled a conversation he'd once had with an erudite British consul, who told him about how, during the American Revolution, the British had offered freedom to any black slaves who could make it to British lines -- an offer that tens of thousands of slaves accepted.
But fighting for the crown was just the beginning of what would prove a long and ultimately tragic odyssey, Schama's source had informed him. After the revolution, the British refused to return the escaped blacks to their masters -- an act of kindness that would later give rise to the belief among African Americans like Frederick Douglass that the British were less racist than the Americans.
At the same time, however, the British also reneged on their promise to reward the "black loyalists" with land for their service, relegating them to a life of destitution in Nova Scotia.
Eventually, with the help of a couple of British abolitionists, one group of freed slaves went to England and the other to West Africa. The latter had the good fortune of being on board a ship captained by the extraordinary naval officer John Clarkson -- a man so humane, Schama said, that he tried to ensure that the voyage would not remind his passengers of their terrible experiences during the Middle Passage, in slave ships from Africa to America.
Clarkson's group founded Freetown (today the capital of Sierra Leone), intended by the abolitionists, like neighboring Liberia, to provide former slaves with a place where they could once again be their own masters. But in one of history's many ironies, the ambitions of the freed slaves' descendants came to clash with the aims of imperial Britain.
Noting that this is not the first time Schama has asked uncomfortable questions about historical events, Remnick said he was reminded of his own experiences living in Moscow in the late 1980s, during the rewriting of history and the dismantling of official Soviet narratives. He asked how Schama would define the role of the historian and the effect of the historian's craft on politics.
Schama said he was inspired early in his career to see history writing as a civic craft, in which scholarly and public roles are not strictly separated. For Schama, historians should be "enemies of self-congratulations" -- an unsparingly self-critical view of one's own history, he believes, is what ultimately guarantees freedom. |
