Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2024. How does it feel to be shortlisted and what would winning mean to you?
In a word: stunned! I’ve followed the Wolfson History Prize for years and have always been in awe of the fantastic books that are shortlisted. To have my book included alongside such work is a real honour and a privilege. This is my first book, and I really wanted it to be deeply researched, but also written for a general audience. So being shortlisted for a prize that recognises those qualities is fantastic. Winning the prize would be a massive shock given the quality of the other books in the shortlist. If I did win, it would be a fantastic recognition of the work that I put into researching and writing book; bringing the book together has taken fifteen years and three international moves. Winning the prize would also enable me to take my children to New Zealand for the first time, the place where this book all began! Whether I win or not, though, I’m just very happy to be included in the shortlist.
What was the inspiration behind Traders in Men?
The genesis for Traders in Men started in New Zealand back in 2008. After emigrating there in 2004 I’d given up a short-lived career in accountancy to instead read history at Victoria University of Wellington. I was inspired by the teaching at Vic to study the slave trade and decided to write a master’s thesis on the topic. I employed my accounting skills to examine the ledgers and letters of Liverpool slave trader William Davenport. I became fascinated by slave trading merchants and decided to study them further for my PhD thesis, which I wrote at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. For the PhD, I broadened my view beyond Britain to also study slave traders in Africa and the Americas. By looking at slave traders across the Atlantic, I noticed remarkable similarities in their backgrounds, motivations, and strategies. I also read a slew of excellent recent histories that reconstructed the experience of captive Africans within the slave trade. That work really helped me think through how the business decisions of the merchants that I’d been studying shaped the slave trade and, with it, the lives of their millions of victims.
What does the research process look like for you? What were the key milestones along the way?
The research process for this book has really been split in two phases: one before I had children, and one after. When I was a PhD student, I had the time to collect the papers of Atlantic slaving merchants via several lengthy visits to archives in the UK and the US. On returning from these trips, I’d laboriously transcribe the merchants’ letters and then work through their accounts using Excel. Pulling all this material into a book was a drawn-out process. I decided early in the process that I wanted to write a book with a big argument with a wide appeal. Accomplishing that took me five years, during which time I moved back to the UK to start an academic position at Lancaster University. Both of my daughters were born while I worked on this book, and so many of the milestones for Traders in Men were around them: I sent the completed manuscript to the press the night before my first daughter was born, and completed the in the weeks following my second daughter’s birth. Becoming a dad has been fantastic, but it has certainly changed how I research and write history!
Why do you feel it is important to celebrate history writing?
‘The past is a foreign country’ is a well-worn phrase, but it captures well the excitement that can be gleaned from reading history: discovering the differing ideas, cultures, and societies of people in the past, and imagining the different environments in which they lived. The best history writing can hence capture the joys of travel, and the broadening of the mind that comes with it. Pulling together disparate sources dug out through laborious archival research into a book that immerses readers in the past is incredibly painstaking, though. So, it is important that we celebrate that work, be it through prizes like the Wolfson History Prize or through book reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations to fellow readers.
The Wolfson Foundation awards grants to a wide variety of museums, historic buildings and landscapes. Do you have a favourite historical place, or a place that has inspired you?
While I was in the process of writing Traders in Men I was fortunate to visit Ghana, which was formerly one of the linchpins of Britain’s enormous slave trade. While there, I travelled down the coast to Cape Coast Castle, an imposing slaving fort that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Seeing the castle really brought to life the history that I had spent so long researching: the stark contrast between the lavish accommodations of the slave traders above ground and the dank prisons for the slaves below, the ‘door of no return’ marking the portal between African and New World slavery, and the sea stretching off to the distance, where British slave ships would have anchored.
