Equiano makes frequent references to the Israelites of the Old Testament. In the first chapter, he writes of ‘the strong analogy which … appears to prevail in the manners and customs of my country and those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise’. Later, when first reading the Bible itself, Equiano is struck by the similarity of the Levitical exegeses to the customs of his homeland. The liberation of enslaved Africans seems to him the natural sequel to the exodus from Egypt and the escape from Babylon; just as songs of sweet chariots resounded in the fields of the antebellum South, the victims of British slavery imagined themselves as Israelites awaiting freedom. It was not coincidence that, on the body of Quamina Gladstone, the leader of the 1823 enslaved uprising in Demerara, the British authorities reportedly found a Bible marked at Joshua 8:1: ‘Take all the people of war with you, and rise’.
Equiano's equation of British slaves with the Jews of Exodus also played into the contemporary fashion to imagine Britain itself as the heir of Israel. Handel's oratorios for George II were based on the legends of Esther, Deborah, and Zadok the Priest; pamphleteers celebrated the British victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War as the triumph of the Israelites over the Moabites; and even the radical William Blake wrote of founding a new Jerusalem. Most happily of all, for Equiano these Biblical comparisons could merge in patriotic abolitionism.
EQUIANO AND ECONOMICS
The Narrative contains plenty of nods and winks to the prevailing intellectual fashions of the age. One of these is stadial theory, which was favoured by Equiano's contemporary, the Scottish founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. The theory held that all societies passed through four stages of development, from hunting and gathering through pastoral then arable farming, to commercial trading. This arc is apparent in Equiano's own progress through life.
Economic thinking also finds expression in Equiano's comments on the effects of European commerce. He recognises, for instance, that wars among African nations were often incited ‘by those traders who brought the European goods … amongst us’, and he rues that ‘such a mode of obtaining slaves in Africa is common’. The economic imbalance to these transactions was palpable: ‘When a trader wants slaves’, Equiano continues, ‘he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary if … he accepts the price of his fellow creatures’ liberty with as little reluctance as the enlightened merchant’.
Equiano wrote to the President of Britain's Board of Trade to encourage the extension of its imperial market into Africa, and the closing passages of the Narrative explore the possibility of ‘legitimate commerce’ acting as an economic means of eradicating the slave trade. If British merchants would trade in African manufactures and not in people, the thinking went, the prime incentive to enslave would dissipate. ‘A commercial intercourse with Africa’, Equiano writes, ‘opens an Inexhaustible source of Wealth to the manufacturing Interest of Great Britain; and to all which the slave trade is an objection.’ In other words, Equiano was a promoter of free trade; his own activity as a trader had helped him buy his freedom.
Finally, there is also in the Narrative more than a hint of the Smithian economics that would inform Thomas Malthus's ideas about economics and population: ‘If the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country’, Equiano says, ‘they would double themselves every fifteen years’.
THE NARRATIVE'S IMPACT
Initial reviews of the Narrative in the British periodical press – the great engine of enlightened public discourse – were mixed.
The Monthly Review of June 1789 believed that the work of ‘this very intelligent African’ was well calculated to ‘increase the odium that has been excited against the West-India planters’. Yet the reviewer cannot quite believe that an African was capable of writing a book: ‘It is not improbable that some English writer has assisted him in the compilement of his book; for it is sufficiently well-written’. The General Magazine and Impartial Review praised the text's ‘truth and simplicity’, finding that ‘the author's account of the manners of the natives of his own province [was] interesting and pleasing’.
Several reviewers agreed that Equiano's meditations on Christianity were weak and, frankly, boring, and among them was the radical philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. Writing under a pseudonym in the Analytical Review, she finds Equiano's descriptions of brutality so powerful as to ‘make the blood turn in its course’. Yet she also finds ‘the long account of his religious sentiments and conversion to methodism quite tiresome’. Wollstonecraft concludes that ‘a few well written periods’ could not elevate the Narrative beyond the ordinary: Equiano's volumes did ‘not exhibit extraordinary intellectual powers’, and merely placed him ‘on a par with the general mass of men, who fill the subordinate stations in a more civilised society than that which he was thrown into at birth’. In the same vein, Richard Gough in the Gentleman's Magazine concluded that the second volume of the Narrative, which begins after Equiano's manumission and often devolves upon his spirituality, was ‘uninteresting, and his conversion to methodism oversets the whole’.
Notwithstanding the critics, the Narrative sped through ever more editions on both sides of the Atlantic, and the sympathetic elements of the public hailed Equiano as a political and literary hero; in Ireland alone, one edition sold 1900 copies on the back of a wondrously well received speaking tour. (Over 50 years later, the Irish would give a similarly rapturous reception to the formerly enslaved American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.)
This is not to say that the Narrative conferred immediate political benefits on the abolitionist cause. Despite the promise offered by the Dolben's Act of 1788, which imposed the first regulations upon the British slave trade, Wilberforce's efforts to advance abolitionist legislation through Parliament failed repeatedly between 1791 and 1793. There were powerful interests still arrayed in support of slavery, and many in British society were profiting from it. People also felt sympathy for the British Caribbean planters trying to make a living. And when the French Revolutionaries executed Louis XVI and declared total war on monarchist Europe, any political reform which spoke of equality or liberty – let alone fraternity with Africans – was doomed to failure. Indeed, as Pitt the Younger's Tories enacted a series of repressive conservative laws, Equiano himself fell under suspicion both as a member of the radical London Corresponding Society and as a friend of its founder, Thomas Hardy.
AFTERMATH AND LEGACY
As the French Revolution convulsed Europe and delayed progress towards abolition for almost fifteen years, Equiano – enriched by his literary success – settled into domestic life. In 1792, he married Susannah Cullen of Soham, Cambridgeshire, and he became father to two daughters: Anna Maria and Joanna. Tragically, this homely tranquillity would not last. Susanna died in 1796, and Equiano would not long survive her: living in apartments close to London's Tottenham Court Road, he died on 31 March 1797. The death of his elder daughter left Joanna as Equiano's sole heir, and upon her twenty-first birthday she inherited £950, an estate approaching £100,000 in today's money.
Yet Equiano would leave a much grander legacy. In 1807, the British Parliament at last passed the Slave Trade Act, but it was only the start of slavery's abolition. Indeed, in the 1820s, abolitionists and slaveholders fought ferociously over the future of slavery, and Equiano was cited as a key witness in the case for emancipation. As one correspondent of the Mirror Monthly Magazine put it, Equiano had ‘distinguished [himself] as a literary character in this country in modern times’.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 further vindicated Equiano, but his greatest legacy is arguably in the United States. His Narrative created a literary template,