As I was born in England almost seventy-five years ago, I may be a victim of romanticized school narratives of our “island story”. So I was surprised by three sentences in Pratinav Anil’s review of Nigel Biggar’s Reparations and The Big Payback by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder (January 23). To quote: “The abolition of slavery in 1833 was also a grudging concession … by that time Argentina, Chile, Colombia, France (for a while), Haiti, Mexico, Peru and the northern United States had already abolished slavery. Britain was … rather late to the moral party”. I decided to check the facts.
Let us proceed, like Anil, in alphabetical order. Argentina – which was founded in 1816 and only assumed its modern name about fifty years later – abolished slavery in its first constitution of 1853, not before. Chile declared its independence from Spain in 1818 and formally abolished slavery in 1823, but Afro-Chileans – mostly domestic servants – numbered only about 4,000 at the time. (Chile had no plantation agriculture.) Colombia abolished slavery in 1851, but the measure took effect only on January 1, 1852, after a civil war caused by opposition from conservative landowners.
France is awkward, as the revolutionaries in Paris abolished it in 1794, but slavery came back under Napoleon in 1802 and it was only definitively brought to an end in 1848. Of course, Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) had its slave rebellion against France, beginning in 1791, to which the decision made in 1794 was related. It is plainly a special case.
Mexico abolished slavery in decrees of 1829 and 1837, resulting in another civil war. This was not in Mexico as a whole, but in Texas, with the tensions eventually culminating in the absorption of Texas by the US and the consequent continuation of slavery there. Slavery in Peru was formally abolished in 1854.
In qualification, a common pattern in the Latin American countries was the passage of “free wombs” laws in the 1810s and 1820s. The meaning of these laws was that the children of slaves would not themselves be slaves and, on reaching adulthood, would be free citizens. So slavery would disappear over a generation or two. But, where slavery was particularly significant – in plantation-based economies in and around the Caribbean – living conditions for enslaved mothers (and hence their children) were appalling. According to one academic paper, infant mortality was “staggeringly high”, being 80 per cent for under-fives.
Sure enough, the northern United States had abolished slavery formally by 1804, but practice took some time to catch up with the legal position. The census of 1840 reported a few thousand people still in bondage, mostly in New Jersey. But to cite the US at all in this context is odd. Everyone knows that the southern states kept slavery until the American Civil War and enforced vicious discrimination for decades afterwards.
I will remain a victim of those romanticized school narratives of our “island story”, which – perhaps naively – I will always regard as very wonderful.
Tim Congdon
Huntley, Gloucestershire
Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’
Michael Tilby (Letters, February 6) highlights the existence of a stage actress known as “Mlle Jeanne” who was active in 1859, and suggests that she is the same woman as the photographed subject of my article (Commentary, January 23). He contends, moreover, that this woman could not, therefore, be Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s long-term mistress and muse.
In fact, the archives show that there were several actresses known as Jeanne/ Mlle Jeanne working in the Paris theatres around the 1860s. What makes the card portraits of August 1862 unusual is not the name assigned to them, and not just their visual plausibility (lacking from the image identified by Professor Tilby), but also their separate, highly suggestive links to two paintings by Manet produced in the same year (and even, it seems, around the same time of year). One of these two paintings is widely believed to be a portrait of Jeanne Duval. Also, the costumes and poses in the photographic portraits of 1862 are not obviously destined for the stage, which differentiates them from those adopted in the vast majority of actor/actress cartes de visite of the time, including the one highlighted by Professor Tilby. A more detailed, peer-reviewed version of my argument will be published in due course in the journal French Studies.
Maria C. Scott
University of Exeter
Homo Criminalis
Peter Geoghegan’s review of Homo Criminalis by Mark Galeotti (November 28, 2025) tackles a large subject, but leaves out some key elements and even successes of criminal behaviour. According to Fernand Braudel, the great French historian of early modern commerce, owing to the built-in potential profit from avoiding tariffs, sanctions and other trade regulations, smuggling has historically constituted a substantial proportion of international trade, for instance, between Britain and France, Britain and the fledgling US, all European trade with Spanish America and trade in Tsarist Russia. Without the built-in profit, it was hard to organize international or even inter-provincial trade in times before safer ships, trains, telegraph or other faster forms of communications. Braudel thought the built-in profit accounted for substantial proportions of world trade even in recent years. Taking into account cocaine, Russian oil, knock-offs, cryptocurrency and other money laundering, bribery and the slave trade, it may still. At a meeting of the WTO in October 2015, members were told that illicit trade accounted for 8–15 per cent of global GDP. Apparently crime does pay, or at least boosts margins.
Geoghegan discusses the refounding of the US Navy to fight the Barbary pirates. The US Navy was founded in 1775, but played a relatively small role in the Revolutionary War and was closed down after the war. American privateers during the Revolutionary War were more active than the tiny US Navy, and the British characterized the privateers as pirates. This privateering/piracy was an important part of the growth of the US insurance industry, which used the premiums paid by privateers to fund George Washington’s army. One man’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. It depends on who wins.
John Maynard Keynes, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), states that the proceeds of Francis Drake’s illegal capture of a Spanish galleon was the foundation of the British Empire, paying off the kingdom’s debt and leaving £40,000. (Keynes’s concern was more the magic of compounded interest – he said that the proceeds, invested at 3.25 per cent compounded, would now be worth as much as all of British investment overseas at the height of the Empire.) Had the Spanish Armada met with greater success, Drake (and Elizabeth I) might have been hanged as pirates. From the early days of Rome, offices were bought and leadership succession depended on murder – both criminal activities; nonetheless, the Roman Empire created many of the benchmarks of the civilization we know now, including a legal system that characterizes some activities as criminal. The current flourishing of international crime is less favourable to universal flourishing.
James Kardon
Scarsdale, NY
Constable’s reputation
Although he didn’t explicitly compare Turner with Constable (see Ferdinand Mount’s review of the exhibition at Tate Britain, January 9, and Letters, January 23 and February 6), the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, in his essay “Constable, Courbet and de Chirico” (1947), had some provocative things to say about Constable’s reputation as Britain’s favourite landscape painter. Pivoting his argument on the distinctly fatuous remark made by the president of the Royal Academy regarding “Stratford Mill”, which had recently been bought for £43,000, and which he called “without exaggeration, the world’s best landscape”, Grigson strongly challenged Constable’s value as a painter of nature. According to him, Courbet, whose depictions of humans in natural surroundings have a visionary power, and de Chirico, whose symbolism exerted a powerful spiritual force on the human imagination, were vastly superior to Constable, whose aim was merely to show the effect of the natural landscape on his own heart.
According to Grigson, when we examine a Constable, be it an oil sketch or a large landscape such as “Stratford Mill”, what we are looking at is an artist expressing a sentimental attachment to his version of nature. “His was a feeble romanticism of the pathetic fallacy”, Grigson wrote. “He is in his pictures in a way Courbet is not to be found in the grain of that vision of nature which he realized.” A Constable landscape does not penetrate beyond the limited imagination of the artist in transcribing what was around him. He wouldn’t have understood, for instance, the need for Turner to travel widely abroad in search of landscapes on which his imagination could feed. Admittedly, Constable did not only paint scenes around Dedham Vale, but even when he travelled further afield in Britain, his dedication to faithfully recording “dead nature” with an “easy sentiment” is painfully obvious to anyone acquainted with, for example, the work of a visionary such as his contemporary Samuel Palmer.
Grigson was writing at a time when the praise for “Stratford Mill” reflected the undimmed popularity of Constable’s landscapes among the general populace. Blake said it all when he pronounced that “What is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act”. “It is because Constable can be made explicit”, Grigson concluded, “because he lacks grandeur that, in our day, he is so much aggrandized.”
R. M. Healey
Melbourn, Cambridgeshire
Lithuania
Larry Wolff, in his review of Lithuania: A history by Richard Butterwick (February 6), mentions that Franklin D. Roosevelt “still recognized” Antanas Smetona as President of Lithuania at his death in 1944. He was not alone in continuing to recognize Lithuanian institutions after the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states in 1940. Diplomats accredited to the UK continued to appear in the London Diplomatic List under the heading: “List of persons no longer included in the foregoing list but still accepted by His [later Her] Majesty’s Government as personally enjoying certain diplomatic courtesies”.
The last survivor, Vincas Balickas, had been appointed to the Lithuanian legation in London as commercial counsellor in 1938 and became chargé d’affaires in 1967 on the death of the prewar minister plenipotentiary. After the end of the Cold War and UK recognition of renewed Lithuanian independence, Balickas was appointed the first Lithuanian ambassador to London in October 1991, and presented his credentials to the Queen in July 1992, formally a year later.
Mark Etherton
London W2
Sillitoe and Fainlight
I read with interest Michael Caines’s piece on the sale of “association copies” of books from the shared library of Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight (Commentary, February 6).
Alan and Ruth were joint presidents of Bromley House Library in Nottingham at the time of Alan’s death in 2010, and we subsequently received a collection of books from their holiday-home library, along with a small number of maps – a Sillitoe passion. While of less intrinsic value than the contents of the forthcoming auction, the collection offers a unique insight into the writers’ reading lives. Many books are inscribed by the giver, some are gifts to and from the couple themselves, and the various bookmarks, notes, letters (from friends, fellow writers and publishers) and other ephemera they contained have been added to our catalogue, which anyone can search in the Bromley House Library Catalogue online.
More recently, the stepson of Alan’s late brother Brian donated a substantial collection of first editions, some in translation, of Alan’s books, and his joint publications with Ruth, inscribed and signed by the authors. Growing the Sillitoe archive, and encouraging exploration of and responses to it, is a key element of the library’s commitment to celebrate and amplify his work and his contribution to Nottingham’s vibrant literary heritage.
Library members can borrow a large part of our Sillitoe collection, and the additional family copies of books will soon be available to view. We welcome research visits to study these or any of our other rare books and special collections, by appointment.
Clare Brown
Bromley House Library, Nottingham
Eliot and Kipling
Sam Milne is entirely right about Kipling’s influence on T. S. Eliot (Letters, February 6). This was confirmed by Eliot himself on October 21, 1958, in a speech to the Kipling Society:
I once wrote a poem called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: I am convinced that it would never have been called “Love Song” but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head: “The Love Song of Har Dyal”. Many years later I wrote a poem called “The Hollow Men”: I could never have thought of this title but for Kipling’s poem “The Broken Men”. One of the broken men has turned up recently in my work, and may be seen at this time on the stage of the Cambridge Theatre. And I leave you to guess why a Persian cat I once possessed was dignified by the name of Mirza Murad Ali Beg. (T. S. Eliot, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling”, Kipling Journal no.129, March 1959).
Janet Montefiore
Canterbury
Golden Age crime fiction
Jonathan Falla (Letters, February 6) states that Dorothy L. Sayers’s heroine Harriet Vane is “so modern that she will cohabit with Lord Peter Wimsey before marrying him”.
The man Vane cohabits with in Strong Poison is her lover Philip Boyes, whom she is put on trial for murdering. Lord Peter uncovers the real killer before she is executed. He falls in love with Vane, but she refuses him for two more novels, and certainly does not sleep or live with him until after they are married in Busman’s Holiday.
Perhaps a little more “bookishness” on your correspondent’s part might be in order.
Amanda Craig
London NW1
On Pedantry
In reply to John Barnie’s letter (January 23), I would quite agree that the genitive “’s” in Bleak House’s is indeed an integral part of the noun. But the function of the italics here is to denote a title – and the “’s” is not part of that title.
Nancy Brooks
New York
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