Did anyone listen to The Lamplighter by Jackie Kay on Sunday? Part of the BBC's Abolition season. There were two discussions beforehand in which the point was made that it wasn't slavery as such that was abolished in 1807, but the Slave Trade....slavery still in fact exists in many forms today (even if people are reluctant to call it that...)
The play was a montage of the voices of four women who experienced slavery, interwoven with 'weather reports' from the late 18th century listing how many slaves were thrown overboard from slave ships during storms at sea.....also interwoven with extracts from documents written by slave-owners or traders themselves, completely cold-blooded.....
One of the themes running through the play was sugar....no-one really thought then, or perhaps even thinks now, how sugar is produced (cotton too, come to think of it! But the theme of the play was the triangular trade capturing slaves for the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. One of the women's voice repeatedly listed the types of sugar, and the islands where it was produced...(Demerara, for instance....when I was a child, I didn't know it referred to a place! I thought it was just the name for a type of sugar, not where it CAME FROM!)