Contrary to the title, this is a most disappointing book. It contains nothing about slavery, nothing about the process of emancipation in the American slave societies, and extremely little about the changing attitudes toward slavery and race either in Europe or overseas. Instead, it is a slightly polemical narrative of the efforts in and out of (but mostly in) the British Parliament to abolish the English slave trade and the English segment of the Atlantic slavery. Despite the author’s claim, twenty-two of the twenty-three chapters relate the story until only the 1830s, while the final chapter roves until the late nineteenth century.
The major portion of the book is composed of pen portraits of the leaders in the English antislavery movement: William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, William Pitt, John Newton, John Wesley, and George Whitefield. The style is unblushing (or sophomoric) scissors-and-paste: long quotations—often interesting but not necessarily important—from contemporary sources (parliamentary debates, sermons, plays, letters and histories) held together by outright dubious assertions and highly debatable interpretations.
Jack Gratus, a South African professional writer (“short stories, a biographical study of the victims of murder, and two novels”) has obviously come to a sudden recognition that the system of slavery and the American slave trade were inhuman and unjust, and that the process of abolition was not quite what the participants said it was. Most readers already know that. It is easy to sympathize with his sensibilities. It is difficult to forgive his dismal ignorance of the vast, outstanding literature on the disintegration of slave societies in the world. For the informed, this book makes tedious, sometimes infuriating, reading. For the uninformed, this book is not recommended. Rather, let them begin with David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Concerning the Great White Lie, one may only conclude that anger and awareness are insufficient grounds to write a book—and not every book is worth reading. This one may be omitted without any regret whatsoever.
