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This BBC article presents arguments within the Church of England about reparation for slavery. We learn lots of surprising facts:
- the Church owned plantations in the Caribbean
- the slaves owned by the church were freed 26 yars after slavery was abolished
- The Church was compensated by the British government for the loss of slave labour

Discuss whether the Church should find a way to make reparation. Some arguments are given in the article:
- who would recieve reparation payments?
- could  reparation be made in the form of aid?
- the Church should make a formal apoloigy at least
- reparation would symbolise the church's acceptance that huge wrongs were done

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BBC NEWS | UK | Church considers slavery payments

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The leader of the Church of England says it needs to consider reparations for its role in the slave trade.

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- Pupils might be surprised or shocked that a priest was a slave owner. This BBC article sets out the complex relationship between the Church and slavery. As you can see, some used the bible to justify slavery, others argued that slaves should be treated well but kept as slaves, while others argued that slavery was un-Christian and must be stopped. Make a table and separate the different views held towards slavery from a Christian perspective.
- Once the broad arguments have been established, consider which rest on Christian theology or biblical teachings, and which rest on economic or other non-religious factors.
- Are some arguments generally moral but not specifically Christian?

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Out of Africa

Historical records show that Islam and Christianity played an important role in enslavement in Africa. The Arab-controlled Trans-Saharan slave trade, which was underpinned by Islam, helped to institutionalise slave trading on the continent.

And during the age of exploration, European Christians who approached the continent via the north witnessed caravans loaded with Africans en-route to the Middle East. Others arriving much later in West Africa observed indigenous African slavery, leading them to assume that African enslavement was inherent in the continent.

For many early European explorers, the bible was not only regarded as infallible, it was also their primary reference book. Answers to explain differences in ethnicity, culture, and slavery were found in Genesis 9: 24-27, which appeared to suggest that the differences were a result of sin.

In this passage, Africans were said to be the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, who was cursed by his father after looking at his naked form. Moreover, in Genesis 10, the 'Table of Nations' describes the origins of the different races and reveals that one of the descendants of Ham is Cush-Cush, and that the Cushites were people associated with the Nile region of North Africa.

In time, the European connection between sin, slavery, skin colour and beliefs would condemn Africans. In the bible, physical or spiritual slavery is often a consequence of sinful actions, while darkness is associated with evil.

Africans were considered heathens, bereft of Christianity. Scholars now suggest that Christianity had reached Africa by the early second century AD and that the Christian communities in North Africa were among the earliest in the world.

But Europeans refused to acknowledge African Christianity as genuine, because it appeared irreconcilable with the continent's cultural context.

The emergence of colonies in the Americas and the need to find labourers saw Europeans turn their attention towards Africa, with some arguing that the Transatlantic Slave Trade would enable Africans, especially the 'Mohammedans' to come into contact with Christianity and civilisation in the Americas - albeit as slaves.

It was even argued that the favourable trade winds from Africa to the Americas were evidence of a providential design.

Quaker opposition

Religion was also a driving force for slavery in the Americas. Once enslaved, Africans were taken to their places of labour, where they were subjected to various processes to make them more compliant to slavery. Christianitsation was part of this process.

Ironically, although evangelisation was one of the justifications for enslaving Africans, very little missionary work took place during the early years. Basically, religion got in the way of a money-making, because it took enslaved Africans away from their work. It also taught them potentially subversive ideas and made it hard to justify their cruel mistreatment by fellow Christians.

Nonetheless, some clergy tried to push the idea that it was possible to be a 'good slave and Christian', using as justification St Paul's 'Epistles', which called for slaves to 'obey their masters' and his writings that appeared to suggest it was commendable for enslaved Christians to suffer at the hands of cruel masters (1 Peter 2: 18-25).

But while some clergymen used Christian scriptures to justify slavery, others were scouring the bible to find references to help end the practice. Although evangelicals tend to receive most of the credit for this, the origins of Christian abolitionism can be traced to the late 17th century and the Religious Society of Friends or 'Quakers'.

Quakers had always been persecuted for their beliefs since the sect was established in the mid-17th century. They believed that everyone was 'equal in the sight of God', and capable of receiving the 'light of God's spirit and wisdom', including Africans.

Several Quaker founders, including George Fox and Benjamin Lay, encouraged people in their congregations not to own slaves. By 1696, Quakers in Pennsylvania officially declared their opposition to the practice of importing Africans into North American to be enslaved.

In the 1750s, Quakers in Philadelphia and London debated slavery at their yearly meetings. Quaker Anthony Benezet's 'Some Historical Account of Guinea' (1772) became required reading for abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic.

It informed John Wesley's book 'Thoughts Upon Slavery' (1774), which influenced many British Christian abolitionists and was said to have inspired the former slave trader turned clergyman, John Newton to break his decades of silence about his involvement in the slave trade.

Many of the first Christian opponents to slavery came from congregations such as the Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists. These groups were called 'Nonconformists' or 'Dissenters' because they disagreed with the beliefs and practices of the Church of England.

These Christians were often marginalised because of their stance, but their philosophy enabled them to connect with people who faced other forms of persecution.

Christian abolitionists

But the real thrust of Christian abolitionism emerged from the evangelical revival of the 18th century, which spawned dynamic Christians who had clear-cut beliefs on morality and sin, which shaped their approach to the issue of slavery.

Wesley's 'Thoughts Upon Slavery' questioned the morality of slavery and those who took part in it, while William Wilberforce - the evangelical Anglican member of parliament who campaigned to end the slave trade - believed that he had been called by God to end the immoral practice of slavery.

Many evangelicals were interested in the physical as well as spiritual condition of enslaved Africans. Clergymen such as James Ramsay, who had worked in the Caribbean, was influential in pointing out to fellow believers that many Africans died without hearing the gospel.

Practical evangelical abolition work began with the Anglican Granville Sharp in the mid 1760s, when he fought for the freedom of a young African, Jonathan Strong. Sharp rose to national prominence during the landmark Somerset Case of 1772, which determined the status of slavery in Britain.

Sharp would later join up with the Quakers to establish the first recognised anti-slavery movement in Britain, in 1787. By this time, other Anglicans such as Thomas Clarkson had entered the fray. Clarkson, who wrote an award-wining essay against slavery in 1785, received what he considered to be divine instructions to work towards ending slavery.

It would be wrong to suggest that there were Christian saints and sinners with regards to slavery. It can be argued that both characteristics co-existed within denominations and individuals alike, demonstrating the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of all human beings.

For instance, the Quakers have been described as the 'good guys', yet their links to slavery included the infamous David and Alexander of Barclays Bank fame, Francis Baring of Barings Bank and the Quaker merchant Robert King who was Olaudah Equiano's last owner. Even at the height of their anti-slavery activity, many Quaker meeting houses refused to accept Africans into their congregations.

This was also the situation with the other denominations. The Church of England had links to slavery through United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) missionary organisations, which had plantations in Barbados. The bishop of Exeter personally owned slaves.

Anglicans involved in slavery often poured their ill-gotten gains into church coffers. And in cities with strong links to the slave trade, such as Bristol, the church bells were peeled when Wilberforce's anti-slave trade bills were defeated in parliament.

Africans and Christianity

Not all Anglicans supported slavery. Dr Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, was an evangelical abolitionist whose sermons regularly railed against slavery. Similarly, the Clapham Sect - a group of Anglicans based around Clapham in south London - carried out sterling work to end the slave trade.

Likewise, the countess of Huntingdon (ironically herself a slave owner) sponsored the poetry of the former enslaved African, Phyllis Wheatley. Wheatley's work, some of which addressed freedom and bondage, was published in Britain because publishers in her home town of Boston, America, would not accept that a black woman could write such exquisite verse.

But the Christian abolitionists have their detractors, and some have argued that they failed to show the same commitment towards ending slavery as they did towards ending the slave trade. Their attitude towards Africans appears condescending by today's standards.

Yet, for their time, they can be considered enlightened, because they recognised that Africans were made in the image of God and believed that Africa could trade with Europe in products rather than human beings.

One of the most common misconceptions about Christianity was that it turned Africans into servile slaves. A more accurate reading suggests that Africans accepted and incorporated aspects of Christianity that were in keeping with their traditional belief systems.

Others withstood centuries of slavery and missionary influence to practise traditional beliefs that thrived despite attempts by the respective authorities to stamp them out.

Adherents to Islam also faced restrictions on their ability to practise their religion openly. When Nonconformist missionaries stepped up attempts to evangelise Africans during the late 18th century, it was noted that African Muslims still held on to their tendency to pray with their arms open, as opposed to the Christian way with hands clasped.

The Africans who embraced Christianity identified closely with the bible's take on freedom, equality and justice - especially in drawing parallels between their own situation and that of the Hebrew people in 'Exodus'. Indeed, such was the potency of this Old Testament story that many clergymen were instructed to avoid it in their bible lessons.

But for Africans it demonstrated that God was on the side of the oppressed and would send a Moses to free them. It was ironic that for Africans, the Americas (and the US in particular) represented the biblical Egypt or Babylon - a place from which to escape, while for persecuted European Christians it was seen as the Promised Land.

Rebellion and education

It is no coincidence that in the African diaspora, leaders in the black community are invariably men and women of faith - a trait that is traceable to slavery. During this era, a religious leader was deemed to be called by God and given wisdom and power to lead.

Practically all the leaders of slave insurrections were men and women of faith (or were protected by prayers or hexes) such as Tacky (Tacky's Rebellion), Nanny of the Maroons, Toussaint l'Ouverture and Boukman (St Domingue/Haiti), Sam Sharpe (Jamaica), Nat Turner (USA) and Quamina (Guyana).

Moreover, many slave insurrections such as the Tacky, Bussa and Christmas Rebellions, occurred during Christian religious festivals. There is little doubt that Africans took umbrage at the hypocrisy of those who claimed to be followers of a merciful God, yet forced his 'children' to work on holy days.

Africans in Britain also used the so-called 'slave masters' tool' to destroy his house. The status of slavery in England remained ambiguous during the 18th century because of parliament's failure to address the issue directly in law.

English Common Law suggested that Christians could not be enslaved, and the subsequent ruling of 1772 by Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield held out the mistaken hope for many Africans that a baptised slave living in England was free. Consequenlty, scores of Africans, such as Olaudah Equiano, were baptised in St Margaret's Church in Westminster, London.

England proved a magnet for want-away Africans, and many such as Equiano joined the campaign to end slavery. Once he had obtained his freedom, Equiano wrote his autobiography and worked with a group called the 'Sons of Africa for African Freedom'.

Equiano petitioned parliament and Queen Charlotte on the question of slavery, and was a regular writer for publications such as the Morning Chronicle, London Advertiser and Public Advertiser. He also exchanged theological arguments on slavery with the number one slave trade apologist for the Church - the Liverpool-based Clergyman, Rev Raymond Harris.

Through their writing and speaking, these Africans dispelled notions of racial inferiority and black people's complacency towards slavery. Unlike their white counterparts, Africans had little option but to oppose slavery as they were always susceptible to enslavement by unscrupulous traders.

Consequently, Africans such as Ottobah Cugoano, who published his 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species' demanded immediate, not gradual freedom for enslaved Africans in the late 18th century, at a time when his white counterparts were concentrating on the limited goal of ending the slave trade.

Find out more

Books

African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone (Oxford, 2007)

Slavery in Early Christianity by Jennifer A. Glancy (Oxford, 2002)

Islam's Black Slaves: The History of Africa's Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (Atlantic Books, 2001)

Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion by Anthony B Pinn (Fortress Press, 2003)

The White Man's Burden by Jordan D Withrop (Oxford, 1974)

Africa in History by Basil Davidson (Paladin, 1984)

England in the Age of Improvement: 1783-1867 by Asa Briggs (The Folio Society, 1997)

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776 - 1848 by Robin Blackburn (Verso, 1988)

Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (MacMillan, 2005)

The Clapham Sect by Margaret Bryant (The Clapham Society, 2004)

The Great Abolition Sham: The true story of the end of the British slave trade by Michael Jordan (Sutton, 2005)

Black Church Beginnings: The Long-hidden realities of the first years by Henry H Mitchell (Eerdmans, 2004)

God of the Oppressed by James H Cone (Orbis, 1997)

The Caribbean by Gad Heuman, (Hodder Arnold, 2006)

History of Jamaica by Clinton V Black (Collins Press, 1973)

Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man by Vincent Carretta (University of Georgia, 2005)

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama (BBC Books, 2005)

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Historical records show that Islam and Christianity played an important role in enslavement in Africa. The Arab-controlled Trans-Saharan slave trade, which was underpinned by Islam, helped to institutionalise slave trading on the continent. And during the age of exploration, European Christians who approached the continent via the north witnessed caravans loaded with Africans en-route to the Middle East.

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Read this blog, published on RE:Online, where two teachers consider their reactions to this podacst and how they might bring some of the ideas to their classrooms.

One teacher is in a Primary school and one in a Secondary school.

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- The link above takes you to the Royal Society website and some research on West African innoculation. As you can see, this predates innoculation practiced in the Western world. A copy of a letter from Cotton Mather is shown, display to the class.
- Keywords for this episode: inoculation, vaccine, slavery, enslaved, slave owner, epidemic.
- Let the class listen to the 20 minute episode. At key moments pause and conduct 'think, pair, share' activities so pupils can discuss what they have heard.
- Talk about why the white people in Boston could not hear what Onesimus was saying. Why could they not take his advice? Make a class mindmap of reasons why.
- Look at a map of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 'Onesimus' came from West Africa. Trace his journey across the Atlantic to Boston. Most slave ships left from the coast of Benin, adjacent to Nigeria.
- Read the description Onesimus gives of the innoculation procedure. Do students understand the science behind this? Talk about what it must have been like for parents to let their children have the procedure- would they have been worried? Would they trust the person performing the procedure?
- Write a paragraph from one parent to another, to explain why it is safe to allow their children to be innoculated.
- 'Onesimus' is  a name given to this man from West Africa by his slave owner. In his diary, Mather described Onesimus's ethnicity as 'Guaramantee', which could be Mather's way of writing 'Coromantee'. The Coromantee are also known as the Akan people and they are from the Gold Coast of Ghana. However it is not known what Onesimus's original ethnicity is.
- Find out about the Akan languages and cultures in Ghana. Look at images and compare this land to Boston. What would have been different for Onesimus?
- Onesimus's birth name is not known. Talk about how it must feel to lose your own name and be given a new name from an alien culture.

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Could you introduce yourself and your research?

I'm finishing my PhD at New York University. My current project, ' Smallpox and Slavery: Morbidity, Medical Intervention, and Enslaved People's Lives in the Greater Caribbean', addresses the histories of enslaved Africans who endured smallpox outbreaks, treatments, and public health interventions, between roughly 1520 and 1806, before the promulgation of the Jennerian vaccine. I've spent the last four years tracing West and West Central Africans' macabre journeys across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean, where they cycled through compulsory health inspections, quarantines, treatments, and, in some cases, smallpox inoculations.

How did you discover the Royal Society archives and which records have you studied there?

My interests in West African inoculators led me to the Royal Society's Archives when I was a fellow at NYU's London campus in 2018. My research there focused on James Jurin's correspondence with physicians and scientists during his tenure as Secretary of the Society. The letters include reports and observations about smallpox inoculations performed on children and, to a lesser extent, adults, in England, France, and North America (primarily Boston and Charleston) during the 1720s and 1730s. The inoculations performed on enslaved and free people of African descent were most pertinent to my research.

Letter from Cotton Mather to James Jurin, 21 May 1723 ( CLP/23ii/31)

As part of our exhibit 'A Celebration of Black Science' we mention the role played by the enslaved 'Onesimus' in introducing Cotton Mather to smallpox inoculation. Could you tell us more about the involvement of the Black and indigenous populations in the Caribbean and America?

It's important to note that smallpox inoculation relied on the presence of someone with smallpox pustules, which were pierced with a lancet to harvest pus that would then be inserted in an incision on another person's arm or leg. This was a brutal process that ultimately resulted in a case of smallpox, though reputedly less severe. It controlled when, where, and how someone contracted smallpox, increasing their chances of survival. It did not prevent the illness or necessarily produce a mild case, but if someone survived they would typically have lifelong immunity.

In his Histoire de l'inoculation de la petite vérole (1773), French geographer Charles Marie de La Condamine stated that many West Africans had been practising smallpox inoculation since ' temps immémorial'. The transatlantic slave trade violently dispersed West African communities throughout the Americas, where they continued and shared their medical practices including with their enslavers. The paucity of archival sources does not enable us to fully grasp the extent to which enslaved or free medical practitioners of African descent practised inoculation in the Americas before the early eighteenth century. However, a handful of surviving accounts suggest that they were practising it without European physicians' oversight or knowledge by the turn of the eighteenth century.

After the Royal Society published Emmanuel Timoni's letter about smallpox inoculation in Constantinople, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's promotion of the idea, Europeans became more interested. After hearing about inoculation from Onesimus, Mather and several other ministers and physicians in Boston interviewed enslaved Africans, carried out their own tests, corresponded with the Royal Society and published accounts. In the 1720s, members of the Royal African Company sent a physician, James Houstoun, to oversee smallpox inoculations at some of their West African forts to control the smallpox outbreaks that frequently disrupted voyages.

In the Americas, pamphlets describing smallpox inoculation circulated widely in multiple languages, and reports began to circulate about Europeans inoculating enslaved Africans by the thousands in the Caribbean and North America. Nevertheless, the practice remained controversial and subject to occasional bans until the 1760s, causing some Europeans and Africans to perform smallpox inoculations without government or European physicians' oversight.

By the 1750s and 1760s, metropolitan French and English learned societies endorsed smallpox inoculation, and authorities in the Americas began to restrict inoculation to licensed European or local physicians. Enslaved Africans who continued to practise smallpox inoculation among themselves found themselves subject to increased colonial oversight and the arrival of European inoculators.

The widespread acceptance also ushered in an era of experimentation. Men like John Quier exploited smallpox epidemics as opportunities to perform brutal (even by contemporary standards) experiments with purgatives and inoculations on infant, elderly and pregnant enslaved people. Late eighteenth-century Caribbean and European newspapers were peppered with propaganda advertising European-trained inoculators who would inoculate enslaved Africans to hone their skills or establish their practices before expanding to free white and non-white clienteles.

Many scholars have credited these inoculations as humanitarian efforts and therapeutic experiments. However, we should not ignore the uneven power dynamics and inherent violence associated with forcibly inoculating enslaved and colonised people to ensure labour production and sustain imperial projects.

Versions of variolation were practised in Northern Africa, which seems to be Onesimus's likely birthplace. Have you found evidence that variolation was practised in the Americas by enslaved people from other areas of the African continent?

Mather's descriptions of Onesimus's origins are somewhat inscrutable. The uncertainty arises from two of Mather's letters to the Royal Society. In one, Mather uses the term 'Guaramantese' to refer to Onesimus and the other enslaved Africans who informed him about smallpox inoculation. In the other, he describes these Africans as having been inoculated 'while they were yet in Barbary.' Some historians of Western medicine conclude that Onesimus hailed from North Africa, specifically today's Southern Libya.

By contrast, historians who specialize in the histories of Africa, the slave trade, non-Western medicine, and early modern Anglo-Atlantic literature, argue that Onesimus's origins were likely sub-Saharan, either from the Gold Coast or the West African interior. Social and cultural historians agree that the majority of the enslaved Africans in Boston at this time hailed from sub-Saharan West Africa. There is little evidence suggesting that North Africans were enslaved there.

Several historians speculate that 'Guaramantese' was an alternative orthography for 'Coromantee', used in the Americas to describe Africans who departed from the Gold Coast region. Likewise, 'Barbary' may have been a quaint term for Africa as a whole. Onesimus's description of inoculation aligns more closely with West African techniques than North African ones. The surviving archival sources do not offer historians any easy or definitive answers regarding Onesimus's origins; nevertheless, for the last 45 years, numerous scholars have agreed that he was likely West African.

French and English accounts of sub-Saharan Africans from the West African hinterlands describe inoculation methods for smallpox and yaws (another pox-producing disease) which predate Western Europeans' familiarity with the practice. Cadwallader Colden, a physician and natural scientist who immigrated to New York in the early eighteenth century, spoke with the West Africans he enslaved and surmised (in his Medical Observations and Inquiries) that smallpox inoculation 'came from Africa originally with the distemper itself.'

In addition to North America, I have also found evidence of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, including Jamaica and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), who performed smallpox inoculations and likewise insisted that it was an ancient method in their homelands. The transatlantic and intra-American slave trades violently dispersed West African communities throughout the Americas so it is not surprising to find West Africans practising nearly identical forms of smallpox inoculation in different parts of the Americas. It is deeply troubling that despite ample early modern European sources and modern scholars' efforts to acknowledge this history since the 1960s, the history of smallpox inoculation in sub-Saharan Africa remains understudied at best, or wholly unacknowledged at worst.

What types of strategies for survival did enslaved people deploy to cope with recurring smallpox epidemics?

While some enslaved West Africans used smallpox inoculation to prevent or contain epidemics, I have not found evidence that enslaved West Central Africans used smallpox inoculation before Europeans introduced it in the region. Instead, West Central Africans seem to have typically relied on topical remedies for smallpox symptoms. Many West and West Central Africans believed that diseases were consequences of troubled relationships with deities, spirits or ancestors. Some enslaved Africans' healing rituals involved spiritual practices that appealed to divine or ancestral authorities.

Nevertheless, we must remember that enslavement was a brutal system in which enslaved people's medical knowledge and authority over their or their kin's medical treatment was rarely recognized by their enslavers. Enslaved people had to defend themselves against the risks associated with colonial public health and European and Euro-American responses to smallpox epidemics. This often took the form of refusing or resisting unfamiliar, risky or experimental medical treatments, warning one another about adverse experiences with overzealous medical practitioners, attempting to escape compulsory quarantines, and interceding on behalf of one another, especially young children.

As we have seen with COVID-19, epidemics disrupt normal societal functions and supply chains. One of the most terrifying and poignant things I've learned in my research about smallpox is that, despite the disease's deadly potential, enslaved Africans tended to survive smallpox epidemics only to perish in larger numbers afterwards. Colonial officials frequently reported that, during and after smallpox outbreaks and epidemics, enslaved people died more from starvation, dysentery, parasitic infections, violence and insufficient supplies than from smallpox itself.

While some enslaved people fled to escape the epidemic, search for food and medicine, or bury their dead according to their traditions, many spent smallpox epidemics performing essential medical and public health labour. People of African descent had played a crucial role in enslaved and free people's healthcare since the earliest days of European settlement in the Americas, managing public health in burgeoning settlements and urban and rural societies. Most of the hospitals, almshouses and pesthouses in the early modern Caribbean were built by enslaved Africans.

Spanish and Portuguese records concerning early modern smallpox outbreaks frequently describe enslaved and free people with African ancestry who worked as town criers and medical practitioners, such as surgeons and barbers. They provided local officials with updated information about the number and location of cases. This work often involved coming face to face with the nastiness of smallpox: foul stenches, open pustules, and feverish and delirious people who may have been trying to conceal infected parties in their homes.

Throughout the Caribbean region, most of the people who worked as laundresses, nurses, pharmacists, barbers, and in some cases, surgeons and doctors in almshouses, charitable hospitals, military barracks, lazarettos, and pesthouses were enslaved or free people with some African or Indigenous ancestry. One could say that between 1500 and 1800, they formed the vast majority of early modern Caribbean frontline public health workers, and like today's frontline workers, they lost their lives at disproportionately high rates during smallpox epidemics.

In the context of rural and plantation slavery in the Caribbean, enslaved people played a crucial role as caregivers for their peers as they recovered from smallpox or smallpox inoculation. This often meant that someone, typically an older woman, would accompany one or more children or adults to a quarantine: a small house or makeshift hut separate from the typical plantation sickhouse or 'hospital'. The enslaved caregiver would provide round-the-clock nursing, cooking, laundering, changing wound dressings, administering topical treatments, and notifying others about the health conditions of their charges.

By the late eighteenth century, it was relatively common for enslavers to hire one local medical practitioner, usually a free white man, to perform smallpox inoculations and prescribe smallpox treatments. However, the day-to-day labour of follow-up care typically fell on other enslaved people, providing some with opportunities to perform treatments according to their medical and healing epistemologies and pass on familiar treatments from trusted members of their communities. We should not assume, though, that enslaved people always trusted one another or wished to be treated in the 'hospital', as this left enslaved medical practitioners vulnerable to accusations of maleficence from their enslavers and European medical practitioners if the people under their charge did not survive.

What could the archives and library community do to increase the visibility of the role of Black people, so often hidden in the archives, and how can we facilitate research like yours?

'Hiddenness' brings to mind the 'silences' that the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes in Silencing the Past. Trouillot identifies 'the making of sources', 'the making of archives', 'the making of narratives', and 'the making of history' or 'retrospective significance', as the four moments when 'silences enter the process of historical production'. The silences surrounding Onesimus are produced at all four moments: his history is obscured in Mather's records, the archives, our historical narratives, and our sense of his historical significance.

Likewise, focusing on Onesimus as an individual also risks silencing the collective history of his local community, who were, in Mather's words, 'an Army of Africans' who all agreed on 'one story' about smallpox inoculation. Onesimus's community was only one of many diasporic and West African communities in which smallpox inoculation was practised. Increasing Onesimus's visibility, without further obscuring the untold numbers of West Africans who were also familiar with smallpox inoculation, requires rewriting the catalogue and Mather's biography to reflect these histories. It also requires collaborating with other scholars and archivists to ensure that records bring the relationships between these sources to the fore.

Trouillot also reminds us that 'not all silences are equal' and they 'cannot be addressed - or redressed - in the same manner'. The archival strategies that might be most effective for making Onesimus more prominent may not work as effectively for other Black people in your collections. More sustained collaborations with archivists, historians, Black Studies scholars and decolonial theorists, plus public historians who are working diligently on race, colonialism, archival representation and epistemology, can provide useful insights into how better to represent the histories obscured by the current structure and organisation of the Royal Society's archives.

The geographic breadth of your collections makes them valuable to scholars who live abroad. Transnational archival research, already challenging to fund and undertake, is nearly impossible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digitising more of your collections would help scholars access them more easily. Likewise, supporting UK-based initiatives to increase the numbers of professors and archivists researching the intersections of Black history and the early modern history of medicine and science, as well as the number of Black professors and archivists working in research positions at UK institutions, would facilitate further research collaborations in these areas.

Table of people inoculated for smallpox by Charles Maitland between 1721 and 1723, from MS/245

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West Africans and the history of smallpox inoculation: Q&A with Elise A. Mitchell | Royal Society

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Could you introduce yourself and your research? I'm finishing my PhD at New York University. My current project, ' Smallpox and Slavery: Morbidity, Medical Intervention, and Enslaved People's Lives in the Greater Caribbean', addresses the histories of enslaved Africans who endured smallpox outbreaks, treatments, and public health interventions, between roughly 1520 and 1806, before the promulgation of the Jennerian vaccine.

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The episode opens in Boston Massachusetts where smallpox pandemics ravaged the population every 10 or 15 years between the 1600s and early 1700s.

We are introduced to Cotton Mather, a priest and amateur scientist. Mather is also a slave owner, who once received a slave from his church congregation as a gift. He named this man, originally from West Africa, Onesimus.

Mather was very aware of the constant smallpox threat. He asked Onesimus if he had ever had smallpox in Africa. Onesimus described a strange procedure; a person with smallpox had a blister cut open; the skin of a healthy person was cut and some blister fluid was rubbed into the wound. The recipient fell ill after some days, but not fatally so. When they recovered they never contracted smallpox. Mather began to interview many other Africans in Boston and found that this practice was widespread in West Africa.

Great, the listener thinks, problem solved. But as the episode then explores, things are not that straightforward...

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The eradication of smallpox is one of humanity's great achievements - but the battle against the virus was fought by the most unlikely of alliances. How did the breakthrough happen - and can we guarantee that the world is still safe from smallpox?

Written by Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. Producers: Ryan Dilley with Peter Naughton. Sound design/mix/musical composition: Pascal Wyse. Editor: Julia Barton. Publicity: Christine Ragasa.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Heather Fain, Maya Koenig, Mia Lobel, Carly Migliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course, the mighty Malcolm Gladwell.
Further reading and listening
The smallpox wargame is described in 'Shining Light on "Dark Winter".' Tara O'Toole, Mair Michael, Thomas V. Inglesby. Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 34, Issue 7, 1 April 2002, Pages 972-983, https://doi.org/10.1086/339909 and more recent reflections on smallpox are at PittMed, in Wired and on CNN.

The history of variolation in Boston is from The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, and in particular The Fever of 1721 by Stephen Coss.

Edward Jenner's contribution is discussed in the Lancet, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's in Time magazine.

Ellen Laipson's comments on Covid-19 and bioterrorism were reported by Euractiv.

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Cautionary Tales - How To End A Pandemic

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The eradication of smallpox is one of humanity's great achievements - but the battle against the virus was fought by the most unlikely of alliances. How did the breakthrough happen - and can we guarantee that the world is still safe from smallpox? Written by Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.

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The information in this resource is taken from an episode of Tim Harford's podcast, 'Cautionary Tales'.
The podcast series presents mistakes and what we can learn from them. It is worth a listen!
Tim Harford is an economic journalist and broadcaster.

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My podcast, telling true stories about mistakes and what we should learn from them.