The Zong Massacre

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machi ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious events off Jamaica in 1781 and their background. The British slave ship Zong, having sailed across the Atlantic towards Jamaica, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown. Even for a slave ship, the Zong w ...  Show more

It wasn't until recently that researchers working in the national archive in London discovered the extent to which ordinary people in Britain had been involved in the slave trade in the 18th and early 19th century. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to Dr Nick Draper, who uncovered ...  Show more

In the mid-17th Century, Britain dominated the Slave Trade, shipping over 3 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Conditions on board slave ships were inhumane, and large numbers of enslaved men, women, and children died en-route. However, during the 18th and early 19th ...  Show more

The Demerara Rebellion of 1823 was an uprising of over ten thousand enslaved people in the Crown colony of Demerara-Essequibo (now part of Guyana) on the coast of South America. Having grown tired of their servitude, the enslaved sought to resist in the most direct way they co ...