SOURCE: Walvin, James. “Ignatius Sancho: The Man and His Times.” In Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, edited by Reyahn King and others, pp. 93-113. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

In the following essay, Walvin provides the contemporary economic and legal context of slavery and its effects on Sancho, analyzes Sancho's contribution to what would later become the abolitionist movement, and contends that Sancho's writings take readers to the heart of the Black experience at the height of the enslaved African diaspora.

Ignatius Sancho was born a slave in 1729, to a slave mother (who died shortly afterwards) on board an Atlantic slave ship heading for the Americas. At the time of Sancho's birth, the British had become the most successful and most prosperous of European slave-traders. Though that maritime trade in Africans was initiated by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and developed by the Dutch, it was perfected by...