Here they are, on their favourite barge The Apollo, on the River Thames, in all their glory.

This is the Sharp family. Start with the man in green holding a sheet of music for his sister. You will almost definitely know him. This is Granville Sharp. I’ve become exceedingly fond of Granville. ‘Eccentric and socially awkward’ according to historian Hester Grant, Granville used to sign his letters with the musical notation, G#. Nicknamed Greeny as a boy, he read the whole of Shakespeare sitting in an apple tree in the family’s rectory garden. 

Abolition

In 1765 Sharp met Jonathan Strong, an enslaved African seeking treatment for injuries sustained at the hands of his enslaver. Later, Jonathan escaped from his enslaver and was arrested. Sharp took up Strong’s case and secured his release from prison. Following this success Sharp began to research the legal status of enslaved Africans in Britain. ‘He would one day be known as the ‘father’ of the campaign to abolish slavery’ explains historian Hester Grant. Olusoga takes up Granville Sharp’s story and explains the importance of the later Somerset case.*

The Sharps are a very useful family for us in our curriculum because their story helps us to connect different curricular elements together. We don’t begin our story of Abolition with Granville: we begin in West Africa and the Caribbean, but Granville helps our Year 8s to connect events in Britain’s colonies to the reaction in Britain.
Jamaica is a key location in our Year 8 curriculum. We first study the role of mahogany in the transatlantic slave trade, building on the research of the historian Hannah Cusworth. We then follow the historian Vincent Brown’s story of resistance in Jamaica, including Tacky and Apongo’s rebellions in 1760-61, in the Spring Term. In this enquiry, we discuss the impact of the rebellions and executions on Britain. The fact that a free village in Jamaica was named after Granville Sharp helps us to reinforce the connection between events in Britain and her colonies.

The American War of Independence

Speaking of colonies, Granville was employed by the Board of Ordnance when war broke out in 1775. He immediately resigned: he decided he could not assist in providing weapons against his ‘fellow countrymen’ in America. Granville defended the rights of Americans to an independent legislature. Whether you agree with Granville’s critics that this led him to draw his energies unhelpfully away from the cause of abolition or not, it is still a helpful view to share with students: history, as always, is more complicated than the ‘good’ Americans fighting the ‘bad’ British.

George III

Look at the top of the picture. Here’s William Sharp with his hand on the tiller of the barge. He was the one who had treated Jonathan Strong for his injuries at his surgery on Mincing Lane in London, and discussed those injuries with his younger brother Granville. William wears the red collar of a Windsor uniform, which he would have been entitled to wear due to his connections with the Royal Household of George III. William recorded that he was called on as a surgeon to look at Princess Amelia’s knee in 1799. This wasn’t William’s only contact with the royal family: almost 30 years earlier, in 1770, James and his siblings had serenaded a young Prince George on the banks of the river Thames as their family barge was passing Kew.

William does a different job to Granville: while Granville helps us to consolidate knowledge (connections between Britain and the Caribbean during the fight for abolition), William helps us to prepare students for a later study, in Year 9, of protest. ‘Remember this painting? Who is Graville and why was he important? Do you remember which one is the surgeon William Sharp? Can you remember which king he once visited? Well, while William was studying 15-year-old Princess Amelia’s knee in 1799, Britain was at war with…’

Agricultural Revolution

William Sharp was very close to one of his sisters, Elizabeth Sharp because Elizabeth became a widow quite early in her life. Find Elizabeth in the centre of the portrait playing the harpsichord. Elizabeth had married her cousin, George Prowse, in 1762, but George died unexpectedly.

Between 1767 and 1810, while her brother Granville was campaigning against slavery in London, and her other brother William was performing surgery and playing music on his barge on the Thames, Elizabeth managed 2,200 acres of land in and around the village of Wicken in Northamptonshire.

We know how Elizabeth farmed her land because she kept a detailed ledger and a diary. Elizabeth carefully listed her purchases in this ledger, including new machines, books, tools and seeds. In her diary, Elizabeth recorded her trips to London looking for new furniture for her new home.

‘What type of wooden furniture do you think Elizabeth was looking for in the 1760s, Year 8?’

‘That’s right: Elizabeth delighted in ‘neat Mahogany Chairs Stuff’s in linnen.’’

Elizabeth’s father-in-law had begun enclosing land around Wicken in the 1750s. He enclosed the common land bit-by-bit, constructing fences around some open fields and buying land from poorer neighbours.

In 1764, Elizabeth and her new husband, George, were given the Wicken estate to run. The young couple were full of ideas about how to improve their new lands. But when George died in 1767 Elizabeth was left alone. William spent a great deal of his time with her.

Elizabeth threw herself into improving her lands. She spent hours scouring newspaper articles about farming. It was an exciting time to become a landowner: in the 1760s and 1770s, books about new farming methods were being published every year. Her reading itself is a huge achievement – she was poorly educated. Elizabeth made many changes to her lands, spreading lime and marl, adding drainage channels, and experimenting with new animal feeds and machinery. Through studying Elizabeth (she is a subject of a book by Briony McDonagh), students can learn about the Agricultural Revolution.

By using the story of Elizabeth we can also link agricultural change to urbanisation. I explain to students that the population was growing quickly in the eighteenth century. More people began to live and work in towns. They could no longer grow their own food. The townspeople relied on farmers like Elizabeth to grow more crops which would provide the towns with food.

Elizabeth improved her farmlands by consulting books, but she also consulted her family.

Industrial Revolution

Elizabeth’s brother, James Sharp, was an ironmonger in London. James is on the left, wearing a hat.

James purchased agricultural equipment on Elizabeth’s behalf, including seed drills. But his manufactury in London manufactured a vast array of products, including anchors and carriages, but also products designed specifically for plantations in the Americas, including sugar hogheads and cotton rollers. These exports were a large source of his income. His truck were designed to fit several hogsheads perfectly. Whether James worried about the enslaved Africans being forced to use his products we will never know.

Take a look at all the machines James sold on his trade card here, including a seed drill.

James was not just an ironmonger, however. ‘James is a visionary, an inventor, engineer’, explains Grant. James secured private audiences with George III to discuss canal building, in order to provide affordable coal. Spreading out his plans on a library table in September 1770, James explains later that he ‘shew’d Brindley’s Canals’ to the king. The plans for a new London canal failed, but James later played a role in the construction of the Oxford Canal.

Another Sharp member, another opportunity. ‘Do you remember James over here, Year 8? Can you remember why he met with George III? Well, canals were very important in…’

The East India Company

Perhaps, like me, you choose to include the East India Company in your curriculum (we use it as our ‘way in’ to the British Empire, having studied Nur Jahan and the Mughals in the enquiry beforehand). If you were keen to use this family as a central point of reference in your curriculum, to make it a stable reference point, you could also mention Charles Sharp, another Sharp brother who isn’t here because he died in the 1740s in Indonesia, during his work for the East India Company. He was only 16.

Why centres of gravity matter

Christine Counsell argues that curriculum proceeds through recognition. The richness of story and setting. If the curriculum is a set of hills, one or two hills will be very important. Every time pupils encounter it they will delight in the recognition. This is what I hope for with the Sharps.

Zoffany

There is one more interesting connection to the EIC, this time with the painter of the Sharp portrait: the artist Johan Zoffany. Look at the painting.

Johan Zoffany (1733-1810): The Auriol and Dashwood Families, c. 1783-7; Oil on canvas, 142 x 198 cm

Before Zoffany painted the Sharps on their barge, he had travelled to India. In this painting, we see a tea party under a jackfruit tree in 1780s Bengal. Lots to discuss here about the EIC in Bengal and relationships between Britain and India.

Zoffany was a talented socialite: in the late 1760s, he had rubbed shoulders with Captain James Cook and Josiah Wedgwood at Jack’s Coffee House every Wednesday evening. Here are more opportunities to draw connections, in a myriad of different ways.

I used to think the ‘long eighteenth century’ was boring and overly-complicated. I used to dread teaching ‘it’. The humanity of the Sharp family, their successes and failures, have changed my view entirely, and I now enjoy pulling on the experiences of the different family members like threads in a beautifully rich and complex embroidery. I never always know where I’ll end up, and that is the joy of the craft of the history teacher: weaving new threads in different patterns to build new past worlds.

References:

Grant, H. (2021) The Good Sharps: The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain, London: Vintage.

McDonagh, B. (2018) Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830, London: Routledge.

Olusoga, D. (2021) Black and British, London: Pan Macmillan.

*In the mid-1700s, the laws on slavery were a jumble of contradictions, uncertainties and ancient case law. When enslaved black people were brought into Britain, no one was clear as to what the exact status of those ‘slaves’ was within English law.
In the aftermath of his victory on behalf of Strong, Sharp began taking up cases of other black people. The case that he had been waiting for came knocking at the door of his lodging in Old Jewry in the City of London on 12 January 1772.
The man was called James Somerset and his case fired Sharp’s indignant temper. Somerset had been enslaved and forcibly taken to West Africa on the infamous Middle Passage and forced to work in Virginia. His enslaver, Charles Stewart, then took him back to London several years later.
Somerset escaped and when he refused to go back to Stewart, Stewart kidnapped him and tried to sell him to labour back on a plantation in Jamaica. Somerset asked Grenville Sharp to support his right to stay in Britain as a free man and not be imprisoned or sent away.
To some extent the Somerset case became a proxy war between the West Indian interest on the one hand and humanitarians like Sharp and his supporters on the other, as money was donated to pay the counsel on both sides. Sharp rather brilliantly had James Somerset hand-deliver documents to London officials, to reinforce the fact that they were determining the fate of a real, flesh-and-blood human being.
The final judgement on this epic trial took place on 22 June 1772. The judgement stated that Somerset should be set free: Charles Stewart had no legal right to detain Somerset on English soil.
The significance of this judgement is debated. The judge, Mansfield, took great care to avoid
offering a ruling on the legal status of enslaved people and their rights in England. However, it was perceived – and reported – quite differently on both sides of the Atlantic. Many, including James Somerset himself, understood the decision to have effectively abolished slavery in England. This was reported back in Virginia, America, and in the Caribbean.
After another decade of supporting the rights of black people in England, Sharp was visited on 19 March 1783 by Olaudah Equiano, who told Sharp of the horrific events aboard the slave ship Zong.
Sharp immediately became involved in the court case, attempting (unsuccessfully) to bring criminal charges against the crew of the Zong. The case shone a light on some of the darkest secrets of the slave trade.
In 1787, four years after the Zong affair, the abolitionist movement was formally born at 2 George Yard, London. On 22 May, twelve men gathered for a meeting, including the potter, Josiah Wedgewood, the writer and academic Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp. Together they founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Adapted and abridged from extracts of the book Black and British by David Olusoga (2016).