A Meeting on Mincing Lane

The first full biography of Granville Sharp, the founding figure of abolitionism in BritainIn London, 1765, Jonathan Strong was bludgeoned half to death by his enslaver. As the injured Strong staggered towards a doctor on Mincing Lane, he was noticed by the civil servant Granville Sharp (1735–1813)—a chance meeting which would set in motion a lifelong fight for justice. Appalled by the violence of slavery—a system with at the time some 900,000 victims in North America alone—Sharp took up the abolitionist cause with a zealous sense of moral duty. He taught himself law to challenge slavery in the Somerset case, wrote Britain’s first antislavery tract, publicised the horrors of the Zong massacre, and was integral to the establishment of the free colony of Sierra Leone. Michael Bundock recounts Sharp’s astonishing and largely forgotten life, which saw collaboration with Black activists Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano and even brought Sharp to the attention of America’s founding fathers. This is the extraordinary story of how the fight for abolition began, and the single-minded campaigner at its heart.