The story of the sea also needs to be thought about through questions of race. By the 1740's, traders mostly from Bristol & Liverpool, ports which dominated the slave trade, had made Great Britain the world's leader in carrying human cargoes. At the Festival, in different sites and through different media, artists, writers and activists criticised the way in which problematic histories of oppression in general, through imperialism and colonialism, and in particular slavery were largely elided in the event. Annie Lovejoy's artistic intervention entitled 'stirring@the international festival of the sea' (Figure 1.3) was a reminder of the human costs of mercantile success in slavery in the infamous triangular trade in which goods, slaves and sugar circulated around the Atlantic between Britain, Africa and the West Indies. From the 1640s, English settlers in the West Indies began to produce sugar and imported slaves to work on their plantations and British manufactured goods. On Lovejoy's sugar packets - which were found and used by visitors in the cafes within the festival site - Bristol was located within these circuits of sugar, tobacco, cocoa, tea, spices, rum, slaves and sugar. She also produced a postcard which mapped the sites where the sugar packets were available on to the plan of the Festival and so made this dockside geography speak of the overlooked but central issue of oppression within Bristol's history of imperial and commercial success.
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