IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 260

In the eighteenth century, ships sailing from Bristol, London and Liverpool carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas. Historians estimate that British vessels transported well over three million people in the course of the trade, and that its profits seeped into banking, insurance and shipbuilding. Yet within two decades of the first organised protest, Britain had outlawed the traffic, and within another thirty years it had abolished slavery itself in most of its colonies. That transformation, achieved against determined opposition from merchants and planters, has long fascinated historians.

The campaign began among the Quakers, who had opposed the slave trade since the seventeenth century. In 1783 they presented a petition to Parliament, and four years later a group of twelve men, most of them Quakers, formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Two members gave the movement its early direction. Granville Sharp, a scholar who had already acted for enslaved people brought to England, handled publicity and the law, while Thomas Clarkson, a young clergyman, took on the research. Clarkson travelled the country collecting testimony from sailors, surgeons and former captains, and assembled the evidence that campaigners would use for the next twenty years. He also gathered the measurements of slave ships and of the equipment used on board.

The parliamentary leader was William Wilberforce, the member for Yorkshire, an evangelical Christian who had been urged to take up the cause by his friend William Pitt, the prime minister. Wilberforce spoke against the trade for the first time in 1789 and returned to the subject in almost every session that followed. The campaigners also worked outside Parliament. Formerly enslaved writers published accounts of their lives, most famously Olaudah Equiano, whose narrative appeared in 1789. Josiah Wedgwood produced a seal showing a kneeling African with the words 'Am I not a man and a brother?', which supporters wore as a badge, and thousands of families gave up sugar from the plantations.

Progress was painfully slow. In 1791 Wilberforce's first bill was defeated by 163 votes to 88, and a year later the House of Commons agreed to gradual abolition, only for the measure to be blocked in the House of Lords. That year hundreds of petitions reached Parliament, in the first mass campaign of its kind. Then came the French Revolution and, from 1793, war with France. For a decade, anyone who criticised the slave trade risked being accused of disloyalty, and the planters' representatives in Parliament made full use of that argument.

The breakthrough came by a different route. In 1806 a bill banning British subjects from carrying enslaved people to the colonies of foreign powers passed with little resistance, on the grounds that it struck at the trade of Britain's enemies. Wilberforce and his allies then moved against the trade with the British colonies themselves. After a debate in which both sides appealed to national interest rather than morality, the bill received royal assent on 25 March 1807 and came into force on 1 May. From that date British ships were forbidden to carry enslaved people, and captains who did so faced heavy fines. The act did not make slavery illegal; it ended the shipment of enslaved people in British ships.

Enforcement was another matter. From 1808 the Royal Navy maintained a squadron off the coast of West Africa, boarding suspected slavers and taking them before courts in Sierra Leone. Naval patrols seized hundreds of ships and freed thousands of Africans on board, but the trade did not stop. Captains sailed under other flags, threw their captives overboard when challenged, or used faster vessels. Suppressing the traffic at sea required treaties with other nations, and Portugal, Spain, France and the United States accepted restrictions only gradually and incompletely.

Slavery itself remained lawful in the British colonies, and the abolitionists turned to that question next. Their opponents argued that immediate emancipation would ruin the plantations; the campaigners replied that a system resting on the ownership of people could not be reformed. A new Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1823, and after a further decade of petitioning the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. It did not take effect until 1 August 1834, and it contained compromises that still provoke anger. The government paid twenty million pounds to slave owners as compensation for the loss of their property, a sum funded by a loan that was not finally repaid until 2015, while the enslaved received nothing.

In most colonies, former slaves were also required to serve an apprenticeship of several years, a form of unpaid labour that was ended early, in 1838, after sustained protest. Who deserved the credit for abolition has been debated ever since. Victorian accounts placed Wilberforce and his parliamentary allies at the centre of the story; later historians gave more weight to Clarkson's research and to the mass petitioning that made abolition a popular cause.

More recently, scholars have stressed the resistance of enslaved people themselves, including the uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791 and repeated revolts in Jamaica, and have argued that planters accepted emancipation partly because they feared worse. The bicentenary of 1807 brought official apologies and new exhibitions, along with complaints that the enslaved were still being presented as the grateful recipients of British benevolence. What the campaign shows is not simply that moral argument can prevail, but that it usually needs organisation, evidence and popular pressure.

A medieval tapestry is not simply a picture made of thread. It is a woven cloth in which coloured weft threads are packed so tightly that they conceal the warp, producing a surface that can carry figures, animals and inscriptions across several metres. Tapestries hung in the halls of kings, the choirs of cathedrals and the houses of wealthy merchants, where they were usually seen from a distance. Most were designed to be read across a room rather than examined closely. They kept out draughts, displayed their owner's wealth and, because they could be rolled up and carried on carts, served as portable treasure.

The weaving was done on one of two kinds of loom. On a high-warp loom the threads are stretched vertically and the weaver stands behind the cloth, working from the back and checking the front in a mirror. On a low-warp loom the warp lies horizontally, the weaver works from above and the design lies beneath the threads. In both cases the full-size pattern, known as a cartoon, was placed where the weaver could see it. Because the weft covers the warp, tapestry is slow work: two or three weavers might finish about a square metre in a month, and a large set could take years. Where two colours meet, the weavers left small slits, which are one of the ways in which specialists recognise tapestry.

The materials were chosen for durability as much as for beauty. The warp was usually strong wool, sometimes linen, while the weft might combine wool with silk and with gold or silver thread wrapped around a silk core. English wool was prized across Europe for its quality. Colour came from plant dyes: woad for blue, madder for red and weld for yellow, with other substances for intermediate shades. The expense was enormous; a single tapestry could cost as much as a comfortable house, and sets were bought, inherited, pawned and given as diplomatic gifts.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the leading workshops were in the towns of Flanders and northern France. Arras, Tournai, Brussels, Lille and Valenciennes all supported large numbers of weavers organised into guilds, which regulated training, quality and the marking of finished pieces. Training began with a long apprenticeship, and only masters could set up a workshop of their own. Arras was so dominant that the word 'arras' entered English as a general term for a hanging, long after the town's own workshops had declined. Brussels later took the lead, and in the seventeenth century the French crown established a state manufactory at the Gobelins in Paris.

Historians reconstruct this world from documents rather than from the tapestries alone. Household inventories list hangings room by room; account books record payments to weavers; contracts specify the subject, the size, the deadline and the price; wills distribute sets among heirs. Such records are uneven. Few medieval cartoons survive, since the pattern was cut into strips for reuse or simply wore out, and many tapestries have disappeared altogether, burnt for their gold thread or lost in revolutions. What remains is a fraction of what once hung on walls.

Scientific techniques add a different kind of evidence. Chemists can identify the dyes in a single fibre using high-performance liquid chromatography, and can distinguish a red made from madder from one made from an insect dye imported at great cost. This helps to date a piece and to detect later repairs, since a restorer's wool may carry dyes unavailable when the tapestry was woven. Some dyes fade far faster than others, so the colours on view today are not those the weavers saw. Radiocarbon dating of the wool is possible but rarely decisive: the results usually span several decades, and repairs using old wool can mislead.

The largest surviving medieval set shows both the scale of the achievement and the fragility of the evidence. The Apocalypse tapestry was commissioned by Louis I, Duke of Anjou, and woven in Paris in the 1370s and 1380s. It originally ran to about 140 metres and depicted scenes from the Book of Revelation. About 100 metres survive, and even those panels were cut up, reused and repaired before being reunited and put on display in Angers, where they are now shown in a gallery built for them inside the castle. They were given to the cathedral of Angers in the fifteenth century and have remained in the city ever since. The surviving sections have lost much of their original colour.

Who designed these works remains contested. Payments sometimes name a painter who supplied the cartoon, and art historians have tried to attribute designs to well-known artists on stylistic grounds, but such attributions are uncertain. The weavers themselves are usually anonymous, although guild rules and surviving marks show that they were expected to follow the cartoon closely. How much freedom they had, in choosing shades or simplifying details, is disputed; the balance probably varied between workshops and between one commission and the next.

Terminology causes further confusion. The Bayeux Tapestry, as it has been called since the eighteenth century, is not a tapestry at all but an embroidery: the design is stitched onto a plain linen ground rather than woven into it. The distinction matters, because the two techniques were practised by different people in different conditions. Historians of medieval textiles therefore spend a good deal of time defining their terms before they interpret what they see.

Every so often a literary executor faces the same awkward decision. A writer has died leaving a diary that is frank, vivid and often unkind; the family wants it kept in a drawer; a publisher is interested; and the letters left by the dead writer say nothing about what should happen next. The question is an old one, but it has become sharper as archives have grown and as digitisation has made anything published permanently available. Should a private diary be printed once its writer is gone?

The case for publication rests on the peculiar value of diaries as evidence. Letters, memoirs and official papers are written for an audience and shaped accordingly, whereas a diary kept for no one but its author is the nearest thing we have to a record of unguarded thought. Historians of the seventeenth century still depend heavily on Samuel Pepys, whose diary describes plague and fire with an immediacy no official document matches. Pepys wrote in a seventeenth-century system of shorthand that few later readers could follow, and left the manuscript, with his library, to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it remained unread until a nineteenth-century scholar broke the code. Nothing in the diary suggests that its author expected readers.

Against this stands the simple fact that the diarist did not consent. A diary is written on the assumption, rarely stated and always understood, that no one else will read it, and that assumption shapes what appears on the page. Removing it after the author's death is not a technicality; it means that the very frankness we value was produced by a confidence we have broken. The dead, it is true, cannot be hurt by what appears in print. But the writer's family, friends and lovers can be, and they have not consented either.

A common response is that the diarist's wishes should settle the matter. Sometimes they do: if a writer has asked that the notebooks be destroyed, or left instructions to that effect, the case for restraint is strong. But wishes are not always clear. Pepys said nothing about publication, and his bequest to a college could be read either way, as an act of preservation or as the disposal of a library. Silence is not consent, and it is not refusal either.

The strongest argument for publication is that a diary may become a document of events its author could not have foreseen. Anne Frank wrote in hiding in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, and died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Her father, Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive, published the diary in Dutch in 1947, having removed passages he judged too intimate, including remarks about his wife and about his daughter's developing body; fuller editions later restored them. Was he wrong to cut? He was protecting people he loved and a daughter who could not answer back. Yet every cut altered the record, and the complete text has proved more valuable to historians than the tidy version.

Delay is one answer to the conflict, though it is not neutral. Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf, published a selection of her diaries in 1953 as A Writer's Diary, and the complete diaries, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, appeared in five volumes between 1977 and 1984. The selection made Woolf's working life visible to readers and shaped how she was understood for a generation; the full text showed how much had been left out. Royal diaries raise a different version of the same problem. After Queen Victoria died in 1901, her daughter Princess Beatrice spent years copying out her mother's journals, and some of the original volumes were destroyed, so that scholars now rely in part on a copy edited by a member of the family.

Public life complicates the argument further. A politician, a general or a bishop exercises power over others, and a private record of what that person thought while doing so belongs to the public's understanding of events. Here the case for publication is at its strongest. It does not follow that everything must be printed. Material whose only function is to satisfy curiosity about a third party's private life can be left in the archive without any loss to history.

The law offers less guidance than people expect. Copyright in a diary passes to the writer's heirs, who can therefore prevent publication, but copyright protects a form of expression, not a confidence. The practical effect is that the decision usually rests with a family, which is precisely the party with the strongest reason to conceal. A fixed interval, long enough for the people mentioned to have died, is a rough but reasonable safeguard.

My own view is that there should be a strong presumption in favour of eventual publication. Diaries are among the few sources that record how people actually thought, and the arguments for keeping them hidden — embarrassment, family feeling, the impossibility of consent — are real but temporary, while the loss to the historical record is permanent. The right response to a difficult diary is not the fire or the locked drawer but an editor with judgement: publication after a decent interval, with the names of the living protected and the cuts stated openly. The dead cannot be embarrassed; the living can be, briefly. History cannot be replaced.