An 1826 political cartoon pokes fun at abolitionists. Credit: VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images
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Can it be 12 years since Barack Obama talked up ‘the arc of history’ in his acceptance speech? In paraphrasing Dr King, who said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, Obama made perhaps the most famous latter-day recap of the Whig View of History.
The Whig View is the premise that history has a direction. It’s the narrative of Our Island Story. From the Chartists to the Suffragettes, history was a struggle. Then we got some more rights, or social housing grants, or gas cookers, or online hate speech laws, and the arc moved on. Progress is inevitable.
The first problem with the Whig View Of History is, of course, that it is bollocks. A Pole born in 1908 would be wondering where exactly this arc was up to as he sputtered his last. A woman born in Nanking that same year would be even more baffled. With his presidential memoirs on the shelves this week and Trump seemingly ousted, Obama would probably argue that the arc is finally back on track. Thank god for that.
But the second problem is that the View robs us of the psychology to deal with history at all. It makes history into an ‘us’ who triumph over a ‘them’, thereby absolving the ‘us’ of all responsiblility.
Take, for instance, slavery. After the Summer Of Slave, the progressive Left, who would normally be the biggest fans of Whig History — of Peterloo and Suffragettes — have been pulling things down, putting plaques under plaques, and arguing for a reckoning with our past. The problem is, the five white, male BLM activists who rolled Edward Colston into the Bristol Harbour clearly identified as the inheritors of Wilberforce, but in doing so, their historical cosplay lost sight of the fact they were also the inheritors of so many others, not least Edward Colston
The true psychological complexity of the slave era comes to life in Michael Taylor’s efficient and detailed new book, The Interest: How The British Establishment Resisted The Abolition Of Slavery. He makes the under-appreciated point that when William Wilberforce sat in the Commons in 1807, tears streaming down his face as his bill passed into law, he had in fact only banned the slave trade. For 800,000 trapped on plantations in the West Indies, each day still began at six with the sound of the conch, graduated to the sound of the whip and the chain, every day, until nine in the evening, for a further 26 years.
So deeply enmeshed was slavery in the times, so powerful were its vested interests, that even the great lions of abolition were in fact all nervous gradualists, anxious not to ruffle many feathers. It is the second battle, which lasted until 1833, that the book covers. It has its heroes: Thomas Fowell Buxton,Thomas Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay. More interesting are the villains, occasionally because of outrageous cruelty, but just as often because they are almost comically blithe.
Throughout, the forces of Big Slave have the nation in their grip, bound with a tithe on every barrel of sugar brought from the West Indies — money that affords the plantation owners a £20,000 annual marketing budget to promote the titular Interest in the press and politics. This was lobbying, pure and simple. As detailed and devious as anything Bell Pottinger ever cooked up, served with much the same shrug of corporate amorality. Thus, for every Anti-Slavery Monthly Review, there are plenty of journals like the popular Quarterly Review, in which Regency Richard Littlejohns bash out punchy jeremiads against the wet snowflakes of abolitionism.
The Interest even has its own books, like Michael Scott Tom Cringle’s Log, a kind of anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin of homilies to bucolic plantation life that the likes of Anthony Trollope, Robert Southey and Coleridge all reckoned had serious literary chops. Meanwhile, the Lords is stuffed with slaveholders — as is the Anglican pulpit — and, because most Britons have never even met a black man, much less a slave, the people fall time and again for the propaganda of the Interest. In a famous cartoon, “John Bull Taking a Clear View of the Negro Slavery Question”, George Cruikshank depicted a gullible Briton looking through telescopes at an idyllic West Indies, with an abolitionist obscuring the lens with fake depictions of slavery.
Taylor tries to structure the story as an arc: the earnest Buxton and dour Macaulay getting there in the end. The end, when it comes, is deus ex machina. It’s the Great Reform Act of 1832, happening just off-stage, that breaks the back of the slaveholders’ cartel and allows for the first anti-slavery majority in the Commons.
The slaves are free; a Whig view would say “and thus ended a dark chapter in our national life…“. But this implicitly puts us on the side of the Macaulays, when in fact the value of a book like The Interest is that it puts us equally in the shoes of the George Cannings and the George Wilson Bridges.
Canning was a great statesman, a wise politician, who, in 1824, gave perhaps the most racist address ever to echo across the despatch box. Freed slaves, he argued, would be physically strong yet morally uneducated — a challenge to the emancipator, who, like Dr Frankenstein, “recoils from the monster which he has made”. Even Mary Shelley, a right-on woman who moved in right-on circles — in many ways the Dolly Alderton of her day — was merely flattered by the namecheck, telling a friend: “Canning paid a compliment to Frankenstein in a manner sufficiently pleasing to me.”
In his opposition to emancipation, Canning was joined, often for quite different reasons, by figures as grand as Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and the future prime minister William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy slave owner. Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently canonised by Pope Francis, called on slaves to be content with their situation.
There’s something darkly comical about the whole Regency universe — Terry Gilliam’s Brazil comes to mind. All these eminences stood around arguing the toss over whether a slave should be allowed access to missionaries, whether the Bible merely forbids slave selling or slave owning too. Yet this is the Britain to which we are all inheritors. The problem is, if you take a Whig view, you end up inheritors of only half of the ‘we’: we ‘the people’.
Ironically enough, this stance plays into precisely the sense of exceptionalism the Left despises in the Right: the sense that ‘we’ did the right thing in the end. Over the summer, the standard riposte on the Right to BLM’s charges became “well the British were the ones who abolished slavery first“. But as The Interest shows, even that limited defence is flawed — the ‘us’ who abolished it was far smaller than the ‘us’ who defended it. Looking back, abolitionism was a rat king of issues that were nothing to do with the actual issues. And most ordinary people didn’t care either way.
Plus, even the ‘we’ we might like to associate with turns out to be subject to the dismal world views of its time.
When non-white guests came to dine at Wilberforce’s society, Taylor reminds us, they had to sit at the other end of the table, behind a screen. Macaulay deplored “miscegenation”, and the anti-slavery barrister George Stephen announced he would not help a family of “halfcastes”. Who could have predicted none would have the mores of a 2020 Goldsmiths grad student?
In an epilogue written in light of this summer, Taylor states that he was initially resistant to the downing of the Colston statue, but changed his mind, because it has allowed us to reckon with this part of our past. He calls Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes “notorious“, and agrees with the Caribbean regional body Caricom’s recent demands for reparations from Britain.
He goes on to say that:
It is only by white Britons understanding the systemic oppression and brutality with which Britain treated Africa and the Caribbean that white Britons can understand how black Britons may not feel ‘at home’ today. I am not immune from this criticism: I must learn more, I must do better.
In other words, not even writing an entire book tracing the cruelties of life in colonial Jamaica can discharge you. It’s the same quicksand of unfulfillable obligation that took over many of our supposed best minds this summer. Rather than take up his moral duty to hold onto both the crime and the context, Taylor seems game for a finger-wagging from his own internal activist telling him to “educate yourself”. What hope is there for the rest of us?
As ideology has given way to managerialism, history teaching in British schools has become ever more Whiggish. It’s easy to sweep everything up into a grand arc towards ‘better’ — a secular morality of niceness. But it’s the optical illusion of hindsight to connect only those dots that resulted in better. Teaching it that way in turn breeds a false confidence in our ability to sniff out “better” in the present. The message of The Interest is as not so much “slavery is bad”, as that our capacity for selfish cognitive dissonance is almost infinite. That’s the gap we needed it to fill in.
Doing so requires some empathy for both sides. But the paradox of Whiggism is that to litigate history is to refuse to consider it at all.
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Subscribe“The problem is, the five white, male BLM activists who rolled Edward Colston into the Bristol Harbour clearly identified as the inheritors of Wilberforce”
They were no such thing. I live in Bristol, and recognised a couple of them. They’re just typical under-employed over-excited Stokes Croft white middle class dreadlock-wearing cokehead morons.
Made me laugh.
Chaque nuage a une ligne argentée.
Normal trustifarians then.
I had an interaction with one of the five once, during the ridiculous anti-Tesco riots in, I think, 2011. He was sitting in The Canteen, the quintessential Stokes Croft hipster bar, talking voluble with his hipster chums, and every other word was either ‘like’ or ‘fvcking’. I got a bit fed up with having to listen to this, and looked directly at him and said ‘fvcking fvcking fvcking fvcking fvcking’. He looked very embarrassed and went rather quiet.
His essay must have been like fvcking awful
spaking of fvcking offal…
Haha!
nice story…have you any published fiction of note?
Were they ever prosecuted? The Chief Constable, one Andy Marsh as I recall, seemed very reluctant.
Andy Marsh is indeed an absolute woke git. As far as I recall, the statue vandals were discharged with a ridiculous woke version of restorative justice: something along the lines of having to make a contribution to a BLM affiliate, and write a short essay about their feelings about slavery. I cannot be alone in feeling trolled as a Bristolian citizen and council tax payer
In the ‘good old days’ they would have got seven years indentured servitude in the West Indies, if they we’re lucky.
and there it is…the truth behind so many comments on these threads.
a longing for the ‘good old days’
Did you not have any as a young girl?
How very sad.
Don’t they do punctuation on Mt Hood? Or are you ESN?
and right on cue a RWNJ to make my point
Translate please, I haven’t a clue what that means.
Are you perchance being an insolent toad? Most unbecoming of female of the species, even one from Oregon.
I gather Oregon is slight larger than the UK, but with a population of only 4 million. That could be bliss, unless they are all sad creatures like yourself.
What went wrong?
your ad hominem is noted
Touché.
Would you prefer Left Wing Nut Job? (LWNJ).
Nope. A longing for an education full of history and culture, not narrow woke narratives and propaganda.
O tempora! O mores!
Sic Gloria Transit Mundi.
Once upon a time I was attending a meeting of the Bristol Uni philosophy dept, when the person speaking uttered the immortal line “there are tiers of administration”. A sort of light bulb flashed inside my head, and I heard myself saying “the Latin translation of that phrase is of course ‘sunt lacrimae rerum'”. Dead silence around the room, and then everyone started tittering, and someone said “a double pun in Latin!”
Today there would be complete silence, soon followed by outrage!
so much ad hominem, so little meaning.
The end of slavery was resisted in Africa also, where Africans had been selling millions of African into slavery ( mostly to Spanish and Portuguese South America). They obviously kept things going until the Royal navy Put an end to it. It was a long and costly struggle throughout the nineteenth. Its a pity that people like David Lammy cannot bring themselves to admit it was a trade with Africans as willing and enthusiastic partners. A million Africans died at the hands of African on the way to the slave ports where all the middle men and stevedores were also African. The slave trade simply could not have worked without Africas complicity.
The African slave trade started hundreds of years before Europeans turned up. The trade in slaves from sub Saharan Africa to the Arab world started in the 7th Century (or thereabouts). By most estimates more slaves were traded on this route than the Atlantic route. The Arab slave trade continued into the early 20th Century.
Africans had been slave traders long before Europeans arrived in the 16th Century.
While we ended slavery Africans are still at it with 7 in every 1000 Africans as slaves right now. Why dont we do something about that. Im sure if we tried to the left would somehow see it as racist or possibly “white Saviour complex”
Of course they can’t accept that Africans were involved, that would shoot their entire narrative down.
Slavery hasn’t ended in Africa. Pygmies are held as slaves by Bantu masters in Congo to this day, and no one does anything about it. The BBC made a programme about the Congo a couple of years ago, and described this relationship as “friendly” with no mention that these people are treated as chattel.
Of course everything is better today. Over my lifetime (65 years) I can see how everything became better. Children no longer die of childhood diseases. Children no longer cower in fear of being beaten. Dentistry is a miracle of pain-free treatment that can ensure that you can chew on, and enjoy, healthy food to the end of your life. We have miraculous, instantaneous access to information, and the latest research on any subject. But it all happened gradually, so we hardly notice. Above all, there is the comfort that everything does get better in the end. There is nothing wrong with “gradualism.” It is the better option. It is the difference between water gradually finding its way downstream to irrigate all the farms, or a dam-burst that destroys everything in its wake. But anti-gradualists prefer the dam-burst. It is spectacular, the destruction allows them to rebuild a society in their own image and to their own advantage; and there is glory and looting to be had. Gradualism would have ensured a prosperous, peaceful Africa. South Africa could have continued to be the breadbasket of Africa and the economic engine of Africa, with gradually more Africans in leadership and business. The instantaneous hand-over is satisfyingly spectacular, with deified heroes like Mandela, while the poor continued to be the same poor, only the rich and powerful change names and skin-colour. Only these new overlords feel entitled, and can act without the world’s scrutiny and opprobrium while they loot and enrich themselves and oppress people (which is OK, if they are people of your own race) until there is nothing left for anybody else.
For instance, The Black Empowerment Act in South Africa. As a White person, I have to get a certificate of exemption in order to be able to make a living. This is the request from one of the publishers for whom I do freelance work:
“According to the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Act, we are required to collect information on the B-BBEE status of all companies and individuals with whom we do business. In order to comply with its terms, we are asking for B-BBEE certificates from all our business partners, including freelance workers.
You may be thinking, ‘I don’t have a B-BBEE certificate and I am an individual, not a business.’ However, the B-BBEE Act considers individuals to be enterprises.
If you do not have a valid B-BBEE certificate and your annual revenue is less than R10 million, we request that you complete an affidavit, which is used in place of a B-BBEE certificate. The official form of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) should be used. We are sending the form with this letter, and it is also available from the DTI website:
How to fill in the form:
“¢ Fill in your name and identity number in the space provided at the top of the first page.
“¢ Under clause 2:
o Next to ‘Enterprise Name’, fill in your name again.
o Leave the space next to ‘Trading Name’ blank.
o Next to ‘Registration Number’, fill in your ID number again.
o Next to ‘Enterprise Physical Address’, fill in your street address.
o Next to ‘Type of Entity’, write ‘Individual’.
o Next to ‘Nature of Business’, write ‘Author’.
“¢ Under clause 3:
o The first bullet point: If you are a black, Indian or coloured individual, your ‘enterprise’ is 100% black-owned. If not, it is 0%.
If you are any good at what you do, you would not need to rely on the colour of your skin to get work. After 30 years of Black rule, why would anyone still need this leg-up to compete against white individuals? Rest assured, this is only to benefit the already rich and powerful Blacks. Ordinary, regular people, of any colour, just want to get on with their lives and are not even aware what is being done in their name, supposedly to “benefit” them. I was born here, as were my ancestors going back to the 1600s. We’ve never had a choice to “go back home” like the English settlers. And yet, I have to get special exemption to be able to earn a living, because of the colour of my skin.
wow
The time for gradualism in South Africa would have been in 1948. However the “gradualism” that the National Party gave was in the opposite direction, ie increasingly to entrench white privilege and power until they were forced to yield.
The one sided history race baiting drivel pushed by some people of the alledged ‘left’ should be of grave concern to us all.
I’m all up for genuine warts and all history, but we look at one culture with a harsh spotlight whilst the others are through rose-tinted spectacles.
There is an element here similar to the criticism of Israel. Now Israel rightly gets some criticism for it’s often appalling human rights record, but what about Russia, China, Pakistan, pretty much every Arab nation etc.
There’s only ever 2 answers:
1. The critic doesn’t like ‘Israel’ becase it’s Jewish
2. More common, the critic think Israel should be ‘better’ than the other countries, because ummm? A version of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
This happens when looking at history constantly, when they’re not denying reality altogether.
If a country founded in the 1940s as a religious state has been at war over land, has developed nuclear weapons clandestinely and actually persecutes a minority religion by state law it should be subject to some kind of academic boycott. Unfortunately Pakistan doesnt face that kind of criticism from the liberal west elite. Those critics think Israel is white and therefore at the bottom of the the list. Most of them are as brown as the other semitic “palastinians”.
If a cluster of religious states has as its stated or implied goal the destruction of another religious state in its midst, where is the academic boycott for that? It is fascinating how the Arab world gets a pass, but it’s also predictable in giving tacit approval to one of the world’s most enduring hatreds.
There is nothing more comical than the attempt to portray Muslims as the victim in a game of “minority persecution.” Really? How do Jews, Christians, and others fare in some of the Islamic nations? For that matter, how do Muslims of the ‘wrong’ sect fare?
“It is fascinating how the Arab world gets a pass…”
even more fascinating is to see members of a political class and ideology; whose antecedents drew arbitrary lines in the sand a hundred years ago; took realpolitik action from 1945-48 causing much blood and treasure to be wasted; make chippy criticisms of those who want to avoid making the same mistakes today.
learning from the past is a good thing only when the lesson is informed by empirical facts on the ground.
All those arbitrary lines were Ottoman Empire provinces.
ahhh…no…from the Daily Beast Published Apr. 14, 2017
Gertrude [Bell] of Arabia, the Woman Who Invented Iraq
MIDEAST MISCHIEF
Gertrude of Arabia rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, drew new borders”and gave us today’s ungovernable country.
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist who explored, mapped, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making due to her knowledge and contacts, built up through extensive travels in Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia.
Actually he’s right, Iraq consisted of 3 former Ottoman vilayets, Bell or no Bell. And it’s almost split up along those lines
“almost” only counts in horseshoes, grenades and nuclear war…and the fact that portions of what is modern day Iraq were vilayets under Ottoman rule is besides the point which is modern day Iraq came into being by an arbitrary combination made by the British Empire created Iraq and the ongoing international quagmire it is today.
“Unfortunately Pakistan doesnt [sic] face that kind of criticism from the liberal west elite.”
yet another unfounded assertion from a closeted anti-semite conservative would-be-aristocrat who points an accusing finger to shift attention from his own perfidy.
They used to say the same about south africa.. and look what happened…
We should expect better of UnHerd than this bog standard woke-left self-flagellation. The comments below show more balance than anything in the Haynes polemic.
so you are saying the truth hurts and rather than detailing the inaccuracies you perceive you respond with ad hominem.
I disagree, Ralph. It is useful to be reminded of unpleasant facts. The anti-abolitionist caricature alone, which I had never seen before, and Gavin’s explanation of it, made it worth reading. Perhaps he could have had more balance. William Pitt the Younger and Wilberforce were very good friends and Pitt nearly succeeded in abolishing the slave trade when he was PM. Perhaps that could have been mentioned. However,, there are lots of biographies and hagiographies of the important figures who contributed to ending slavery. Gavin has a right to remind us of the other side.
Oh thank God, we can go back to hating ourselves again. For a time I thought there might be something we could take pride in, but no, not even the abolition of slavery. Gavin’s next article: “Some people in Britain supported HITLER”, so take that!
Are we going to perpetually re-litigate slavery? it’s bad enough that the New York Times got away with its ridiculous 1619 project or that the left persists in judging actions of the past through sensibilities of the present. It’s even worse when the same left not only pretends that the US was the only nation to have slavery, but that it exists nowhere else today.
The ugly reality is that the slaves got the least worst of the available options. The other possibilities were to be killed outright or to be enslaved by the conquering tribe. Perverse as it sounds, the people here making all this noise about what happened then are the lucky ones. How many would even be alive today if not for an ancestor being brought here?
Yes, slavery is horrible. And? We had a big war about it. It has also existed for about as long as man has, continuing to this day. Yet, the pretense is that one nation and one alone invented it, cultivated it, and perhaps still clings to it in some way. This is intellectually dishonest and patently offensive. That the statue crowd went after abolitionists only confirms that the American education system is either failing or purposely malignant. Neither of those is encouraging.
“…the left persists in judging actions of the past through sensibilities of the present…”
pardon me… but the right [but wrong] with their rear view mirror conservative ideology understand and respond to everything based on judgments and policy formed in the past.
Common sense is timeless. The Left is currently wo(k)efully lacking in this regard…
For all the heat and hot air of the BLM movement, the only thing I have learned about slavery that I never knew before, is: 1. Britain paid Portugal to end slavery’ 2. Ethiopia only abolished slavery in 1936. Yes, that is 1936.
History is not easily and neatly appropriated to fit one particular perspective of the past – as this excellent article demonstrates. This is particularly so when history is imbued with an instrumentality for moral or self-righteous uplift of a particular segment of our body politic (the ‘woke’). To our shame, there are many intelligent people out there who really ought to know better but are abetting this intellectual lobotomization of our history because it doesn’t pay to speak up (substantive critique in the US 1619 Project only being done my small number of historians, most are silent).
And the lack of self-awareness in the smug moralising of the woke is almost comic: who believes that our 23rd Century descendants will look with anything other than unmitigated horror at the contemporary practice of abortion as birth control? And it was the Evangelicals that protested slavery the most in the 18th C, just as they are with abortion in the 21st…
I don’t see what he’s driving at….He informs us that after abolition, British society was racist, and `that slave owners and Britain continued to profit until slave emancipation. He then seems to say that the self-congratulation of the abolitionists was therefore unwarranted, and this then leads to a charge of hypocrisy directed solely against the left that he stretches to the current day. This is very tenuous and fabricated. Surely the ending of the slave trade had to precede the ending of slavery, and the fact it took a few decades is what happens when the power and might of the Establishment – and the slave owners – had to be challenged and eventually bought off (or fought against in the USA) And is that not a perfect example of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice?
It seems that the self-evident of human history is becoming fair game for reactionary revisionism under the knee-jerk response to perceived ‘wokeism’
I had much the same thought. It is also noteworthy that the northern working classes of in the cotton mills supported the abolitionists in the United States despite the direct economic impact on then of the blockade of the Confederacy. The arc may not be perfect when examined close up, but its direction is undeniable. Hurrah for Whig history, I say.
The Manchester Guardian on the other hand…
Well done. What he doesn’t say is that since the 1790s the establishment had been firmly Tory, and that abolition had always been Foxite Whig policy since the 1780s, though they were often lukewarm about it – they had to juggle whether to go for Catholic emancipation (which the Tories were eventually forced to pass), Reform, or abolition first. Moreover saying that ‘most people’ supported slavery but that it was only a reform and extension of the franchise that got abolition through is an implied contradiction.
“…a perfect example of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice…”
nice to see your inner SJW becoming woke…better late than never.
“Because they view history in a context-free, partisan, balkanised way, where a simple story of good and evil holds.”
That pretty much sums up the agenda of the current crop of partisan historical revisionists.
They aren’t interested in learning from history – they want to use history to validate their Injustice IOUs.
It is social justice alchemy: turn Guilt into Gold.
In many ways it’s a laughable pile of crap but IMO it is causing mental atrophy in our unwitting young folk by depriving them of the critical mental exercise they would otherwise get by examining and attempting to understand about who we were then, who we think we are now and how we draw a line between the two.
“…the current crop of partisan historical revisionists.”
as opposed to current crop of partisan know nothings, flat earthers and willfully ignorant.
you know who you are.
What else do you have apart from:
1. An unjustified moral superiority complex
2. Ad Hominem threats and insults
I’m stumped by Eve Hedderwick Turner’s choice to play Anne Boleyn in Fable Pictures’ Channel Five drama series. She touts black actress Jodie Turner Smith’s ability to express a “feminine insight” into Anne’s struggle against a weak monarch and his misogynistic toadies. My question: couldn’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) a white actress play the role? At the time, England was deep into the slave trade. How to explain much less exonerate a black queen? Is this purely artistic license? If so, why couldn’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) white folks who claim genealogical ties to Anne be offended? If so, are they racist? How about white actresses who can present a feminist insight just as well? Flip the coin: Matthew McConaughey as George Washington Carver… I’m all for racial equality but let’s quit making white people squirm with guilt and shame over a “white-washed” historical depiction of slavery in the process.
This issue has nothing to do with slavery. BLM and similar organizations are full of Marxists who are excited at the opportunity of finding a vehicle to tear down the Institutions and the History it so despises in our Country, Britain. And they must be so surprised that they are meeting so little resistance from a pathetically weak and wet establishment whilst understanding that their agenda would be promoted by the BBC, Channel 4 and the intelligentsia.
If you wanted a balanced argument about slavery you would mention that it has been around since the beginning of time, before the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians and before the English were discovered in the Roman slave markets by Pope Gregory the Great in around 580. (After which he Augustine and 40 Monks to convert the Angels with dirty faces from their Germanic Heathenism.)
And you would then go onto say that just about every group of people have at one time in History felt the brutality of slavery. But interestingly everyone else just gets on with life, doesn’t cling to victimhood and doesn’t go around pulling down statues and demanding the re-writing of History!
And when talking about Africa you would start by saying, traditional forms of servitude were endemic in Africa and Asia at that time and in places today still remain.
You would say that the British lead the abolition of slavery and could do so due to the might of the British Empire and particularly its Royal Navy and so the British Empire served a very good purpose. But even then there was trafficking so the Royal Navy placed a permanent squadron from 1808 to 1870 to try to intercept slave traders off West Africa-sometimes as much as 1/6th of their ships. Many of the sailors died of tropical diseases whilst on duty.
The British had to pay off the Spanish, Portuguese and most of all the African tribes. They signed 45 treaties with African rulers to stop the traffic at source. However the African Rulers were very reluctant to give it up, threatening to kill all their slaves so Britain was forced to pay compensation and then help them with other trades like palm oil to ween them off the slave trade.
You would note that before slavery, in Africa the Dahomey used to kill large numbers of their own people every year,until they realized it was more profitable to sell them. African tribes and Kingdoms were heavily involved in providing slaves including the Oyo,Igala, Kaabu, Asanteman, the Aro Confederacy and Imbangala war bands.
Stanley(and no doubt Livingstone) discovered the slave markets where women slaves were provided by Dugumbe & Tagamoio and Swahili traders who sold them to the Sultan of Zanzibar off the coast of modern day Tanzania .
Ashanti on the Gold Coast were particularly brutal with many Humans being sacrificed annually until they too discovered they could earn some money selling them.
You would also say that that Arabs dragged millions of slaves across the Sahara where it is believed at least 1 million died.
You would say that in 1843 British subjects were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the World.
You would also mention, just to be balanced, that in America, as well as white people, the Native Indian tribes of Cherokee, Chikasaw, Choctaw,Seminole and Creek had black slaves.
So in conclusion, you would realise, that probably all people in History have been at one time or another slaves. You would realise that the profits of the African Slave Trade were divided by people of all colours and Nations and so if you want to go after the British then don’t be hypocritical, just go the Hague and issue a class action suit against the Whole World!!
But it’s not about slaves is it, it is about Marxists trying to destroy our institutions and our very proud History! If we had tougher leaders they would have been stopped at the first march “¦”¦”¦
“BLM and similar organizations are full of Marxists…”
you and yours are the only remaining Marxists on the planet so imbued with willful ignorance that you are trapped in the substrate of argument made more than half a century ago.
Corporate leaders, right wing politicians and policy makers are the only remaining Marxists as they utilize Marxist analysis to inform their decisions making and policy choices.
The only Marxism extant today is economic analysis utilized by capitalists in Russia, China, The City, NYC and Greenwich, Conn.
Thanks to Frederick the Great the market for West Indian sugar cane was about to be succeeded by European sugar beet, and thus the whole system was doomed. It was also very inefficient compared to say ” hire and fire”.
Fortunately its abolition allowed millions to be redeployed in the great railway boom, that saw the opening of the 112mile London to Birmingham Railway in 1838.
Sugar beet did not come to dominate the UK market until well after at the abolition of slavery. Tariff reduction made Cuban and Brazilian sugar competitive (slave labour remained legal there), and the smaller island economies went into long-term decline. I am not sure what redeployment you might be referring to, unless it is the emigration of West Indians to the US and the UK in the 20th Century. And it’s ‘beet’, as in -root, not ‘beat’. The latter is what the slave-owners did rather a lot to their slaves, by the way.
Many thanks, I stand corrected!
I should have stated clearly that the redeployment I mentioned was
the very generous cash compensation given to the former slave owners on Abolition. I seem to recall that the Gladstone family did rather well.
“… the 112mile London to Birmingham Railway…” was built with slave labor?
who knew?
That would have been interesting. In fact, as you know, ‘Paddies’ were cheaper and much better.
thanks for making clear who and what you truly are
Gavin might have mentioned that Abraham Lincoln drew inspiration from the work of English abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. There is a fragment of speech one can find by googling “Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States” where he mentions both men by name. It was written for his 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas, and may have been part of one of his speeches in the campaign, but was not part of a speech he gave in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It seems that Lincoln saw abolition in America on very much the same lines as in the British Empire, but events unfolded otherwise. The work of the English abolitionists certainly hasted American abolition along.
Its forms and degrees vary but, the essential thing, the reification and exploitation of human labor, is the basis of the ascendent economic paradigm since the 17th century which continues apace to this day, and of which someone once sternly proclaimed TINA.
there is hope on the horizon as the merger of AI and quantum computing will soon create a new ascendent economic paradigm sans human labor.
And after ‘The Great Reset’ the ‘arc of history’ will go backwards: for the 99.9% life will be slavery at little more than pre-(1st) industrial revolution level.
Today’s slaves are wage slaves “increasingly condemned to peonage.
I have heard there’s hope that “the merger of AI and quantum computing will soon create a new ascendent economic paradigm sans human labor.”
Sounds good. Could you explain how this would work please?
it won’t, as you well know
Sorry – didn’t realise you did irony as well.
sorry you don’t understand the meaning of “irony”
your ad hominem is noted
as is your self parody
ad hominem” directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining… care to try again?
It was directed against me.