Category Archives: History

Now it is becoming the perhaps unexpected centre of a pan-Caribbean move to redress one of the great horrors of the 19th century: the transatlantic slave trade.

The 17th or the 18th perhaps, but not the 19th I think?

Similarly the Tea Party occurred because the British were defending the Dutch East Indian Company.

Who knew the English were defending the Dutch East India Company?

The English one perhaps, but the Dutch one?

Britain is being sued with France and the Netherlands by 14 Caribbean countries which are demanding what could be hundreds of billions of pounds in reparations for slavery.

The compensation for a tort is to put people back into the position they would have been before the wrong committed.

In what manner is the Caribbean worse off than West Africa?

Ed Miliband has urged his party to remember that the post-war Labour government achieved radical social change while also managing to run budget surpluses in a time of austerity.

The Labour leader urged party members concerned about his decision to accept coalition spending plans for 2015-16 to recognise that high day-to-day spending is not the only route to social justice and that Clement Attlee created the welfare state and NHS while also balancing the budget.

Of course, they created the NHS simply by nationalising all of the extant health care facilities.

But it is true that Major Atlee was running budget surpluses, yes.

Yes, indeed, the British Government did compensate slave owners when they abolished colonial slavery. Damn good thing they did too.

For it was the thing which got slavery abolished. Without the compensation it\’s extremely doubtful that it would have passed: and it certainly wouldn\’t have passed when it did.

The true scale of Britain\’s involvement in the slave trade has been laid bare in documents revealing how the country\’s wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished.

The previously unseen records show exactly who received what in payouts from the Government when slave ownership was abolished by Britain

Think through the flow of money for a moment. At the time the British State was largely supported by two sets of taxes. Those on the rich and those on commodities like, erm, tea, sugar and tobacco. The products, largely so, of that slave economy. The Government borrows money which it pays to free the slaves. It then collects the money again in taxes either from the rich or from those who use the products of that now ex-slave economy. And the original borrowing was largely from the sort of rich people who owned slaves anyway.

In the meantime, the slaves are free. Sounds like a reasonable enough plan to me.

And there\’s one truly terrible statistical fault here:

The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their \”property\” when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain\’s colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury\’s annual spending budget and, in today\’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.

\”Wage values\”, eh? So we\’ll take the highest possible measure of inflation over that period to use as our comparator, eh? Using a more standard CPI stylee measurement it would amount to some £1.4 billion in today\’s money. And all of the various amounts received by the various families should be reduced by the same proportion.

And finally, what is perhaps really important here.

Britain spent more in the years 1807 to the 1930s in the suppression of slavery than it earned in the profits from the slavery before that.

Finally finally: did slavery exist? Yup. Was it a bad thing? Yup. Did our forefathers abolish it? Yup. Good, eh?

Leave aside the green mummery at the end. A fascinating little discussion of the Chinese wheelbarrow.

And pondering the difference between the European and the Chinese wheelbarrows. I agree absolutely that the Chinese style one would have been useful in Europe. But I have a feeling that the design differences are due to their being made to perform different tasks (of course, with the possibility that their design differences meant that they were used for different tasks). I especially like the idea of the ones with sails. I could imagine making a modern version of those. Something like a windsurfing mast (although much smaller) attached to a modern lightweight  construction borrowing from modern baby buggies/unicycles perhaps.

The European wheelbarrow is very good indeed at what it does: ease of loading and unloading of entirely unpacked goods. It\’s very easy indeed (as compared to any other method at least, which is why we still use them) to shovel in sand, dirt, carry a few bricks whatever. And to dump them 50 or 100 yards away.

That\’s not what the Chinese wheelbarrow is good for nor what it is or was used for at all.

But I am, as above, entirely unsure which came first: the design flowing from different desired uses or the different designs stumbled upon leading to different uses.

Fossils of bacteria found in Australia are the oldest yet discovered anywhere on Earth and predate the formation of oxygen on our planet, new research claims.

Given that oxygen in the atmosphere is a product of life then clearly, life existed before oxygen in the atmosphere.

“Do you realise,” he exclaimed one day, “that from the time the Romans left Britain until the arrival of the American heiresses, this country was completely without central heating?”

I\’m not all that sure that I believe the whole tale but there we go.

Victor Kislyi, who made a fortune from the online game World of Tanks, is funding the search for Second World War Spitfires believed to have been buried in Burma.

But given Mr. Kislyi\’s background perhaps someone would like to whisper in his ear about a much more interesting little rumour. One that\’s been around for years.

Soviet forces in the Second World War did have their own legendary fighter planes, like the Yakovlev Yak. They even had some Spitfires, given to them by the British.

Again, that\’s not something I\’m all that sure about. Hurricanes, yes. Which is the basis of this interesting rumour. That up on the Murmansk peninsula are a number of said Hurricanes still in their packing crates. The Arctic convoys delivered them but they were never actually put into use. And there are, at least I\’m told there are, fewer Hurricanes flying today than there are Spitfires.

But it is just a rumour, heard around Moscow in the mid 1990s.

No, go on.

A baby could neither be enslaved, nor marched to the gas chamber alone. And so her mother had to carry her to both their deaths.

The leading voice in Britain denouncing the savage treatment of the Kenyan prisoners at the time was Enoch Powell, the supposed racist.

Calling us all middle class solves nothing

Hmm. And the example to be used?

In Georgian times, Jane Austen\’s family lived an impecunious life, on £210 a year, better off than 95% of the population but treated as \”the middle ranks\” – so richer than most but not as wealthy as the few.

By simple inflation that £210 is now £10,600. Which as an income for an entire family ain\’t much by present standards.

By income changes that £210 is now £160,000. Still in the top 5%, yes.

But look at the difference between the two numbers there, £10k and £160k. The reason we do say that we\’re all middle class now is because by any rational standard of historical experience we are all middle class. If not inordinately rich in fact.

Farmers first reached Orkney on boats that took them across the narrow – but treacherously dangerous – Pentland Firth from mainland Scotland. These were the people of the New Stone Age, and they brought cattle, pigs and sheep with them, as well as grain to plant and ploughs to till the land. The few hunter-gatherers already living on Orkney were replaced and farmsteads were established across the archipelago.

There are very few places and or peoples that have settled proper terra nullius. Entirely uninhabited regions.

Off the top of my head I can really only think of two: Maoris in New Zealand (and OK, all of the associated expansion across the Pacific Islands to Hawaii etc) and the Portuguese on Madeira. There\’s even significant doubt now as to whether the Amerinds were the first to the Americas via Siberia.

The point being that almost all of the \”it\’s our land, the invaders stole it from us\” stuff is in fact just one group of descendants of land thieves complaining about being usurped by a later set of such.

And yes, this does indeed describe such places as Southern Africa. The Bantu got there only marginally before the Dutch, indeed, for the area beyond the Fish River, afterwards. Hottentots (or perhaps we should call them Kung! now?) had the place before either: and Pygmies much of the area further north.

Or if you prefer: there\’s nothing unique about the European expansion of the past 500 years. The technology and the skin colour perhaps, but not much else.

The white palazzo-style building, which has 45 bedrooms, is being discreetly offered to a select group of wealthy international buyers.

A reported price tag of £300 million would smash Britain’s existing house-price record of £140 million, which was achieved on a 300 year-old house in Henley-on-Thames last year.

OK, vastly expensive palace in London. But is the expense actually unusual?

The asking price shows just how far adrift the London property market is from the rest of Britain. According to Halifax, the average house in the UK costs £160,250, meaning that whoever buys the mansion would be buying the equivalent of 1,872 typical homes.

The house seems very like one of the vast Ducal palaces more than anything else. The London palaces, not the country ones.

The question being, historically, was 2,000 times the cost an unusual multiple between such palaces and the average home? I have no idea but does anyone else?

I\’ve said this before and Fraser Nelson is saying it again.

By just about any measure you care to use the good old days are right now. More people are living better, richer and longer lives than has ever been true at any previous point in history.

What\’s that if it\’s not the good old days?

I\’m reading a history of Ancient Egypt. And there are two bits that would help me get a grasp on what I\’m reading, two bits that don\’t seem to be in the book.

One is the population, which I can find online. 1-5 million, dependent upon period.

But the other is the size of the fertile area. This is of course in three parts, the Delta, the Fayoum and the banks of the Nile itself. From what I\’m reading those bankside fertile areas could be very narrow. A hundred or two hundred metres perhas. And at times much wider.

But is there any estimate of what that fertile area amounted to in total? Not that it\’s important at all, but connecting the arable land area with the population would give an idea of real population density which is useful in imagining actual living conditions.

So, anyone know?

Ho hum.

Before this, such outbreaks would have remained localised, argues a provocative new book. But by then the \”scramble for Africa\” was under way and thousands of porters were crossing through the area. So it was, the authors claim, that colonisation by the European powers a century ago is responsible for unleashing HIV on the world.

And Spanish colonialism in the New World caused the syphilis/smallpox exchange, Mongol colonialism caused the Black Death and homo sapiens coming out of Africa killed the Neanderthals.

There\’s nothing strange about population movements causing epidemics. To blame \”colonialism\” is just to attatch at trendy tag to it all: any substantial amount of economic development is going to mean an increase in population movement and thus the spread, unfortunately, of hitherto unremarked diseases.

Private owners of capital used the state to force peasants – who, in the 14th century, worked about a quarter of hours that the average person does now – to work 12 hour days in factories.

We\’re supposed to believe that a peasant working in a subsistence economy works 10 hours a week are we? Assuming a 40 hour working week now.

Or given the average working year in the UK of something like 1500 hours, a peasant worked 375 hours a year? 7 hours a week, not even one full day\’s labour?

No, I think we can call bullshit on that one, don\’t you?

When they reached their destination, the church leaders got down on their knees and prayed. “This truly is a sacred place,” they said. Canterbury Cathedral, perhaps? Westminster Abbey, or Stonehenge? Not quite. It was a branch of Boots. In Barnsley town centre.

The spies were then given a choice of betraying their Nazi leaders or facing the firing squad.

For hanging was the punishment at the time.

A firing squad is, when used, a military punishment, not one for civilian spies even in time of war.

Update: so, someone dares to contradict me in the comments, eh?

Yes, one was shot in the Tower.

All of the others were turned or hanged after civilian trials.

Yah Boo!