The conversation shouldn’t be about deciding whether the British empire was “good” or “bad”. The purpose of slavery was to build wealth for Britain by any means necessary, through subjugation, division and coercion.
The idea that things just happened because of the interaction of personal motives and incentives never does sink into some people.
Most things just don’t have some guiding intelligence, some central purpose. They’re just shit that happen. It’s the flip side of the insistence that we must have a nation plan for everything etc – folk just don’t grasp that 67 million people will just do stuff and the outcome will be whatever: no guiding plan and – here’s the controversial bit – none needed. But you can see the confusion this causes. If you’re one of those who believes that there is and or needs to be a guiding plan then you’ll look at the things which have happened and think there just have been a plan which made them do so. Which is where the error starts to seep in of course.
There never was a plan for Empire. There wasn’t a national plan for slavery either. They’re things that just happened, driven by the individual incentives of those actively involved.
I wonder when this blaming of Britain, as an institution, for slavery started ?
When I was a student in the 1980s, slavery was seen as one of the highest expressions of capitalism : where even humans become commodities.
Even if it was Marxist claptrap, it made a bit more sense as to a motive for the slave trade.
So let me get this straight –
For thousands of years:
Black people capturing black people to use as slaves was OK.
Arab people capturing black people to use as slaves was OK
Arab people capturing WHITE people to use as slaves was OK.
Black people selling black slaves to black people was OK.
Arab people selling black slaves to black people was OK.
Black people selling black slaves to arab people was OK.
Arab people selling black slaves to arab people was OK.
Black people selling arab slaves to arab people is OK.
Arab people selling arab slaves to arab people was OK.
Black people selling WHITE slaves to black people was OK.
Arab people selling WHITE slaves to arab people was OK.
Black people selling WHITE slaves to arab people was OK.
Black people and arab people selling slaves to white people was OK.
White people BUYING slaves over a period of around 230 years is definitely NOT OK and is totally the fault and responsibility of the descendants of white people who must now pay reparations.
FUCK OFF.
Olivette Otele is distinguished professor of the legacies and memory of slavery at Soas University of London
Hmm. So Ms Otele makes a good living from talking about slavery and doesn’t want her job to disappear. Incentives!
Very well put Addolff, consider it stolen.
Yet, if I was to have a peak at Ms. Otele’s ancestry, what are the chances I would find someone flogging slaves to the Europeans? After all, they didn’t just magically appear on the slave boats, did they?
Hmm. So Ms Otele makes a good living from talking about slavery and doesn’t want her job to disappear. Incentives!
God forbid that she’d have to go out into the real world and get a proper job. How Horrid!
I want everything to change, and extreme positions I support (such as restorative justice for slavery) to become mainstream, and enshrined in law. Anyone opposing this is trying to start a culture war.
Why can’t we all just start a dialogue, by agreeing that I’m right, you’re all wrong, and you’re racists for ever having disagreed with me?
I despair to see the country sliding into fascism like this.
I think it was Jack Hawkins who was the first recorded Englishman who sold African slaves to the Ports and Spans. Nice sideline from
piracyprivateering.Britain has no national ceremony for the thousands of lives that were lost to slavery.
Tbf, we don’t care.
A lot of this is cognative dissonence built on the expectation/insistance that everywhere is America with 35% of the population black descendants of slaves. They get really confused that only 3% of the UK population are black, and are people who voluntarily migrated here in the last 70 years. See also the insistance that there should be more black people portayed in the media, etc., when they are already actually massively *over*represented.
Slavery is inevitable in an economy that has no other concentrated energy source to power machinery, which replaced slaves.
As Net Zero removes our concentrated energy sources, and ability to power machines, slavery will return.
May be called something different: indentured labour (hello NHS), puiblic service duties (conscription) or just old-time “You’re my property: obey or die!”
But economics, like reality, will not be ignored.
Britain has no national ceremony for the thousands of lives that were lost to slavery.
Yes, we need a huge, prominant monument to the West Africa Patrol remembering the thousands of British sailors who gave their lives stamping out the international slave trade and liberating enslaved Africans. With prominent notice given to the 25% of government spending that funded it.
When I was at school in the ’80s this was covered in the standard curriculum. Did none of these morons pay attention at school?
Tim the Coder: exactly
The lack of celebration for the ingenuities of the Industrial revolution which ultimately freed the masses from nasty, brutish and short lives providing physical labour, by our current utopians speaks volumes
we need a huge, prominant monument to the West Africa Patrol remembering the thousands of British sailors who gave their lives stamping out the international slave trade
Best we can do is Black Gay Dr. Who.
Oh, and redesign RAF fighter pilot helmets to accommodate gigantic afros.
“everywhere is America with 35% of the population black descendants of slaves”: the figure usually quoted is 13%.
I don’t know where the “35%” comes from: maybe some wild underestimate of the fraction of murders they commit?
Despite being just 13% of the US population…
Is a gentleman’s gentleman a slave? Did Jeeves pay his subs to the Junior Ganymede out of salary or did Wooster stump up? I don’t think we were ever told.
There’s a world of difference between domestic slavery and field slavery.
But the USA wasn’t part of the British Empire. And as for the West Indies, only an ignorant idiot would imagine that ‘wealth for Britain’ was dependent on sugar and cotton.
jgh, one study cites circa 450,000 black African slaves going into North America via Whitey. This has grown to 13% of the population = 43+ million. Virtually none of those people would exist if it were not for the Atlantic slave trade.
Another estimate is of 120 million black African slaves going into islam. Where the fuck are their descendants? Does the fact that there aren’t any have anything to do with the moslem practice of castrating said slaves perchance?
I think we should be told.
I had to look up the prominent FLSW in Ms Otele’s Wiki entry:
The Learned Society of Wales (Welsh: Cymdeithas Ddysgedig Cymru) is a learned society and charity that exists to “celebrate, recognise, preserve, protect and encourage excellence in all of the scholarly disciplines”, and to serve the Welsh nation.
WTF is her connection with Wales?
Also, it took her a long time to get her first degree – graduated with a BA at age 28. Was that because she’s a woc? (The excuse she gave for her alleged delayed promotion to professor.)
All in all, I think I’d like a second opinion on any results of her “research”
WTF is her connection with Wales?
Perhaps she’s one of the Llanwynno Oteles ?
Similar to when under-qualified biology teachers tell their students that giraffes evolved “so that they could” reach trees, rather than mutating randomly and the best suited organisms surviving.
John B
yeah but no but…
Although there was no “official” Empire as such, the American colonies, some of which had slavery were British possessions. Cheap cotton from America flowed into the newly mechanised factories of north west England and did indeed give a major contribution to the industrial revolution. But if it hadn’t been grown in America, it would have been grown elsewhere ( India or the Caribbean) and although the raw material would have been slightly dearer, the end product would have still been produced where it was in the same manner.
Don’t forget also that many industrialists were Methodists or Quakers to whom slavery was anathema and it was their lobbying and wealth that led to its eventual abolition.
@Ottokring: “Cheap cotton” from America wasn’t available until after the invention of the cotton gin in 1794.
Since Britain abolished slavery in Great Britain over a millennium ago and in a long list of colonies it acquired, only a total ignoramus or a deliberate liar would claim that the purpose of slavery was to build wealth for Britain.
I leave it to you to decide which.
French West Africa retained slavery until 1848, 41 years after the UK Parliament passed legislation to abolish the slave trade. Wikipedia says that by 1850 (after France, as well as the UK had abolished slavery), there were more African slaves in African kingdoms than in the Americas – how was this Britain’s fault? How did this build wealth for Britain?