Austen makes passing reference to slavery in Emma and Mansfield Park; in the latter it is clear that this is where the Bertram family have made their money. So why not show scenes making this explicit? Why not show Sir Thomas and Tom brutally quashing a slave revolt on their plantation in Antigua? Contemporary readers will probably have inferred this as the purpose of their trip in the novel.
Jesu.
The crossing was 30 days (a v fast one) to 8 weeks. So, news of slave rebellion takes two months to get to England, it takes them two months to get to Antigua. 4 months. By which time either the rebellious slaves have all been hanged or the entire island is in flames.
It’s the stunning ignorance that’s so painful, eh?
Jane Austen personally owned thousands of slaves. She demanded each year that her overseers in the Barbados sentence her a tribute of severed hand and feet of her slaves, which she would keep in a cupboard and gloat over.
“Mwahahaha” she would cackle as she then made angels out of all the gold coins that she had made from the slave trade, spread out on the floor.
It’s always the quiet ones isn’t it? Though I am tempted to ask if our ancestors made so much money out of this slavery game why aren’t we all incredibly rich?
Aye, and if a few hundred years of owning African slaves makes you rich, why isn’t all of Africa rich as Croesus?
The thing is that machines were cheaper. That’s why slavery ended. Also why Africa didn’t get rich.
I have a view on this that the civil war was probably unnecessary. Far more death and bloodshed in a war than letting slavery just expire (which had happened in the northern states).
But I also hold a view that relatively speaking, slavery just wasn’t that bad. It’s not like people were going off on gap years if they weren’t picking cotton for Massa.
Your first paragraph is rubbish. So is your second.
Machinery, especially the early machinery, didn’t end slavery. It just introduced a different form. It was still labour intensive, with whole families, including children, being used to operate that machinery. Long hours in terrible conditions, for low pay. No health and safety, so noise, heat, health problems and even death, resulted. I’m not saying slavery is good, because it’s not, though the introduction of machinery often brought it’s own kind of hell, where only factory owners, rather than plantation owners, became wealthy.
That’s not slavery. If you can leave, it’s not slavery.
Yeah it was dirty and dangerous. Yeah, kids worked. Yeah, low pay. Now what was the alternative? Live out in a shack in a village. Where kids also worked. Where pay was lower. Where you were far more likely to starve to death or not have medicine. You’re looking at it with 2025 eyes.
The squires around Swindon struggled to get skilled people when GWR arrived. They went and worked there, got a better life.
I always say this about the Nazis. People in 1933 Germany didn’t think the Nazis were fucking mental or 30% of them wouldn’t have voted for them. We have no idea about the mindset of rural Bavarians, but we know their great grandchildren aren’t wanting to invade the Ostland, so well, it’s not in the genes, but the incentives.
Indeed. Our host makes the same point about kids making t-shirts in Bangladesh. They do it because it is better than the alternative: back-breaking agricultural work.
Slavery was ended by a religious awakening among Evangelical Anglicans and Quakers. Even the staunchest atheist must give them credit for that.
Well yes Dearieme quite. Those guys turned the moral culture both for individuals and institutions from laissez-faire indifference to active opposition. Its to be celebrated that they achieved the goal of emancipation but as often happens with moral movements people graft on new goals. Dr Kehindre Andrew’s current moral stance, and it’s ability to attract an audience and adherents, very likely owes more to those radical evangelicals than any moral sentiments espoused in Africa. A small point but i would be pleasantly surprised to see it acknowledged that it’s our culture that abhors slavery. Yes you can point to a Briton in history who was fine with it, or couldn’t care less but individuals like that don’t exist in our culture anymore thanks to long dead moralising evangelicals.
I don’t give them credit for that. And despite being an atheist, I generally consider religion a neutral thing.
One thing to note with the Quaker movement is that they were a lot like the Jews. Because they weren’t part of the Church/state thing, they were excluded from universities, professions and the establishment that was about land tithes. They had to work in trade in the industrial revolution. And that meant that unlike the aristos, the CofE and so forth, they had nothing to gain from the existence of slavery.
I tend to believe that there’s an average amount of goodness in man. Some nice people, some horrible people. But what is nice or horrible changes with the environment. People used to take deformed babies out to the woods and leave them there. That was normal. You get richer and you don’t do that. You have the resources to support such a child.
I’m the same cunt I was 20 years ago, but I’m much greener. It’s not because I’m making deep sacrifices. It’s because I can work from home and stream movies and get Paxton and Whitfield to deliver.
Well there were a few empires that were. Benin springs to mind. Then they annoyed the British and FAFO.
Quite so! Britain did not get rich by slavery, but through free trade and industrialisation. The benefits of slavery – direct and indirect – were small. Total profits from the slave trade, had they been invested entirely in Britain – which they weren’t – would have accounted for about 3% of all capital formation in 1770. These profits, vast as they were for some individuals, were too small to change a nation. The UK government’s compensation to the slave owners for abolition amounted to an average of £435 each (c. £50,000 in 2025 £s). On average, slave owners were receiving returns of c.£22 pa each or about £2500 pa each in 2025 £s. Such sums were too small to change the British nation.
And most of the payments to compulsarily purchase (“compensation” has changed its meaning to modern ears) all the slaves were later taxed back off them.
Whether you have a slave or a worker, the costs aren’t a lot different for manual work. They’ve still got to be fed, clothed, housed, have some booze etc.
When you grow sugar cane, you have multiple plots on the same farm. It takes 11-13 months from planting to being ready for harvest. So it’s quite easy to arrange to have harvesting going on all year round.
Because if you own all those slaves, you need to feed them every day of the year, whereas you might only need them for a few weeks to get the harvest in on time??
Sorry, my reply to this ended up being to Western Bloke.
Thanks.
Saw the headline and had a bet with myself – Nesrine or the Coslett bird?
Lost it!
Nesrine is working on an ISIS funding sideline I think and the article isn’t anti-semitic nor did she mangle it to include a mention of Gaza but under normal circumstances I would have plumped for her too.
On that subject Carl Benjamin has produced an excellent Akkad Daily on YouTube about another of our favourite gals, Kate Mulvey of the telegraph.
Regular readers will know Kate and her soul-searching articles questioning why the world and its riches (and men) haven’t come flocking to her now elderly feet.
@Julia , surely you won it, it was indeed Coslett.
“Why not show Sir Thomas and Tom brutally quashing a slave revolt on their plantation in Antigua? “
Because vacuous virtue signalling wasn’t in vogue for 19th Century literature?
The article not surprisingly skates around the fact that Georgiana, the extremely wealthy (and judging by the TV series also extremely frisky) heiress of colour, made her fortune from family ownership of a Caribbean sugar plantation.
I wonder who did all the hard work there?
I also wonder what Austen’s unfinished chapters of Sanditon really said about this character and her origins.
You mean they didn’t fly there like normal people?
Eco friendlier to sail.
At least so Greta says…
Not when you’re using marine diesel and I’ll wager good money they motored most of the way.
Philip Hensher has suggested that Mansfield Park is named after Lord Mansfield who made the judgement in Somerset v Stewart that slavery was unlawful in England. Seems quite plausible.
Ugh! The worst book I was ever set for English Literature O Level.
I was relatively lucky; Animal Farm & Romeo and Juliet.
Howards End by that bloody woofer EM Forster 🙁
EMF was interested in Maurice’s end, too…
The Mayor of Casterbridge. Still haven’t read it. I did not pass English Lit and I can’t say it has ever bothered me or been a disadvantage.
Thats was my attitude to Eng Lit too. I had a quite a heated discussion with my Eng Lit teacher once on the pointlessness of his subject. It was the only exam I didn’t get an A on in the end.
I did Mayor of Casterbridge and Macbeth. And a series of interminably boring Harold Pinter plays. I would have preferred wood or metal work, or being taught to weld. Much more useful.
Of Mice and Men and The Catcher in the Rye – American literature in vogue at the time….
On an American blog I once said that I had found The Catcher in the Rye funny.
There was a reaction that suggested to me that Americans don’t think of it as comedy. But then a nation that thought Abbott and Costello were funny …
Julius Caesar, 1984 and The Pardoner’s Tale. I hated having to read Middle English but the other 2 were pretty great.
We did Macbeth, which of course is great because there’s buckets of blood in it.
They made us sit though videos of the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench version , which we booed. So they dug up an old Michael Jayston film and he was far superior.
Troilus and Creseyde, Hamlet, As You like it, Tomas Hardy, TS Eliot, WH Auden, 1984, Brave New World.
And I liked all of them
How damn fucking stupid is this woman?
Er…
How damn fucking stupid is this woman?
About as stupid as her readership at the Guardian, innit? That’s the point of being a journalist?
It’s a show. Display of sophistry. Guardian readers cannot understand what she is saying.
This is primordial sin shit. UK doesn’t deserve to exist because reasons. Cosslett hates Britain and wants it destroyed.
She hates you. All of you.