Once again, the media is wetting itself over slavery that came to an end over two hundred years ago. This time it is over the compensation paid to slave owners.
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 – much to the potential embarrassment of their descendants. Dr Nick Draper from University College London, who has studied the compensation papers, says as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy.
While this is of historical interest, it is of no relevance to today. Attempts to blame the current generation for the sins of their fathers is nasty revisionism and there is no need for them to be even remotely embarrassed. They weren’t born. Much of inherited wealth could, if traced back far enough, be demonstrated to have been taken at someone else’s expense. The people involved are dead. Long dead and buried. People alive today are not responsible for their actions.
In the meantime, there is slavery going on today, but as it tends to be brown people doing it to other brown people, we don’t talk about it…
Dear Mr Longrider
The major slavers today are governments: taxation is a politer form of part-time slavery. Being sentence to perform unpaid community work is a more direct form of slavery: gulag lite.
Slave trading may well have been made illegal at the retail level in all civilised lands, but wholesale slave trading continues as governments sell “their” populations to supranational bodies such as the EU.
I wonder how much our politicians and bureaucrats have received over the decades for delivering the British peoples to the EU, all paid out of our own taxes.
DP
All wealth can be construed as being amassed at the expense of others. The rules of Capitalism are like those of any other form of race: the wealthy are the ‘winners’, the poor are the ‘losers’. Without those losers, nobody can ‘win’.
If we’re going to demand the great-great-great-(…)-great grandchildren of slave-owners to pay back their money, perhaps we should be asking the Windsors where they got theirs from. And, indeed, anyone with a title, such the Duke of Westminster.
Go back far enough and you’ll find the entire population of the planet is “guilty” of the sins committed by a many-times great ancestor.
There’s a good tip when it comes to letting old wounds heal: stop picking at the scabs.
I wonder how many ‘African-Americans’ would be alive today if their antecedents had not undergone assisted migration? I’m sure the majority are better off than if they had stayed at ‘home’.
Of course none of us had any choice how we entered this world and few get much choice in the way we leave, or for that matter, how we get between these points.
Que sera, sera.
When all this apologising for slavery nonsense was in the news a few years back, BBC Bristol interviewed a number of young black people in St Paul’s. They were all a bit bemused about it – after all, it was abolished 200 years ago.
This obsession with something our ancestors did is unhealthy to say the least and we certainly should not be looking to punish the current generation. As you say, black people living here or in the USA are likely to be living better lives than some of their African counterparts.
And let’s not forget – although there are those who try to ignore it – slavery isn’t and wasn’t purely a white European practice and these days it is still going on in Africa. I would suggest that this is a more pressing issue.
“The true scale of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade” is that we took the lead in abolishing it, and enforced that lead at considerable cost in blood and treasure.
We have nothing whatever to reproach ourselves with; on the contrary, we can and should hold our heads high.
Thank you to William Wilberforce and the brave men of the Royal Navy.
Quite.
Agreed.
No-one wants to talk about the millions of blacks that are currently slaves to Arab Muslims in Africa, including the at least 600,000 black slaves in Mauritania alone? In fact, the Arabic word for a black person means ‘slave’.
@Paul:
“In fact, the Arabic word for a black person means ‘slave’.”
This is untrue. There are multiple words for “black” (‘aswad’ is the closest for “black person”). It does not mean “slave”.
“Ajam” means “Non-Arab” and has no slavery connotations.
Arabic is spoken in nations as far apart as Egypt and Turkey, but there are regional dialects, as with any language. Iran – originally Persia – speaks Farsi (“Persian” by any other name) and is non-Arabic, ergo Iranians are frequently referred to as “ajam”.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that many very poor families are quite willing to sell children for bonded labour – essentially a form of voluntary slavery; most slaves were captured as prisoners of war – because at least they know those children will *have* to be looked after and cared for by their owners. When the alternative is to watch your children die of starvation and disease, it’s not such a difficult choice to make.
There’s a well-known slang term that combines dark skin pigmentation with connotations of slavery: it begins with ‘n’ and is still in common use among African-Americans. To imply that Arabic people are somehow unique in having such slang terms themselves is the height of hypocrisy.
(Note, too, that, according to Islamic texts, Mohammed himself taught that slaves were considered equal to freemen in the eyes of the Islamic god. There are even exhortations to free slaves as payment for the sins of the owner.)
All that said, I’m with Peter MacFarlane on this: the British have nothing to be ashamed of here.
S. Baggaley: This is untrue. There are multiple words for “black” (‘aswad’ is the closest for “black person”). It does not mean “slave”.
I’m referring to “Abd”. “Abd” in modern Arabic refers to a black person, but it also (in more normal contexts) means a slave.
I had this backed up by two native Arabic speakers.