A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Probably few other societies had as much chance of buying freedom. Was never entirely sure which bits were believed and which bits were just a fun bit of intellectual muscle-flexing couldnt all have been intended seriously since so many posts contradicted each other. Like I said before, tolerance is in the gift of the powerful. It wasnt always so & it may not be in the future. The system he witnessed and wrote about was one in which human beings were worked to death. From Roots. Different people can argue the toss from different viewpoints and perspectives but in many ways their arguments pass each other like ships in the night, because they havent all got nobodys got an absolute frame of reference to judge things with respect to. Separated from home and family and landed in the West Indies (countless numbers dying of suffocation during the journey, given that the people traffickers were packing the holds to maximise profits), the Africans had no recourse to the law, much less the conscience of their captors. Dont even get me started on the Moors, Arabs and Ottomans, As for getting rich many African tribes kept slaves and their societies did not get rich. Wider imperialism reparations that include South Asia, China for the Opium Wars and so on, surely even more prohibitively costly, regardless of how effective the education system gets at making young Brits feel a vague sense of guilt about it all. Joining them is Psychologist and Lecturer at Lancaster University, Dr David Tod, for a fascinating conversation about the psychology of acting. Although the bottom line is that no Black person remembers slavery. Had a vault for the more inflammatory pieces. So he calls himself a Geordie. As Black British History Month draws to a close, TV historian Prof David Olusoga looks at the impact it's had - and how young people are taking it on. Fuck right off As a winning debating strategy. Societies have what morals suit them. Olusoga has written stand-alone history books as well as those accompanying his television series. The German survivors of Stalingrad were sent to camps and most of them worked to death. The Royal African Company, established by Charles II in 1672, eventually enslaved and transported more Africans than any other company in British history. Then the adult men became profitable too. So is Richard Murphy. "The way history is viewed is changing. Ironically, one of the sources we can turn to in order to learn more is his own accounts of late 17th-century Jamaica. Slavery is bad or it isnt. David then moved with his mother and three siblings in the north-east of the UK. Slaves were crowded in a new environment with new diseases. How does importing new labour from West Africa solve the food shortage in the West Indies? And the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. The exception is Tim Worstall, who is truly the Ron Jeremy of blogging. You can pay all the reparation for historical slavery related wrongs, real or imaginary, you want. They have a game plan & youre falling for it. The good news is that Black Lives Matter may be that trigger. The thing we British are ancestrally responsible for is beginning and continuing to pursue the extinction of the sordid business of slavery. Its been banned for two centuries in Britain. Reckon they found commenters guessing which parts of a hypothetical argument were meant all part of the fun, In many respects youre one of the posters here whose views on morality Im closest to our personal moralities probably being quite far apart, but I recognise mine as very much the product of my upbringing and surrounding society and know enough about other places and times to realise just how contingent that makes them. Then the second. Moreover its arguably unjust that only victims of still-extant states have a route to compensation whereas people from ethnic groups roughly contemporaneously massacred, enslaved and sacrificed by the Aztec Empire have nobody to sue. Theres no point pretending Europeans who profited from either the transatlantic slave trade or the use of slave labour in the Americas were somehow doing a favour to the slaves involved, even if, as it happens but their owners could not have predicted, their surviving descendants ended up financially better off on average than the counterfactual of remaining in Africa. So 10.416 were sold by the Africans every month for one hundred years, There will be no peace on this issue until black people acknowledge their own responsibility for the trade. The people in Portland, Seattle and Kenosha are too decadent to fight back. It seems absurd to me that anyone should be concerned about what happened 200 or 500 years ago. For some peculiar reason possibly because theres a section of Western society has become very insecure about its own position its being some credence. I have done nothing. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. I know there are posters on here who see stepping into their opponents perspective as a dangerous and pointless endeavour that gives undue worth to a viewpoint they despise, but purely as a mental exercise theres usually something to be said for examining your opponents strongest argument instead of their weakest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxc5ENT8ajg, https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-real-vikings/articles/eyewitness-to-the-vikings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/world-of-domesday/order.htm, Apparently Essay Mills Must Be Made Illegal, Why Oxfam Can Go Boil Their Heads Over Vaccine Patents, The real point about climate change is how cheap the solution is, The excellent Tim Worstall- The Register, Tim Worstall is a darn good economist- Don Boudreaux, Tim Worstall, you pendant- Polly Toynbee, .more sensible than most right wing nutjob bloggersBob Piper. It may not. Thankfully the Woke have gifted us an all purpos3e response to this sort of crap. Within the EU the two most common ages of consent are 14 and 15 (if Ive done my counting correctly), though in some but not all cases thats with additional restrictions on permissible age gaps. He updates Fryer, citing radioisotope analysis of skeletons and craniometrics, which support written documentation of Aurelian Moors guarding Hadrians Wall and settling in places such as Yorkshire. We pretend we do not like slavery but actually we do not like slave traders. Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Then, in October, came a breakthrough. If the alternative was that they were killed? Support 100 years of independent journalism. What has Nigeria ever done for him? Instead he has become a campaigner working to discredit Britain, the country that has educated him, promoted him and brought him fame and acceptance. Exactly, bis. Prof Olusoga, the presenter of the A House Through Time TV series, calls it an act of "historical salvage" to bring to the fore the black British figures who had been "lost in the archives, completely forgotten". Maybe Europeans did increase demand. But that is not the argument I am making. and while the responsible state still exists, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant.. Re putting the argument for paedophilia they actually gave Gide the Nobel prize for literature didnt they? The point about slave descendants in Georgia being better off than descendants of slave sellers from West Africa is reasonably strong (though look back in everyones ancestry and youre likely to find, far back enough, a mix of slaves, owners and probably traders too). If one disproves his assertions would slavery then be okay? During the Second World War, thousands of black American soldiers stationed in Britain were befriended by white Britons who opposed efforts by the white military to segregate them. Youre right, MBE. There is plenty of slavery about we just do not call it that. BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3, The Meaning of Zong, Spacious open-plan family home in Muswell Hill, Five Cineworlds across south London still at risk of permanent closure, Residents who have 'suffered for years' to be asked if they want blocks knocked down, Dazzling Thamesmead light festival returns with performances, films and flash mob, Charlton murderer claims prison guards broke his arm and sues for 20k, Children and young people with eating disorders face treatment postcode lottery, Angry protests erupt over Greek rail disaster, How fake copyright complaints are muzzling journalists, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. Thats what I dont like about the angle of Tims header. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, Slavery in England definitely continued for a couple of generations after the Norman Conquest and Bristol was a major export centre, though there were attempts to ban the export trade in particular (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds has some interesting quotes from the time). White people will take it. Anglo-Saxons had slaves. Later his parents separated from each other when he was just two years old. How could Britain, a civilised and Christian nation, indulge in rape, torture, killing and the forced labour of Africans over two centuries? Well whats the point of pretending it doesnt also induce moral disgust in me, just in case someone mistakes it for guilt, or an admission of liability? Nevertheless, we live in a society that generally regards slavery as an absolute and eternal wrong, and a grave one at that, yet which has historically (at least certain people and places, and including the state itself) benefited from imposing slavery on others.. His choice of subject and his choice of material make that very clear. Over 1000 years in Britain. David will . In 1860, cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports. His current research focuses on stress, burnout, and wellbeing in sports, with a particular interest in high-performance environments and elite coaching. I think a case could be made. Giles Terera, the Olivier award-winning British performer who starred in the popular theatre production Hamilton, has . The problem with slavery is that it left us with their descendents and weak minded White populations. It was such a brilliantly organised programme of mass protest that slavery was declared abolished in 1833: 46,000 slave owners were given 20m in compensation (17bn in todays money), the largest payout in British history and 40 per cent of all government spending that year. Pretty sure if you could, implausibly, trace my family tree through various not-very-literate eras youd pass through at least one Anglo-Saxon who owned a bunch of Britons. Mans a loon. Giles Terera, the Olivier award-winning British performer who starred in the popular theatre production Hamilton, has recently staged a play called the Meaning of Zong about the massacre of 132 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 and the impact it had on Equiano. . Arguably wrong in a crimes against humanity way (similar language of natural justice and universal morality indeed being used by the abolitionists and the UK itself when it tried to enforce a ban on the trade) that made it inherently illegal even when governments tried to put it on a legal footing. It was far too real to her. Whoever has the upper-hand in power political, cultural, economic, military or whatever other form is decisive at that moment. After decades of complaints, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1712 and, Olusoga writes, Independent traders were turned loose upon the shores of Africa. These traders had argued (stone-blind to irony) that the right to enslave Africans was a defining feature of English freedom and that the Royal African Company had breached their status as free-born Englishmen. Theres an argument about judging people by the standard of their times, though even in the 1500s moral and religious objections to the slave trade had been made and the rationale of crimes against humanity is that some things are so abhorrent they could never truly be legal no matter what moral code the perpetrators justified themselves with. His dad met his mom at the city's university in the 1960s. No member of my family ever owned slaves. No. Olusoga is just getting even because he was attacked by the right when he was a teenager. David Olusoga MyBurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:31 pm Deliberately shipping that many people that far in order to participate in a newly-created society whose economic system was designed, pretty much from the ground up, around slave labour?, True that unlike certain other examples of slavery, you werent likely to be killed as part of a religious sacrifice or as part of your owners funeral., But there have been other societies with slavery where slaves had more autonomy and a greater chance of buying their freedom.. The Benin Dialogue Group announced it had brokered an agreement that will see "some of the most iconic" of the bronzes returned to Benin City, Nigeria, where they will be housed in the soon-to-be-built Benin Royal Museum. Get back to us when youve developed your historicalguiltometer. Very little sugar on the mainland. So wherever the wealth came from, it wasnt just slavery (or even mainly), Olusogas an alright presenter but a class A race hustler, Edward Lud August 30, 2020 at 9:12 am We could just cut to the chase, and impose a reparations tax on anyone who is descended from from anyone who did something, er, wrong.. Oh man. A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. And tolerance is not a given. The New Statesmans weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. Guess wed have to print it. But morals are very transient things. Of course if a rule was instituted that only people with white skins had to pay taxes, it might happen. They did not care much for adult males. And, of course, being half white, he is only entitled to half the reparation payment. 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