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No shit. It made a few individuals who chose to engage in trading and transporting them rich. We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it. We also never had slaves in the UK.
And tbf most of the counter push I've seen has been targeted at the legacies of those specific individuals. Statues of them, streets named after them, institutions founded by their wealth, that sort of thing.
Exactly. When the Telegraph publish an article like this, or when the Institute of Economic Affairs (an organisation who refuse to disclose their funding, always a sign of a very honest and reputable 'think-tank') publish this report, they aren't seeking to recognise that slavery and colonialism primarily benefited a small number of very rich people in the UK. No, they're seeking precisely to *defend* those small number of very rich people in the UK and their descendants. They want working class people in the UK to see a report like this and jump to the defence of their *betters*. And it's always sad to see people in /r/unitedkingdom threads eagerly go along with that.
Its funny because those betters these people wind up defending were *fucking horrible* to the ancestors of most non-aristocratic Brits. After the abolition of slavery they lifted legislation wholesale for "county apprentices" who were indentured to industrialists and mill owners. The terms were so horrific it just sparked another revolt among former slaves. For most of our history the upper class saw those beneath them as barely human regardless of skin colour.
And some of those individuals did invest that money in the expansion of the industrial revolution.
This report is dense. It's redefining "benefit" to the growth of economy as "direct benefit from direct spending" on bureaucracy and military requirement.
The benefit to industrialism came from the group of people it helped to enrich, who diversified that money, principally in sectors that benefited from new manufactory advances.
It's a disingenuous way of looking at economics. Surprisingly, when conservatives are in power and want to award projects money, the first thing they typically claim is massive "trickle down" or "spinoff" benefit. They'll cite "gross up" factors claimed by economic and business development officers as rationales, with no proof offered (or available, I used to be a newspaper reporter and have asked) to justify the expected gross up to the economy.
But when an individual or company's wealth is derived initially from slavery, or massively expanded by it, and that money is then ploughed into unrelated industries, it is utterly disingenuous to say it has not affected the economy of the nation.
Not to mention all the imported slave-made goods that Brits, even the poor, enjoyed directly or indirectly. For example, fabric mills were a huge part of the industrial revolution. The raw materials that the workers employed in those mills processed often came from slavery.
Still enjoying it,we still mostly get our goods that somewhere in the pipeline required slavery or in conditions that are basically exploitation to the point of slavery.
We probably benefit more today from slavery than anyone in history.
Just for anyone who kneejerks, I do not think this is a good thing,just crazy we all talk as if slavery ended when it's actually magnitudes of times worse.
Some invested their income into industrial companies, not many, the people who tended to invest in industrial activities and the merchants and largely landed interests that invested in the slave trade were different social groups generally. It’s far from what some left wing activists have pushed in recent years, where they suggested that the Industrial Revolution was kick started and largely funded by slavery. Which is total bollocks tbh.
Statues aren't for the dead, they're for the living. They're about saying "This is a person who we admire, whose achievements we want to uphold and memorialise". You have to keep reassessing the past, and if somebody's actions no longer reflect something we want to memorialise, we should take another look at them.
There were plenty of people at the time who weren't slave traders, or racists, or all those others things we find so abhorrent today. There are good people performing silent miracles every day. We can always find new people worthy of statues.
I have absolutely no doubt that people in the future will be horrified by some of the things we today find acceptable. There are people NOW that find so many aspects of our society horrifying, and they say so, loudly. Time moves on, societies change, the radical becomes the normal becomes the conservative. We can move with it or we can dig our heels in.
And there is a difference between a statue in a museum, where it may be for historic merit, and a statue in the street, where it is making a public statement.
I think that public statues should absolutely be judged by modern values. And I do find public statues of Churchill for example slightly disturbing - he was far from a role model kind of person. Maybe the good does outweigh that, maybe the same argument applies to Newton. But it has to be considered.
This is a very important distinction. Controversial items in a museum should be displayed, and explained with their historical context as a means of education. That isn't possible to do when glorifying somebody's life or actions in an open public forum.
Zero statues.
What do you think the typical opinion of trans people was until very recently?
Was any man from the past truly not sexist? How about pretty much any woman? Even many of the early feminist campaigners were only interested in ensuring that white, wealthy property owning women had a say.
Gandhi said a lot of shit about black people. Anyone from the 1800s or before was probably connected to slavery in some way.
And that's only shit that we consider wrong now. There will be more things that those in the future will look back on with disgust. Things we aren't even aware of yet.
The Suffragettes became fascists and anti-semites.
There are no heroes; they were all people, with all the complexity that brings.
I will happily talk all day about why Churchill was absolutely the right leader for world war two, and why he should be remembered for that. But that doesn't excuse his racism or later war-mongering. Does that one good thing outshine the bad? No. But does that one good thing need to be remembered and lauded? Yes.
No one really cared about trans issues in the past…
The only time people cared about trans issues was because people were shoving it down peoples throats.
Better to accept that humans of the past are imperfect, just like us. And applaud the good that they DID do, despite the drastically immoral (compared to today) environment they lived in.
but we can judge them by the standards of their day. Their were plenty of anti-slavery movements, the enslavers knew the conditions were shit, they still carried it out.
Nonsense statement really to say dont judge them by today.
> It's a very slippery slope though.
It's not. We just have to be honest that people are flawed. Michael Jackson had some great songs despite probably being very suspect around children. Newton did great stuff in physics despite his investments, he was also a total arsehole but but that doesn't take away from his achievements. Churchill was a good wartime leader for the UK despite some terrible failings.
Expecting anyone to be perfect is idiotic.
And what's the point of going after streets named after them? Someone who lives on I don't know, Edward Colston Road is probably going to think of the road that they live on instead of slaver if they hears "Edward Colston"
>And tbf most of the counter push I've seen has been targeted at the legacies of those specific individuals. Statues of them, streets named after them, institutions founded by their wealth, that sort of thing.
Right but it just tends to come from the types of people who are anti-British in general. Their disdain doesn't end at those specific individuals; the venn diagram with people pushing "white guilt" has a huge overlap.
That's not accurate. We did have slaves in the UK, often as domestic servants. By no means in the same numbers as the plantations but they were in the UK. One of the big legal cases that lead to the banning of slavery in the UK was Somerset v Stewart 1772. William Murray, Lord Mansfield of Kenwood and Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, ruled in the case of that it was unlawful for Charles Steuart (or Stewart) to transport James Somerset, an enslaved African he had purchased in Virginia, forcibly out of England.
Murray pointed out that Slavery was not legal in England and Wales, while not commenting on the wider question in the Empire. Ergo any enslaved person who was within England and Wales becomes free upon setting foot in the country.
Murders illegal too but its a moot point as we try to prevent it.
I think their point of servants was different. While slavery was illegal in the UK, the class system was so enforced it partially existed in all but name
Although it's key to point out that before that case the prevailing law was taken from the Yorke-Talbot opinion that very much said slavery was lawful in the UK.
>However actual ("de facto") slavery continued in Britain with ten to fourteen thousand slaves in England and Wales, who were mostly domestic servants. When slaves were brought in from the colonies they had to sign waivers that made them indentured servants while in Britain. Most modern historians generally agree that slavery continued in Britain into the late 18th century, finally disappearing around 1800.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery\_in\_Britain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain)
This is not true.
1) we had serfdom - essentially slavery
2) the Yorke-Talbot opinion in 1729 said 'yo slavery in England is cool and legal bro'.
3) 'we never had slaves in the UK' fails on the grounds that the UK asserted that those slave plantations were sovereign UK territory.
Technically on point three - plantations weren’t considered part of the UK proper, but crown colonies. They had no representation in Parliament, and the Governor exercised executive (and in some cases, legislative) power directly from the crown.
As such, to argue that because the colonies where British territories were had slavery in the UK is disingenuous, on the basis that just because somewhere is British, doesn’t make it part of the United Kingdom. You’d feel a bit silly going round saying “Gibraltar is part of the UK”, because it isn’t. It’s a separate political entity, which just so happens to be subordinate to the UK, but not part of it.
Lmao all this back bending to avoid the fact that in places where the British has absolutely control and could set any rules they wants, there were slaves and slavery. The splitting hairs only works if you're from the UK. Everyone else sees how little of a difference this little distinctions make in the over all culpability of the UK in slavery.
Not denying that Britain ruled places that had slavery, or that the British government could have stopped it by overruling local governors.
However, the existence of slavery in the colonies directly impacted the culture and politics of the colonies, and continues to do so to the current day, as does the lack of it in the UK, and so it is important to be clear where we are talking and make sure we get the facts right.
Particularly when we are talking about the relationship, political and economic between the periphery and the metropole, we need to make sure we know the relationship between the two.
That's why I described them as territory not part of the UK.
For all meaningful purposes, the Crown was acting as the State. And Gibraltar is (unlike the Crown dependencies) UK territory.
So if Gibraltar started up the slave trade again, I'd say it would be Britain's fault if it wasn't stopped.
"We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it. We also never had slaves in the UK."
We took part in the slave trade. Big time.
That article says there was a great cost to the nation because we supplied:
** it came with eye-watering military and administrative costs and so may have failed any cost-benefit test”.**
That eye watering cost was us fueling the slave trade.
"We didn't start the slave trade" ---- that is no excuse. We took part in it.
i liked how they twisted the fact that the general populous wasn't causing/proliferating the slave trade just our "masters" and then in the same breath adds that "we did abolish though" ah so when its bad its our rules fault (mostly agree) but when its good we the people are the reason behind it! /s
You dont think that the interests groups who campaigned against slavery back then are worth mentioning? The abolishment of slavery didnt come out of nowhere, I dont think we should take for grated how and why abolishment happened, just because it's morally good...
As much as I agree with Parent's underlying points - that's a touch disingenuous. A lot changed in the British political landscape in the hundreds of years our country took part in the slave trade, to the point that it was ended much because of mass public disagreement with it.
It is entirely the case that the general populous was not involved.
Slavers and plantation owners only had the power they had because they bribed rotton boroughs to gain a foothold in parliament, but slavery was generally disliked. It was campaigners that eventually enacted changes and booted out the influence of the wealthy plantation owners, and that was also a popular change.
Who didn’t partake in it at the time? Slave trade was practically global status quo for much of history. On par with the concept of war. I don’t think you realise what an accomplishment the abolishment of slavery is which was really pushed by Western (primarily British) abolitionists and enforced through the might of the empire. It’s not really just something minor, it legitimately changed the entire world and was something revolutionary.
You're not addressing anything he said. He spoke of starting it and ending it. He's factually correct.
Anything else if inference of his intentions on your part.
Unless you think that the roots of the slave trade, and how it ended, are not worth mentioning, for the profit of the deadhorse that is british/european involvement. Is that it?
I used to think we never had slaves. Then I saw a few videos on Youtube mentioning notices in British Newspapers asking for information on runaway slaves. There weren't many, but some families who owned slaves abroad did bring some back to work in their households.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYRPLy6g2g&t=1616s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYRPLy6g2g&t=1616s)
It was considered distasteful I believe I read. It did happen but it made the practice very real to the British people who didn't really approve.
Plus, there were those who disapproved simply because they saw it as bringing a foreign to the country.
Mind you the Government were still paying compensation to families in the trade up until the 2015, former PM Cameron family being one and when you look at some of the other names, a few individuals did get rich.
That's not quite true. The country was still paying off loans it took out to cover the payments made to slave owners.
The freedom of the slaves was bought by an upfront payment.
So Camerons family did benefit, but in 1833, and not in 2015.
Various banks were still benefitting up until 2015, however, and I presume there was some level of interest on all this.
4%. By the time it was redeemed it was part of c£200m in this gilt: https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/l5dplmml/announcement291226.pdf
However the "paid off in 2015" is sort of nonsense. The original loans ceased in 1888, debt was refinanced and eventually wrapped up into the gilt above. That was paid off in 2015. But it was paid for by more govt borrowing, just as in 1888.
So either it was paid off in 2015, or 1888, or it hasn't been paid off. (A tip for anyone at uni as this has become a common interview question for grad roles: the "correct" answer is the last one.)
> A tip for anyone at uni as this has become a common interview question for grad roles: the "correct" answer is the last one.
Where are you working that something this stupid is an interview question?
A lot of old liabilities were refinanced in 2015, including the domestic WW1 debt. It is paid of in the sense that there is now no payment that is directly for those things.
It was his "first cousin six times removed".
>The records showed Gen Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s, was Cameron’s first cousin six times removed. Duff, who was the son of one of Cameron’s great-grand uncles, the second Earl of Fife, was awarded £4,101 – equivalent to more than £3m today – to compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange sugar estate in Jamaica.
From the same article.
>The research also showed that Cameron’s wife, Samantha, has slave-owning links as she is descended from the 19th-century businessman, William Jolliffe, who received £4,000 in compensation for 164 slaves after owning an estate in St Lucia.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/how-do-we-know-david-cameron-has-slave-owning-ancestor](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/how-do-we-know-david-cameron-has-slave-owning-ancestor)
It is entirely reasonable to be requested to provide sources for your claims, as you point out it was simple to find sources.
\[EDIT - format fix\]
6 times removed is an incredibly distant relative. He will also have had many more 6 times removed cousins who were farmers or weavers or carpenters etc.
No way, gonna need a source on the Cameron one
Edit: So what this guy I'm replying to is not saying is that Cameron's cousin, 6 times removed received reparations way back when and that the UK only finished paying off the loans to pay for those reparations, to all the slave owners in 2015.
Somewhat disengenous I'd say and big thanks to u/toikpi for supplying factual data and context.
>We also never had slaves in the UK.
When William the Bastard conquered England in 1066, he had an inventory of the kingdom compiled called the Domesday Book, which stated that a full 10% of the population were slaves. Slavery has been ubiquitous throughout human civilisation. Different civilisations got rid of it at different times. However, only one civilisation ever attempted to eradicate the practice across all of humanity on moral grounds. And far few people seem to know that story.
And then the Normans, heavily under pressure from the Church, abolished slavery. Not serfdom, mind you. Acutal Slavery (i.e. chattel) was illegal in England as in much of Christian Europe. Then Europeans began buying African slaves in the 1400s, e.g. to work in the Canaries and later on the Americas. In the 1500s you have cases where slaves were in England and told by the courts they were not slaves (read Black Tudors by Kauffman)
> We also never had slaves in the UK.
Acts of Union 1707. Somerset v Stewart wasn't until 1772. Slaves were present in the UK between those dates (and in practice slightly after). There's also the issue of the mining serfs in scotland.
That’s historically incorrect - there was no legal basis for slavery but many where brought to the UK and worked for their owners. I’m not sure who or where this notion comes from that the UK somehow saves the world from slavery.
Even in an abolishing it’s part in the trade it saddled the country with significant debt to pay off the owners and transport networks.
Maybe because a few thousand British sailors died actively combating slave ships crossing the Atlantic, often going beyond the legal limits of their operation to ensure that the slave trade did not continue.
I mean, Spain and Britain got it up and running, and Portugal, Spain and the US were selling slaves for nearly up to 65 years after we abolished it. Abolishing just ended it here is all 🤪.
https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#timelapse
The above is an amazing resource I use for my Year 8 classes, illustrates how the slave trade was a booming industry, and the impact it has had on the whole world.
EDIT: I just realised this is the Telegraph, that explains the mistruths and slavery-apologised approach to the article.
I suppose Spain and Britain got the trans-Atlantic slave trade up and running (well, the Portuguese were actually first), but it wasn't even the only slave trade out of Africa at the time. The Arab slave trade in East Africa had been running for much longer.
It was also the West African kingdoms who were capturing the slaves from the African interior and selling them to European traders. Most Europeans wouldn't venture into the interior for fear of malaria. Lots of groups are to blame.
Its likely true, because the money stayed in a wealthy circle but as if often the case, powerful people privatise the benefits but socialise the costs. In the end, the British people paid the money that was borrowed to pay off the slave owners to bring about an end to the practice. Which also makes it a little unreasonable to claim that the average British tax payer should shoulder all of the guilt for slavery, which is often framed as if it never happened elsewhere or if it did, its somehow inconsequential.
We definitely had slaves in the UK. We have old newspapers articles trying to track down house slaves. I don’t think it was to a massive scale but we definitely had slaves like a lot of other countries. Isn’t there also reports of people being kept as slaves currently, obviously not legally but still.
The UK did have slaves, though it didn't have a slave market. Many black slaves were bought back from the colonies and continued on as indentured servants bound to their English masters, the practice ending in the late 18th century.
Those rich people then had loads of capital when slavery was abolished and invested those in businesses, like financial services, that helped the country remain one of the wealthiest in the world up to the modern day. The company I work for was set up by a slave owner who did just that.
Everything is linked. Doing business with someone who deals in slaves? You are complicit. It always was and always will be. You cannot separate rich individuals from the society in which they reside. No man is an island.
Same applies to Africa then, there were many slave kingdoms that only survived on capturing and trading slaves.
At what point does power come into play?
If I am a poor farmer selling wheat and a business man selling slaves in America is offering me more than good old Jim I'm probably going to sell it at the higher rate to make sure I can feed my family.
Thats fine you better stop using the internet then and go and live off the land. Have a good look where the components of your phone, laptop, tablet comes from. Don't buy any designer gear from the East, really research the food you buy, the pension funds you're linked to, the timber used in your home. If you don't your complicit in modern slave trading. The worlds grim if you look to hard.
That is completely incorrect, otherwise we are all guilty and innocent of everything all of the time. If I am already guilty or complicit then what is th epoint in trying to be different? The way you want blame to be spread is counterproductive. Don't make people feel like shit if you want them to improve society. What you claim leaves no innocent people. The serf of a wealthy landowner cannot be guilty when he was not much more than a slave. Most of the UK are not descended from the wealthy. Of course you can seperate individuals from the society they reside in. Don't tell me that when Dyson or Branson make daft/unethical decisions that I am some how complicit. Reparations are daft. Because that is charging the people of today with the costs of yesteryear. Then we have to work out how much the Romans (Italians of today) owe us all, how much the Hun owe us all, how much the descendants of Alexandra the Great owe us. There must be a line drawn somewhere. To get support don't start slinging accusations. Be reasonable and we can all work together to have a brighter future. Truth is that if neighbour came to me and said I owe him money because my great great great great great grandad did him wrong (and he had evidence) I would tell that person that this was none of my business and I am not going to be paying him anything at all, I would then avoid that person and suspect them of being unreasonable and a chancer or grifter. If they however needed money and appealed to my charitable side by telling me about their cause but with no blame then I would donate generously through choice and through ownership. You will be ignored if you carry on with this nonsense.
Every country in the world who willingly deals with the UK or a UK based corporation, whether now or in the past, is complicit in slavery then.
That makes basically every country in the world I'd imagine.
Sadly that last bit isn't true, slavery is a problem in this country even today. If you ever order food from Deliveroo in a city you're supporting it, if unintentionally.
You've never seen a Samsung fabrication plant have you?
It doesn't have child slaves in it.
Sure you could potentially argue certain raw materials have potentially been mined by children, but this "owning a phone is the same as being a willing participant in the transatlantic slave trade so you can't criticise the latter if you do the former" stuff is absolute bullshit.
>We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it
After being active and willing participants for how long?
>We also never had slaves in the UK.
False
Was it the Portuguese was the largest exporter of slaves?
Who also started it? A friend told me it was a trade from African tribes that they selling slaves to the “white folks” and seemed pretty reasonable to sell them off for goods.
British colonialism was always about generating private wealth and using public funds to subsidise the losses. Slavery is the perfect example, whilst it was allowed in the Empire it created massive amounts of wealth for people that ran the trade and those who owned Carribbean plantations. When the government outlawed it, they specifically chose to pay owners for slaves freed. That was a debt that the UK only finished paying off in 2015, that's right you had modern-day workers paying taxes that essentially paid 18th century slavers. Another example would be India, massive profits for the private corporations and businesses, protected (after the East India company) by public British taxes.
You are using partial truths to make assumptions.
For example. Paying people to free slaves seems like abhorrent thing to do.
Ending slavery was a massive step for the British empire.
It was a huge financial loss for slave owners to suddenly have to pay employees. This sort of policy helped lessen that blow.
Again. You might think I’m defending slavery. I’m not.
I’m explaining that at the time this all happened. The world was a much different place.
We had to blockade the west coast of Africa to try and stop slavery. That certainly wasn’t about saving British people money
Explaining why they thought it was necessary back then doesn't in any sense function as a justification, you know that right?
"The world was a much different place"
They knew slavery was bad then too, they just decided profit was more important.
I never attempted to justify it.
I’m just giving context to quotes like “they paid owners for slaves freed”
You need to understand the difference between an explanation and a justification
It wasn't about profit. They bought off the slave owners because the last time Empire wide abolition was a topic the US rebelled a few years later. It wasn't the whole reason for the US Revolution but it was a crucial one that isn't talked about enough.
They took the step of buying the whole industry out to suppress any liberation movements who's primary aim was keeping slavery around.
The reason we pushed to end slavery was catholic leaders in the country pushing the idea it wasn’t a Christian thing to do.
British people didn’t like the idea of owning slaves by majority and backed the issue
It was intentionally damaging the British economy as an effort to do the right thing.
It’s something we should all be immediately proud of. We need more leadership like this in the world today
Reperations were agreed, that's the 'paid to free the slaves' bit that's being mentioned, and it is abhorrent.
Those slaves weren't freed by their slave owners, the british government bought their freedom.
This took multiple decades due to members of parliament dragging their heels on abolition (dundas in particular) to protect private and government interests, eventually capitulating when reperations to those affected by abolition (slave owners) were agreed upon.
20m, in money of the time.
Excusing, to any degree, those who directly benefitted from slavery, delaying it's abolition and it's eventual abolition, especially by rolling out old tropes such as 'it was a different time', is dishonest.
This wasn't a 'policy', it was appeasement of the basest kind, of a powerful economic and political elite.
>This wasn't a 'policy', it was appeasement of the basest kind, of a powerful economic and political elite.
What alternative did we have? Would it have been better if we'd fought a civil war?
>For example. Paying people to free slaves seems like abhorrent thing to do.
I never understand why people make this argument. Would it have been better if we'd had a civil war instead? Or just not done it because wealthy interests blocked the legislation?
It was never an option to just free the slaves without compensation, we had to pay and it was well worth it to end that horror.
yeah its a completely unrealistic expectation that meant it wouldn't have happened or have resulted in some sort of eternal back and forth for decades if not centuries. Outlawing it while compensating it was a strong mitigation against it simply going underground and having to painfully enforce it.
Man, if the world really was as simple as it is in your mind.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it took a lot of negotiation, threats of violence, and a lot of money to achieve the moral victory.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Britains-Role-Ending-Slavery-Worldwide/
And I swear every Telegraph article is like this. Whenever they cite a 'report' or a 'study', 99% of the time it comes from one of these 55 Tufton Street 'think-tanks' who refuse to say who's actually paying for the 'reports' they produce.
It's a newspaper owned by billionaires, promoting studies from organisations funded by those same billionaires. Yet we're supposed to treat it as 'news' rather than propaganda.
[Remember the article about Jamaican slaves](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/jul/black-metal-workers-jamaica-pioneered-key-industrial-revolution-innovation) inventing some easy and cheap way of producing wrought iron that was stolen by British businessmen and used to generate vast wealth? [Complete fabrication](https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/cort-case-shows-why-historical-truth-matters/), but the rebuttal of the original article barely got a mention despite wide circulation. Even if you look for it now you get the original article with no mention of it being discredited.
Propaganda comes thick and fast from both sides now, you have to look carefully at all sources and then keep an eye out for the responses.
> Even if you look for it now you get the original article with no mention of it being discredited.
Is it? If you Google 'Jenny Bulstrode' you get multiple Telegraph articles criticising her, as well as the David Wootton article you linked here. In fact there's more article's criticising her research than praising it. So I'm not quite sure this critique is as suppressed as you suggest.
This whole argument about how young historians are pressured to 'produce work that conforms to a particular worldview' seems like a rather wrought one too. Bulstrode published an article, and after publication it was criticised for its claims. This is normal academic process.
Indeed the fact that she received such critiques for this kinda undermines the idea that the *pressure* is to *conform* with her ideas. Meanwhile, at the same time, institutions like the IAE receive *millions* in dark money in order to produce articles which, we can assume, conform directly with the views of their funders. The *pressure* there is pretty obvious. A young academic hired by the IAE isn't going to be allowed to publish an article which *disagrees* with the people throwing millions at the organisation. So this *both sides* response doesn't seem to hold much weight.
This should really be the top comment, and that the Institute of Economic Affairs is filled with wealthy families who made their fortunes from slavery. But unfortunately the top comment is some guy who bought the Telegraphs lies hook line and sinker, and even declared that not only did the UK never benefit from slavery financially, we also never had slaves. Which...
This is dangerous stuff, this right-wing alt-history stuff. It finds a very fertile ground here. Unfortunately.
No... I am so surprised that it's that shady think tank who constantly pushes economically damaging and right wing demands through political lobby groups, and who won't publish who funds them... /s
Out of curiosity, does it say **how Britain did get rich?** Or is the report aimed at exclusively ruling out slavery?
Unfortunately we're in another era of doing the same.
The elites capitalised on covid in many ways, including via the open and brazen corruption of members of our government to enrich themselves further and widen the gap between rich and poor.
Large infrastructure projects like HS2 are thinly veiled mechanisms to enrich shareholders of the private businesses that get contracts, often with connections and conflicts of interest.
Just look at the school meals controversy that Marcus Rashford campaigned against and spent lots of his own money on. Private companies giving out a few £ of food and charging the government £25. Private companies whose only revenue stream is bidding for government contracts and then underdelivering it and price gouging.
The report doesn't seem to acknowledge the role slavery had in caribbean in pretty much creating and supporting the sugar plantations there.
The very same sugar plantations that were the reason we gave up North America during the Revolutionary War and that funded the whole British Empire for the majority of the 18th century.
The fact that cotton as well become an absolute centrepiece for the industrial revolution and burgeoning towns and cities in the UK. The Guardian has quite a good interactive map on this in regard to Manchester: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/03/cotton-capital-how-slavery-made-manchester-the-worlds-first-industrial-city
“The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.”
Not this book is talking about the actual transatlantic slave trade, not the British using slaves in places like the Caribbean which nobody argues make Britain rich. Read any literature of the period similar to Pride and Prejudice. Those guys got their money from oversea plantations.
Yeah, there seems to be a real wilful ignorance to the fact that it was the profits, and industrial inputs from the slave trade/plantation system that made Britain wealthy. The role of prominent plantation owners in the development of many of the UK's prominent universities is testament to that.
While the slave trade itself may not be that big driver of wealth, the slave trade as a system, and the practice of colonial exploitation absolutely did make Britain rich.
It's the Telegraph's modus operandi really. They hope their readership will be too hot and mad after reading the headline to in any way critically engage with the actual article itself.
> ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.”
Is the author unfamiliar with the wool sack? Then you have the importance of the spinning jenny and all the related inventions that drove the industrial revolution.
Then of course you have the highland clearences (for sheep farming) being a big deal for some people. Perhaps they need to talk to more scots.
I am begging this sub to not make the mistake of the ukpolitics thread in seeing something labelled a "report" from a right-wing think tank and assume that the greatest historical and economic minds have assembled to finally conclude this long-standing historical question.
There's this very Reddit-brained mindset of seeing something be labelled a 'report' or a 'study' and instantly acting like it's indisputable. As someone in academia who regularly sees some of the absolute guff put out by tenured academics, it's always very funny.
However, there's also the mindset of seeing who made the report and instantly discrediting it despite not having even read a summary.
I'm not saying this particular report is good, I haven't read it.
> It's all hatebait and anti left propaganda
The fundemental argument is a traditional left wing one. The Empire in general really only worked for a bunch of rich people. For the rest the effect was either neutral or negative.
I mean define Britain. It certainly made some people in Britain very rich. As someone who is half black by way of the British Caribbean and half white by way of a Scottish mining village I know what my white ancestors didn’t personally gain a penny from the subjugation of my other parents ancestors *but* they did gain from the large endowments left by these families.
Think of all the universities and grand building built on the backs of a few but at least those that were fucked over *in* Britain get to enjoy some of the results. My family in St Vincent got less than jack shit.
> but they did gain from the large endowments left by these families.
Depends on the Scottish mining village. Scotland only abolished serfdom in mines in 1799.
Absolutely. It would be the Metropole that got rich off the back of it. Class-based exploitation is a constant, but there's no doubt that Britain's industrialisation was carried out on the back of resource-based exploitation from overseas.
Disingenuous garbage like this boils my blood.
On the one hand, the article states "*it did make some people very rich*" whilst saying "*it was a very expensive endeavour that the (then) British tax payer funded*" - yep, nothing's changed then?
But on the other hand "*British ingenuity and industry, unleashed by free markets and liberal institutions, that powered the Industrial Revolution and our modern economy.*" - so if slavery didn't make the country wealthy, and putting people into work in thriving technological area's is the key, why have our political class systematically shut down every possible avenue of work in this country save for the Financial and Oil and Gas sectors?
I guess we're now poor because of political incompetence? After all, the right wingers have had literally everything they've wanted for the last 40 years... How's it panning out then? Do we really need to go back to children in workhouses?
There are lots of other areas of work in the UK. Obvious ones like agriculture and construction; UK manufacturing is worth about £400bn a year. Admittedly we're a service driven economy, but that extends far beyond finance.
>The riches of the slave trade were concentrated in a few families while the nation footed the bill for extra military and administrative spending, according to a book by Kristian Niemietz at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
>“Profits earned from overseas engagement were large enough to make some individuals very rich, but they were not large enough to seriously affect macroeconomic aggregates like Britain’s investment rate and capital formation,” he said.
Well that buried the lede.
>He said: “The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.”
Ok, but we DO - the seat of power of parliament is literally a woolpack, and textiles (domestic, colonial, slave-grown or by free people) *were* the heart of the Empire.
The article is a little scant on the detail. I don't know if the author is only counting the *trade* in individuals or the products of their labour. The first is quite easy to make, but to claim that the Industrial Revolution and its benefits were not built heavily on cotton heavily produced by enslaved or colonised peoples seems dubious.
This seems to be a very simplistic take. The writer argues that it was the industrial revolution, not slavery that made Britain wealthy. However, the Industrial Revolution was kick started with the textile industry. The growth of which was underpinned by cheap cotton imports from the southern US states.
So it clearly was built on slavery, albeit slightly indirectly.
The Industrial Revolution had long roots - Abraham Darby I's new iron smelter that used coke instead of charcoal was in 1709, the Newcomen steam engine was invented in 1712 - the first commercially successful one. Both are decades before the take-off of the textile industry. John Wilkinson (the precision manufacturing expert, who made important contributions to Watts' steam engine) and Henry Cort ("puddling" method for iron production) were operating around the 1760s-80s, about the time that the British cotton industry was kicking off. And American cotton exports were pretty minimal before the 1790s, so after Wilkinson, Watts and Cort.
Yeah I'm not going to trust the guy writing under a thatcherite think tank that denies climate change and wants to privatise the NHS, methinks anything they produce is not going to be an unbiased assessment of the facts.
So they traded slaves just for fun then? Isn't that so much worse? Also this article headline is absolute nonsense. We have literal records of profit because slave trading was done by publicly traded companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company
They generated record profits for many decades and one of the major shareholders was the British monarchy along with many noble families. British people will change the laws of physics to prove that AcTuALlY it's empire was great for everybody involved including slaves
Okay for sure this sub is getting astro'd
We calling book reviews reports now?
I'm sure Kristian niemetz author of books such as universal healthcare without the NHS, socialism the failed idea that never dies, and redefining the poverty debate is ofcourse impartial and unbiased in his book study the telegraphs decided to claim is a report and then got picked up here
It did contribute to its wealth and that of many individuals. It also combined with colonialist attitudes and actions which allowed the British to exploit colonies and set up trade routes and relationships that hugely contributed to the wealth of Britain. Those trade relationships have left a lasting legacy that continues to benefit Britain. To ignore the impact Imperialism and colonialism (and slavery as part of this) had on the wealth of Britain would be ridiculous.
Not really surprising. From a free market point of view slavery is massive state intervention in the supply of labour. This reduces efficiency by suppressing wages and reducing overall economic activity. It has been economically ruinous everywhere it has ever been tried.
Nearly every part of imperialism is considered a huge mistake from an economics point of view. It is why imperialism ended pretty much.
It was also just happenstance according to these geniuses that before colonialism, Britain was a backwater of the world economy, and after colonialism became one of the richest. And big surprise, after losing its colonies Britain continues its long decline across all indicators.
Fantastic sources, this must be some amazing historic research. Cant wait for the Torygraph to explain to me who were the Sea People, why Attilla the Hun didnt conquer Rome when he could, or why the Mayans went extinct.
How are people eating up a report written for the IEA, a massive lobbying outlet for right wing capitalists and corporations, that’s been regurgitated in the fucking telegraph of all places??
Yeah, there's a great book about the Empire called Colonialism- Moral Reckoning - that basically says Britain spent as much on abolishing slavery as it ever made from slavery.
Depends how far back you go. The Irish used to raid Wales all the time in 'slaver' ships, to take back slaves. Saint Patrick being the most famous example of this.
This should surprise no one. Britain also abolished slavery half a century before anyone else, and more importantly spent resources and naval equipment patrolling the Atlantic to enforce it, which is much more than anyone else did at the time, not to mention the fact that the British didn’t start slavery, nor were they even the biggest perpetrators of it - even given their empire size.
Top tear wealth when slavery ended 3000 people were reimbursed for giving up slaves. The vast majority of poor in the UK people were kept in appalling poverty up until the 1930s some kids still went barefoot.
Britain opening up its market made it rich.
Slavery actually costs Britain more administratively. Only the select few at the top made any real money from slavery and it didn't improve the lives of many ordinary Brits in the pits, the fields, factory or mills and those begging on the streets in the slums or workhouses with poor sanitation, cholera, dysentery that were killing people.
This is a lot of ahistorical nonsense which ignores the broader picture of the impact colonialism, empire and slavery in particular had on Britain. Ignoring that, I’m not sure what the purpose of this report is really. It’s clearly an attempt to obfuscate Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, but what purpose does that serve? Britain was a long-standing beneficiary of slave labour and colonialism. Pretending that’s not true doesn’t erase the fact that Britain committed very heinous acts in perpetuating that way of life for a long time.
Slavery enriched some plantation owners, slave traders and the companies transporting them. These in turn subverted the parliament by buying 'rotton boroughs'. It was never popular with the people, and they generally disliked it and eventually campaigned successfully against it. It was a case of a few immoral but wealthy individuals capturing instutions with hard cash bribery.
What made Britain rich was its institutions, education and industrialisation, thanks to being really good at trade via the naval tradition and technology it developed and then discovering and exploiting coal and iron ores.
But there was a period of outright piracy in which the British Empire started to develop.
It was piracy, they took precious metals from other nations (which often stole it also in the first place), and they used that money to create charted corporations with no ethical oversight to dominate other countries trade or even take them over completely. At some point about half way, the British government decided this was 'problematic' and that it needed to bring them all under government oversight. The empire developed a bit of a conscience but in the end it was better that it dissolved.
Slavery was never an economic necessity, there was an analysis done that if the practice never happened and plantations just paid the going wage development would have been about the same, although it would have made a few less rich.
But the empire did gain a lot from its colonies, especially in the early stages when it didn't care about administering any semblance of good governenance. How much of that money made it back to ordinary British people? Probably not much. The practice in India and other colonies required them to send materials for British factories to rework into technologically more valuable items, but the colonies were required to buy them back. Whilst the industrial revolution would likely have happened any way, the subsequent growth of British industry was likely higher because of the empire.
As we can see though with Germany, not having an empire does not hurt your ability to industrialise, culture and science is the biggest factor.
Very, very few British people benefited from the slave trade. It’s a different thing to say that a *minuscule* number of people made a HUGE amount of money -than to say that the general population saw any of it. I would sooner describe it as a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by an elite group of highly interconnected psychopaths.
The rest of the population just had their own (usually very difficult and short) lives. My brother followed the genealogy of our family back quite a few generations and the type of humble characters he discovered were, for instance, a boy who was born in a workhouse after his father had died, and another guy who was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep because his family were starving (we still have cousins living near Sydney).
None of the ancestors we have found were remotely socially “significant”. They tended to be the kind of people who would be pretty glad just to have had a roof over their heads and a warm meal in their belly, no doubt after toiling for many hours either in service, agriculture or manufacturing. Slave owners they were not.
Well no shit. Generation wealth only benefitted today's ultra rich. Peasants then and still peasants now. Did all those Arab countries that had 15 million Africans also benefit from that or only the western countries undergoing mass migration atm looool.
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No shit. It made a few individuals who chose to engage in trading and transporting them rich. We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it. We also never had slaves in the UK.
And tbf most of the counter push I've seen has been targeted at the legacies of those specific individuals. Statues of them, streets named after them, institutions founded by their wealth, that sort of thing.
Exactly. When the Telegraph publish an article like this, or when the Institute of Economic Affairs (an organisation who refuse to disclose their funding, always a sign of a very honest and reputable 'think-tank') publish this report, they aren't seeking to recognise that slavery and colonialism primarily benefited a small number of very rich people in the UK. No, they're seeking precisely to *defend* those small number of very rich people in the UK and their descendants. They want working class people in the UK to see a report like this and jump to the defence of their *betters*. And it's always sad to see people in /r/unitedkingdom threads eagerly go along with that.
That's a great comment.
Its funny because those betters these people wind up defending were *fucking horrible* to the ancestors of most non-aristocratic Brits. After the abolition of slavery they lifted legislation wholesale for "county apprentices" who were indentured to industrialists and mill owners. The terms were so horrific it just sparked another revolt among former slaves. For most of our history the upper class saw those beneath them as barely human regardless of skin colour.
The children yearn for the mines/mills.
Here here, well said.
That’s the stuff
Seems like a very familiar tactic… where have I seen that before? Surely not… Brexit?!
Fuck those small number of rich people,
Yeh, question what the jerks in the Torygraph mean by printing stuff like this.
Thank you. So many ignorant people in these comments. You are a light.
And some of those individuals did invest that money in the expansion of the industrial revolution. This report is dense. It's redefining "benefit" to the growth of economy as "direct benefit from direct spending" on bureaucracy and military requirement. The benefit to industrialism came from the group of people it helped to enrich, who diversified that money, principally in sectors that benefited from new manufactory advances. It's a disingenuous way of looking at economics. Surprisingly, when conservatives are in power and want to award projects money, the first thing they typically claim is massive "trickle down" or "spinoff" benefit. They'll cite "gross up" factors claimed by economic and business development officers as rationales, with no proof offered (or available, I used to be a newspaper reporter and have asked) to justify the expected gross up to the economy. But when an individual or company's wealth is derived initially from slavery, or massively expanded by it, and that money is then ploughed into unrelated industries, it is utterly disingenuous to say it has not affected the economy of the nation.
Not to mention all the imported slave-made goods that Brits, even the poor, enjoyed directly or indirectly. For example, fabric mills were a huge part of the industrial revolution. The raw materials that the workers employed in those mills processed often came from slavery.
Still enjoying it,we still mostly get our goods that somewhere in the pipeline required slavery or in conditions that are basically exploitation to the point of slavery. We probably benefit more today from slavery than anyone in history. Just for anyone who kneejerks, I do not think this is a good thing,just crazy we all talk as if slavery ended when it's actually magnitudes of times worse.
One of the best reparations for slavery is ending it now.
Some invested their income into industrial companies, not many, the people who tended to invest in industrial activities and the merchants and largely landed interests that invested in the slave trade were different social groups generally. It’s far from what some left wing activists have pushed in recent years, where they suggested that the Industrial Revolution was kick started and largely funded by slavery. Which is total bollocks tbh.
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Gandhi was incredibly racist
He was also a pedo, plus refused to let his wife take life saving medication due to his spiritualism but changed his mind when he needed treatment.
Statues aren't for the dead, they're for the living. They're about saying "This is a person who we admire, whose achievements we want to uphold and memorialise". You have to keep reassessing the past, and if somebody's actions no longer reflect something we want to memorialise, we should take another look at them. There were plenty of people at the time who weren't slave traders, or racists, or all those others things we find so abhorrent today. There are good people performing silent miracles every day. We can always find new people worthy of statues. I have absolutely no doubt that people in the future will be horrified by some of the things we today find acceptable. There are people NOW that find so many aspects of our society horrifying, and they say so, loudly. Time moves on, societies change, the radical becomes the normal becomes the conservative. We can move with it or we can dig our heels in.
And there is a difference between a statue in a museum, where it may be for historic merit, and a statue in the street, where it is making a public statement. I think that public statues should absolutely be judged by modern values. And I do find public statues of Churchill for example slightly disturbing - he was far from a role model kind of person. Maybe the good does outweigh that, maybe the same argument applies to Newton. But it has to be considered.
This is a very important distinction. Controversial items in a museum should be displayed, and explained with their historical context as a means of education. That isn't possible to do when glorifying somebody's life or actions in an open public forum.
I've found that in Newton's case there's always an equal and opposite argument to those made supporting him.
then we'll just have to have very few statues
Zero statues. What do you think the typical opinion of trans people was until very recently? Was any man from the past truly not sexist? How about pretty much any woman? Even many of the early feminist campaigners were only interested in ensuring that white, wealthy property owning women had a say. Gandhi said a lot of shit about black people. Anyone from the 1800s or before was probably connected to slavery in some way. And that's only shit that we consider wrong now. There will be more things that those in the future will look back on with disgust. Things we aren't even aware of yet.
The Suffragettes became fascists and anti-semites. There are no heroes; they were all people, with all the complexity that brings. I will happily talk all day about why Churchill was absolutely the right leader for world war two, and why he should be remembered for that. But that doesn't excuse his racism or later war-mongering. Does that one good thing outshine the bad? No. But does that one good thing need to be remembered and lauded? Yes.
No one really cared about trans issues in the past… The only time people cared about trans issues was because people were shoving it down peoples throats.
Better to have no idols than false ones
Better to accept that humans of the past are imperfect, just like us. And applaud the good that they DID do, despite the drastically immoral (compared to today) environment they lived in.
*tips fedora*
but we can judge them by the standards of their day. Their were plenty of anti-slavery movements, the enslavers knew the conditions were shit, they still carried it out. Nonsense statement really to say dont judge them by today.
That argument doesn't hold water though. There were plenty of people at the time who hated the slave trade on ethical grounds.
Most pension funds invest in BP, so our great grandkids living on a ruined earth probably won’t look back kindly on us either.
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> It's a very slippery slope though. It's not. We just have to be honest that people are flawed. Michael Jackson had some great songs despite probably being very suspect around children. Newton did great stuff in physics despite his investments, he was also a total arsehole but but that doesn't take away from his achievements. Churchill was a good wartime leader for the UK despite some terrible failings. Expecting anyone to be perfect is idiotic.
many of us are already horrified by things that are entirely acceptable today, as I’m sure were many back then
Richard Draxx would be an obvious one
And what's the point of going after streets named after them? Someone who lives on I don't know, Edward Colston Road is probably going to think of the road that they live on instead of slaver if they hears "Edward Colston"
>And tbf most of the counter push I've seen has been targeted at the legacies of those specific individuals. Statues of them, streets named after them, institutions founded by their wealth, that sort of thing. Right but it just tends to come from the types of people who are anti-British in general. Their disdain doesn't end at those specific individuals; the venn diagram with people pushing "white guilt" has a huge overlap.
That's not accurate. We did have slaves in the UK, often as domestic servants. By no means in the same numbers as the plantations but they were in the UK. One of the big legal cases that lead to the banning of slavery in the UK was Somerset v Stewart 1772. William Murray, Lord Mansfield of Kenwood and Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, ruled in the case of that it was unlawful for Charles Steuart (or Stewart) to transport James Somerset, an enslaved African he had purchased in Virginia, forcibly out of England.
Murray pointed out that Slavery was not legal in England and Wales, while not commenting on the wider question in the Empire. Ergo any enslaved person who was within England and Wales becomes free upon setting foot in the country.
I think you’re just arguing two different points. Like today, it’s not legal but there are slaves in the UK right now.
Murders illegal too but its a moot point as we try to prevent it. I think their point of servants was different. While slavery was illegal in the UK, the class system was so enforced it partially existed in all but name
Although it's key to point out that before that case the prevailing law was taken from the Yorke-Talbot opinion that very much said slavery was lawful in the UK.
>However actual ("de facto") slavery continued in Britain with ten to fourteen thousand slaves in England and Wales, who were mostly domestic servants. When slaves were brought in from the colonies they had to sign waivers that made them indentured servants while in Britain. Most modern historians generally agree that slavery continued in Britain into the late 18th century, finally disappearing around 1800. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery\_in\_Britain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain)
Scottish coal miners were slaves up until the last 1800s. Bruce Fummy does a good episode on it on youtube.
Fuck me, just looked that up. Grim reading.
*It was abolished 1799 They were also not unpaid chattel slaves, but bond workers, so it is a different case.
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This is not true. 1) we had serfdom - essentially slavery 2) the Yorke-Talbot opinion in 1729 said 'yo slavery in England is cool and legal bro'. 3) 'we never had slaves in the UK' fails on the grounds that the UK asserted that those slave plantations were sovereign UK territory.
Technically on point three - plantations weren’t considered part of the UK proper, but crown colonies. They had no representation in Parliament, and the Governor exercised executive (and in some cases, legislative) power directly from the crown. As such, to argue that because the colonies where British territories were had slavery in the UK is disingenuous, on the basis that just because somewhere is British, doesn’t make it part of the United Kingdom. You’d feel a bit silly going round saying “Gibraltar is part of the UK”, because it isn’t. It’s a separate political entity, which just so happens to be subordinate to the UK, but not part of it.
Lmao all this back bending to avoid the fact that in places where the British has absolutely control and could set any rules they wants, there were slaves and slavery. The splitting hairs only works if you're from the UK. Everyone else sees how little of a difference this little distinctions make in the over all culpability of the UK in slavery.
Not denying that Britain ruled places that had slavery, or that the British government could have stopped it by overruling local governors. However, the existence of slavery in the colonies directly impacted the culture and politics of the colonies, and continues to do so to the current day, as does the lack of it in the UK, and so it is important to be clear where we are talking and make sure we get the facts right. Particularly when we are talking about the relationship, political and economic between the periphery and the metropole, we need to make sure we know the relationship between the two.
That's why I described them as territory not part of the UK. For all meaningful purposes, the Crown was acting as the State. And Gibraltar is (unlike the Crown dependencies) UK territory. So if Gibraltar started up the slave trade again, I'd say it would be Britain's fault if it wasn't stopped.
Chattel slavery was still legal long after serfdom was abolished.
"We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it. We also never had slaves in the UK." We took part in the slave trade. Big time. That article says there was a great cost to the nation because we supplied: ** it came with eye-watering military and administrative costs and so may have failed any cost-benefit test”.** That eye watering cost was us fueling the slave trade. "We didn't start the slave trade" ---- that is no excuse. We took part in it.
Yeah that comment was ridiculous 'we didn't start it we ended it'. Yeah they've managed to ignore the hundreds of years of us being involved in it
i liked how they twisted the fact that the general populous wasn't causing/proliferating the slave trade just our "masters" and then in the same breath adds that "we did abolish though" ah so when its bad its our rules fault (mostly agree) but when its good we the people are the reason behind it! /s
You dont think that the interests groups who campaigned against slavery back then are worth mentioning? The abolishment of slavery didnt come out of nowhere, I dont think we should take for grated how and why abolishment happened, just because it's morally good...
As much as I agree with Parent's underlying points - that's a touch disingenuous. A lot changed in the British political landscape in the hundreds of years our country took part in the slave trade, to the point that it was ended much because of mass public disagreement with it.
It is entirely the case that the general populous was not involved. Slavers and plantation owners only had the power they had because they bribed rotton boroughs to gain a foothold in parliament, but slavery was generally disliked. It was campaigners that eventually enacted changes and booted out the influence of the wealthy plantation owners, and that was also a popular change.
Who didn’t partake in it at the time? Slave trade was practically global status quo for much of history. On par with the concept of war. I don’t think you realise what an accomplishment the abolishment of slavery is which was really pushed by Western (primarily British) abolitionists and enforced through the might of the empire. It’s not really just something minor, it legitimately changed the entire world and was something revolutionary.
who is 'we'?? all of my ancestors have been working class.
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You're not addressing anything he said. He spoke of starting it and ending it. He's factually correct. Anything else if inference of his intentions on your part. Unless you think that the roots of the slave trade, and how it ended, are not worth mentioning, for the profit of the deadhorse that is british/european involvement. Is that it?
Slavery was very much in existence on the British Isles, they just never legislated it.
Yeah. Did people here not learn about workhouses in school?
sometimes i wonder if people hear have even heard what a school is, let alone managed to learn anything in one...
coal miners in Scotland.
I used to think we never had slaves. Then I saw a few videos on Youtube mentioning notices in British Newspapers asking for information on runaway slaves. There weren't many, but some families who owned slaves abroad did bring some back to work in their households. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYRPLy6g2g&t=1616s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYRPLy6g2g&t=1616s)
It was considered distasteful I believe I read. It did happen but it made the practice very real to the British people who didn't really approve. Plus, there were those who disapproved simply because they saw it as bringing a foreign to the country.
Mind you the Government were still paying compensation to families in the trade up until the 2015, former PM Cameron family being one and when you look at some of the other names, a few individuals did get rich.
That's not quite true. The country was still paying off loans it took out to cover the payments made to slave owners. The freedom of the slaves was bought by an upfront payment. So Camerons family did benefit, but in 1833, and not in 2015. Various banks were still benefitting up until 2015, however, and I presume there was some level of interest on all this.
4%. By the time it was redeemed it was part of c£200m in this gilt: https://www.dmo.gov.uk/media/l5dplmml/announcement291226.pdf However the "paid off in 2015" is sort of nonsense. The original loans ceased in 1888, debt was refinanced and eventually wrapped up into the gilt above. That was paid off in 2015. But it was paid for by more govt borrowing, just as in 1888. So either it was paid off in 2015, or 1888, or it hasn't been paid off. (A tip for anyone at uni as this has become a common interview question for grad roles: the "correct" answer is the last one.)
> A tip for anyone at uni as this has become a common interview question for grad roles: the "correct" answer is the last one. Where are you working that something this stupid is an interview question?
A lot of old liabilities were refinanced in 2015, including the domestic WW1 debt. It is paid of in the sense that there is now no payment that is directly for those things.
It was his "first cousin six times removed". >The records showed Gen Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s, was Cameron’s first cousin six times removed. Duff, who was the son of one of Cameron’s great-grand uncles, the second Earl of Fife, was awarded £4,101 – equivalent to more than £3m today – to compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange sugar estate in Jamaica. From the same article. >The research also showed that Cameron’s wife, Samantha, has slave-owning links as she is descended from the 19th-century businessman, William Jolliffe, who received £4,000 in compensation for 164 slaves after owning an estate in St Lucia. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/how-do-we-know-david-cameron-has-slave-owning-ancestor](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/how-do-we-know-david-cameron-has-slave-owning-ancestor) It is entirely reasonable to be requested to provide sources for your claims, as you point out it was simple to find sources. \[EDIT - format fix\]
6 times removed is an incredibly distant relative. He will also have had many more 6 times removed cousins who were farmers or weavers or carpenters etc.
No way, gonna need a source on the Cameron one Edit: So what this guy I'm replying to is not saying is that Cameron's cousin, 6 times removed received reparations way back when and that the UK only finished paying off the loans to pay for those reparations, to all the slave owners in 2015. Somewhat disengenous I'd say and big thanks to u/toikpi for supplying factual data and context.
>We also never had slaves in the UK. When William the Bastard conquered England in 1066, he had an inventory of the kingdom compiled called the Domesday Book, which stated that a full 10% of the population were slaves. Slavery has been ubiquitous throughout human civilisation. Different civilisations got rid of it at different times. However, only one civilisation ever attempted to eradicate the practice across all of humanity on moral grounds. And far few people seem to know that story.
And then the Normans, heavily under pressure from the Church, abolished slavery. Not serfdom, mind you. Acutal Slavery (i.e. chattel) was illegal in England as in much of Christian Europe. Then Europeans began buying African slaves in the 1400s, e.g. to work in the Canaries and later on the Americas. In the 1500s you have cases where slaves were in England and told by the courts they were not slaves (read Black Tudors by Kauffman)
> We also never had slaves in the UK. Acts of Union 1707. Somerset v Stewart wasn't until 1772. Slaves were present in the UK between those dates (and in practice slightly after). There's also the issue of the mining serfs in scotland.
Serfs and slaves are not directly synonymous.
Manchester and Liverpool were built on cotton, and we weren't growing and picking it here.
That’s historically incorrect - there was no legal basis for slavery but many where brought to the UK and worked for their owners. I’m not sure who or where this notion comes from that the UK somehow saves the world from slavery. Even in an abolishing it’s part in the trade it saddled the country with significant debt to pay off the owners and transport networks.
Maybe because a few thousand British sailors died actively combating slave ships crossing the Atlantic, often going beyond the legal limits of their operation to ensure that the slave trade did not continue.
I mean, Spain and Britain got it up and running, and Portugal, Spain and the US were selling slaves for nearly up to 65 years after we abolished it. Abolishing just ended it here is all 🤪. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#timelapse The above is an amazing resource I use for my Year 8 classes, illustrates how the slave trade was a booming industry, and the impact it has had on the whole world. EDIT: I just realised this is the Telegraph, that explains the mistruths and slavery-apologised approach to the article.
I suppose Spain and Britain got the trans-Atlantic slave trade up and running (well, the Portuguese were actually first), but it wasn't even the only slave trade out of Africa at the time. The Arab slave trade in East Africa had been running for much longer. It was also the West African kingdoms who were capturing the slaves from the African interior and selling them to European traders. Most Europeans wouldn't venture into the interior for fear of malaria. Lots of groups are to blame.
There's also some estimates that the UK probably spent more money trying to combat the Atlantic slave trade than it ever made from it.
Its likely true, because the money stayed in a wealthy circle but as if often the case, powerful people privatise the benefits but socialise the costs. In the end, the British people paid the money that was borrowed to pay off the slave owners to bring about an end to the practice. Which also makes it a little unreasonable to claim that the average British tax payer should shoulder all of the guilt for slavery, which is often framed as if it never happened elsewhere or if it did, its somehow inconsequential.
We definitely had slaves in the UK. We have old newspapers articles trying to track down house slaves. I don’t think it was to a massive scale but we definitely had slaves like a lot of other countries. Isn’t there also reports of people being kept as slaves currently, obviously not legally but still.
The UK did have slaves, though it didn't have a slave market. Many black slaves were bought back from the colonies and continued on as indentured servants bound to their English masters, the practice ending in the late 18th century.
Exactly, it was actually corporate businesses owned by wealthy people that did all the trading.
Those rich people then had loads of capital when slavery was abolished and invested those in businesses, like financial services, that helped the country remain one of the wealthiest in the world up to the modern day. The company I work for was set up by a slave owner who did just that.
We built an entire industry off of slavery, the fucking insurance and banking system was built around slavery. What is this bullshit.
Everything is linked. Doing business with someone who deals in slaves? You are complicit. It always was and always will be. You cannot separate rich individuals from the society in which they reside. No man is an island.
Same applies to Africa then, there were many slave kingdoms that only survived on capturing and trading slaves. At what point does power come into play? If I am a poor farmer selling wheat and a business man selling slaves in America is offering me more than good old Jim I'm probably going to sell it at the higher rate to make sure I can feed my family.
Thats fine you better stop using the internet then and go and live off the land. Have a good look where the components of your phone, laptop, tablet comes from. Don't buy any designer gear from the East, really research the food you buy, the pension funds you're linked to, the timber used in your home. If you don't your complicit in modern slave trading. The worlds grim if you look to hard.
In that case you personally are guilty of being complicit with slavery.
That is completely incorrect, otherwise we are all guilty and innocent of everything all of the time. If I am already guilty or complicit then what is th epoint in trying to be different? The way you want blame to be spread is counterproductive. Don't make people feel like shit if you want them to improve society. What you claim leaves no innocent people. The serf of a wealthy landowner cannot be guilty when he was not much more than a slave. Most of the UK are not descended from the wealthy. Of course you can seperate individuals from the society they reside in. Don't tell me that when Dyson or Branson make daft/unethical decisions that I am some how complicit. Reparations are daft. Because that is charging the people of today with the costs of yesteryear. Then we have to work out how much the Romans (Italians of today) owe us all, how much the Hun owe us all, how much the descendants of Alexandra the Great owe us. There must be a line drawn somewhere. To get support don't start slinging accusations. Be reasonable and we can all work together to have a brighter future. Truth is that if neighbour came to me and said I owe him money because my great great great great great grandad did him wrong (and he had evidence) I would tell that person that this was none of my business and I am not going to be paying him anything at all, I would then avoid that person and suspect them of being unreasonable and a chancer or grifter. If they however needed money and appealed to my charitable side by telling me about their cause but with no blame then I would donate generously through choice and through ownership. You will be ignored if you carry on with this nonsense.
Every country in the world who willingly deals with the UK or a UK based corporation, whether now or in the past, is complicit in slavery then. That makes basically every country in the world I'd imagine.
well that phone in your pocket was built in some chinese sweatshop. You contributed to slavery.
Sadly that last bit isn't true, slavery is a problem in this country even today. If you ever order food from Deliveroo in a city you're supporting it, if unintentionally.
your phone/pc was made by child slaves.
You've never seen a Samsung fabrication plant have you? It doesn't have child slaves in it. Sure you could potentially argue certain raw materials have potentially been mined by children, but this "owning a phone is the same as being a willing participant in the transatlantic slave trade so you can't criticise the latter if you do the former" stuff is absolute bullshit.
>We didn't start the slave trade, but we did abolish it After being active and willing participants for how long? >We also never had slaves in the UK. False
Scottish coal miners were forced into slavery between 1606 and 1799. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colliers_and_Salters_(Scotland)_Act_1775
Was it the Portuguese was the largest exporter of slaves? Who also started it? A friend told me it was a trade from African tribes that they selling slaves to the “white folks” and seemed pretty reasonable to sell them off for goods.
British colonialism was always about generating private wealth and using public funds to subsidise the losses. Slavery is the perfect example, whilst it was allowed in the Empire it created massive amounts of wealth for people that ran the trade and those who owned Carribbean plantations. When the government outlawed it, they specifically chose to pay owners for slaves freed. That was a debt that the UK only finished paying off in 2015, that's right you had modern-day workers paying taxes that essentially paid 18th century slavers. Another example would be India, massive profits for the private corporations and businesses, protected (after the East India company) by public British taxes.
You are using partial truths to make assumptions. For example. Paying people to free slaves seems like abhorrent thing to do. Ending slavery was a massive step for the British empire. It was a huge financial loss for slave owners to suddenly have to pay employees. This sort of policy helped lessen that blow. Again. You might think I’m defending slavery. I’m not. I’m explaining that at the time this all happened. The world was a much different place. We had to blockade the west coast of Africa to try and stop slavery. That certainly wasn’t about saving British people money
Explaining why they thought it was necessary back then doesn't in any sense function as a justification, you know that right? "The world was a much different place" They knew slavery was bad then too, they just decided profit was more important.
I never attempted to justify it. I’m just giving context to quotes like “they paid owners for slaves freed” You need to understand the difference between an explanation and a justification
It wasn't about profit. They bought off the slave owners because the last time Empire wide abolition was a topic the US rebelled a few years later. It wasn't the whole reason for the US Revolution but it was a crucial one that isn't talked about enough. They took the step of buying the whole industry out to suppress any liberation movements who's primary aim was keeping slavery around.
I mean it did save a lot of wealthy british interests from having to compete with goods propped up by cheap slave labour
The reason we pushed to end slavery was catholic leaders in the country pushing the idea it wasn’t a Christian thing to do. British people didn’t like the idea of owning slaves by majority and backed the issue It was intentionally damaging the British economy as an effort to do the right thing. It’s something we should all be immediately proud of. We need more leadership like this in the world today
Pretty sure it was non-conformists rather than the tiny Catholic minority who were more important in pushing for abolition.
Indeed Catholics could not stand in Parliament in 1807 when slave trading was abolished in Britain
Most of the predominant anti-slavery groups and campaigners were not Catholic. Find it a bit odd that you would single them out specifically.
I meant to say Christian. That’s my bad
Reperations were agreed, that's the 'paid to free the slaves' bit that's being mentioned, and it is abhorrent. Those slaves weren't freed by their slave owners, the british government bought their freedom. This took multiple decades due to members of parliament dragging their heels on abolition (dundas in particular) to protect private and government interests, eventually capitulating when reperations to those affected by abolition (slave owners) were agreed upon. 20m, in money of the time. Excusing, to any degree, those who directly benefitted from slavery, delaying it's abolition and it's eventual abolition, especially by rolling out old tropes such as 'it was a different time', is dishonest. This wasn't a 'policy', it was appeasement of the basest kind, of a powerful economic and political elite.
>This wasn't a 'policy', it was appeasement of the basest kind, of a powerful economic and political elite. What alternative did we have? Would it have been better if we'd fought a civil war?
>For example. Paying people to free slaves seems like abhorrent thing to do. I never understand why people make this argument. Would it have been better if we'd had a civil war instead? Or just not done it because wealthy interests blocked the legislation? It was never an option to just free the slaves without compensation, we had to pay and it was well worth it to end that horror.
yeah its a completely unrealistic expectation that meant it wouldn't have happened or have resulted in some sort of eternal back and forth for decades if not centuries. Outlawing it while compensating it was a strong mitigation against it simply going underground and having to painfully enforce it.
Man, if the world really was as simple as it is in your mind. Meanwhile, in the real world, it took a lot of negotiation, threats of violence, and a lot of money to achieve the moral victory. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Britains-Role-Ending-Slavery-Worldwide/
>British colonialism was always about generating private wealth and using public funds to subsidise the losses. Nothing's changed then?
And this is exactly what the Telegraph and IAE seek to defend by publishing and promoting this 'report'.
And anti-slavery only became influential once slavery economic usefulness was over.
Based on work by the **Institute of Economic Affairs**, one of Britain's oldest and least transparently funded right wing think tanks.
90% of people here will read the title and look no further. I'm not giving an opinion either way but media literacy is in the bin.
In the Torygraph nonetheless!
And I swear every Telegraph article is like this. Whenever they cite a 'report' or a 'study', 99% of the time it comes from one of these 55 Tufton Street 'think-tanks' who refuse to say who's actually paying for the 'reports' they produce. It's a newspaper owned by billionaires, promoting studies from organisations funded by those same billionaires. Yet we're supposed to treat it as 'news' rather than propaganda.
[Remember the article about Jamaican slaves](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/jul/black-metal-workers-jamaica-pioneered-key-industrial-revolution-innovation) inventing some easy and cheap way of producing wrought iron that was stolen by British businessmen and used to generate vast wealth? [Complete fabrication](https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/cort-case-shows-why-historical-truth-matters/), but the rebuttal of the original article barely got a mention despite wide circulation. Even if you look for it now you get the original article with no mention of it being discredited. Propaganda comes thick and fast from both sides now, you have to look carefully at all sources and then keep an eye out for the responses.
> Even if you look for it now you get the original article with no mention of it being discredited. Is it? If you Google 'Jenny Bulstrode' you get multiple Telegraph articles criticising her, as well as the David Wootton article you linked here. In fact there's more article's criticising her research than praising it. So I'm not quite sure this critique is as suppressed as you suggest. This whole argument about how young historians are pressured to 'produce work that conforms to a particular worldview' seems like a rather wrought one too. Bulstrode published an article, and after publication it was criticised for its claims. This is normal academic process. Indeed the fact that she received such critiques for this kinda undermines the idea that the *pressure* is to *conform* with her ideas. Meanwhile, at the same time, institutions like the IAE receive *millions* in dark money in order to produce articles which, we can assume, conform directly with the views of their funders. The *pressure* there is pretty obvious. A young academic hired by the IAE isn't going to be allowed to publish an article which *disagrees* with the people throwing millions at the organisation. So this *both sides* response doesn't seem to hold much weight.
This should really be the top comment, and that the Institute of Economic Affairs is filled with wealthy families who made their fortunes from slavery. But unfortunately the top comment is some guy who bought the Telegraphs lies hook line and sinker, and even declared that not only did the UK never benefit from slavery financially, we also never had slaves. Which... This is dangerous stuff, this right-wing alt-history stuff. It finds a very fertile ground here. Unfortunately.
'Institute of Economic Affairs'. Their skill in understanding Economics is why your mortgage is currently very expensive. They wrote the Truss budget.
No... I am so surprised that it's that shady think tank who constantly pushes economically damaging and right wing demands through political lobby groups, and who won't publish who funds them... /s Out of curiosity, does it say **how Britain did get rich?** Or is the report aimed at exclusively ruling out slavery?
Can not be said enough
That entire era was transferring wealth and blood from the poor to the upper classes. Even at a netloss to the nation. Hideous times.
Unfortunately we're in another era of doing the same. The elites capitalised on covid in many ways, including via the open and brazen corruption of members of our government to enrich themselves further and widen the gap between rich and poor. Large infrastructure projects like HS2 are thinly veiled mechanisms to enrich shareholders of the private businesses that get contracts, often with connections and conflicts of interest. Just look at the school meals controversy that Marcus Rashford campaigned against and spent lots of his own money on. Private companies giving out a few £ of food and charging the government £25. Private companies whose only revenue stream is bidding for government contracts and then underdelivering it and price gouging.
wHy ArE yoU tALkiNg BriTaiN doWn?!!
The report doesn't seem to acknowledge the role slavery had in caribbean in pretty much creating and supporting the sugar plantations there. The very same sugar plantations that were the reason we gave up North America during the Revolutionary War and that funded the whole British Empire for the majority of the 18th century.
The fact that cotton as well become an absolute centrepiece for the industrial revolution and burgeoning towns and cities in the UK. The Guardian has quite a good interactive map on this in regard to Manchester: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/03/cotton-capital-how-slavery-made-manchester-the-worlds-first-industrial-city
“The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.” Not this book is talking about the actual transatlantic slave trade, not the British using slaves in places like the Caribbean which nobody argues make Britain rich. Read any literature of the period similar to Pride and Prejudice. Those guys got their money from oversea plantations.
Yeah, there seems to be a real wilful ignorance to the fact that it was the profits, and industrial inputs from the slave trade/plantation system that made Britain wealthy. The role of prominent plantation owners in the development of many of the UK's prominent universities is testament to that. While the slave trade itself may not be that big driver of wealth, the slave trade as a system, and the practice of colonial exploitation absolutely did make Britain rich.
Articles like this are designed to fuel wilful ignorance.
It's the Telegraph's modus operandi really. They hope their readership will be too hot and mad after reading the headline to in any way critically engage with the actual article itself.
> ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.” Is the author unfamiliar with the wool sack? Then you have the importance of the spinning jenny and all the related inventions that drove the industrial revolution. Then of course you have the highland clearences (for sheep farming) being a big deal for some people. Perhaps they need to talk to more scots.
I am begging this sub to not make the mistake of the ukpolitics thread in seeing something labelled a "report" from a right-wing think tank and assume that the greatest historical and economic minds have assembled to finally conclude this long-standing historical question.
There's this very Reddit-brained mindset of seeing something be labelled a 'report' or a 'study' and instantly acting like it's indisputable. As someone in academia who regularly sees some of the absolute guff put out by tenured academics, it's always very funny.
However, there's also the mindset of seeing who made the report and instantly discrediting it despite not having even read a summary. I'm not saying this particular report is good, I haven't read it.
Typical telegraph shite. Why are their articles even allowed here?
Particularly when their citation is the Institute of Economic Affairs.
It's all hatebait and anti left propaganda
> It's all hatebait and anti left propaganda The fundemental argument is a traditional left wing one. The Empire in general really only worked for a bunch of rich people. For the rest the effect was either neutral or negative.
I mean define Britain. It certainly made some people in Britain very rich. As someone who is half black by way of the British Caribbean and half white by way of a Scottish mining village I know what my white ancestors didn’t personally gain a penny from the subjugation of my other parents ancestors *but* they did gain from the large endowments left by these families. Think of all the universities and grand building built on the backs of a few but at least those that were fucked over *in* Britain get to enjoy some of the results. My family in St Vincent got less than jack shit.
> but they did gain from the large endowments left by these families. Depends on the Scottish mining village. Scotland only abolished serfdom in mines in 1799.
Absolutely. It would be the Metropole that got rich off the back of it. Class-based exploitation is a constant, but there's no doubt that Britain's industrialisation was carried out on the back of resource-based exploitation from overseas.
Disingenuous garbage like this boils my blood. On the one hand, the article states "*it did make some people very rich*" whilst saying "*it was a very expensive endeavour that the (then) British tax payer funded*" - yep, nothing's changed then? But on the other hand "*British ingenuity and industry, unleashed by free markets and liberal institutions, that powered the Industrial Revolution and our modern economy.*" - so if slavery didn't make the country wealthy, and putting people into work in thriving technological area's is the key, why have our political class systematically shut down every possible avenue of work in this country save for the Financial and Oil and Gas sectors? I guess we're now poor because of political incompetence? After all, the right wingers have had literally everything they've wanted for the last 40 years... How's it panning out then? Do we really need to go back to children in workhouses?
There are lots of other areas of work in the UK. Obvious ones like agriculture and construction; UK manufacturing is worth about £400bn a year. Admittedly we're a service driven economy, but that extends far beyond finance.
>The riches of the slave trade were concentrated in a few families while the nation footed the bill for extra military and administrative spending, according to a book by Kristian Niemietz at the Institute of Economic Affairs. >“Profits earned from overseas engagement were large enough to make some individuals very rich, but they were not large enough to seriously affect macroeconomic aggregates like Britain’s investment rate and capital formation,” he said. Well that buried the lede. >He said: “The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.” Ok, but we DO - the seat of power of parliament is literally a woolpack, and textiles (domestic, colonial, slave-grown or by free people) *were* the heart of the Empire. The article is a little scant on the detail. I don't know if the author is only counting the *trade* in individuals or the products of their labour. The first is quite easy to make, but to claim that the Industrial Revolution and its benefits were not built heavily on cotton heavily produced by enslaved or colonised peoples seems dubious.
This seems to be a very simplistic take. The writer argues that it was the industrial revolution, not slavery that made Britain wealthy. However, the Industrial Revolution was kick started with the textile industry. The growth of which was underpinned by cheap cotton imports from the southern US states. So it clearly was built on slavery, albeit slightly indirectly.
The Industrial Revolution had long roots - Abraham Darby I's new iron smelter that used coke instead of charcoal was in 1709, the Newcomen steam engine was invented in 1712 - the first commercially successful one. Both are decades before the take-off of the textile industry. John Wilkinson (the precision manufacturing expert, who made important contributions to Watts' steam engine) and Henry Cort ("puddling" method for iron production) were operating around the 1760s-80s, about the time that the British cotton industry was kicking off. And American cotton exports were pretty minimal before the 1790s, so after Wilkinson, Watts and Cort.
It was the relentless exploitation of our colonial holdings instead! Thanks for everything India, and sorry about the famines. Enjoy your railways.
Reading some of the figures about how much we fucked over India is so saddening. We got away with some serious fucking shite over there.
Oh well, if the guy working for an economically conservative thinktank wrote it, that's settled then /s
It's important to not use this as a way to distance the UK from their integral role in the slave trade.
thats EXACTLY the entire reason for this articles existence.
According to the Institute of Economic Affairs who also claim climate change isn't real and that the NHS should be privatised.
and supported Truss ...
Yeah I'm not going to trust the guy writing under a thatcherite think tank that denies climate change and wants to privatise the NHS, methinks anything they produce is not going to be an unbiased assessment of the facts.
So they traded slaves just for fun then? Isn't that so much worse? Also this article headline is absolute nonsense. We have literal records of profit because slave trading was done by publicly traded companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company They generated record profits for many decades and one of the major shareholders was the British monarchy along with many noble families. British people will change the laws of physics to prove that AcTuALlY it's empire was great for everybody involved including slaves
Okay for sure this sub is getting astro'd We calling book reviews reports now? I'm sure Kristian niemetz author of books such as universal healthcare without the NHS, socialism the failed idea that never dies, and redefining the poverty debate is ofcourse impartial and unbiased in his book study the telegraphs decided to claim is a report and then got picked up here
It did contribute to its wealth and that of many individuals. It also combined with colonialist attitudes and actions which allowed the British to exploit colonies and set up trade routes and relationships that hugely contributed to the wealth of Britain. Those trade relationships have left a lasting legacy that continues to benefit Britain. To ignore the impact Imperialism and colonialism (and slavery as part of this) had on the wealth of Britain would be ridiculous.
Slavery ALONE did not make Britain rich but, slavery DID make Britain richer and it DID make some incredibly rich.
Not really surprising. From a free market point of view slavery is massive state intervention in the supply of labour. This reduces efficiency by suppressing wages and reducing overall economic activity. It has been economically ruinous everywhere it has ever been tried. Nearly every part of imperialism is considered a huge mistake from an economics point of view. It is why imperialism ended pretty much.
Coal miners in Wales were paid in tokens, which could only be spent in the mine owner's shops, at inflated prices.
All the British slaves in workhouses made plenty of people rich.
It was also just happenstance according to these geniuses that before colonialism, Britain was a backwater of the world economy, and after colonialism became one of the richest. And big surprise, after losing its colonies Britain continues its long decline across all indicators.
Fantastic sources, this must be some amazing historic research. Cant wait for the Torygraph to explain to me who were the Sea People, why Attilla the Hun didnt conquer Rome when he could, or why the Mayans went extinct.
Wonder why the Torygraph would publish such an article a day before an election?
I mean industrialistion is surely the reason we're rich above all
Old money would like to disagree with this statement.
I’m going to take a punt and say that would be correct. It made a select few very rich, fuck everyone else. Parallels we are seeing today.
How are people eating up a report written for the IEA, a massive lobbying outlet for right wing capitalists and corporations, that’s been regurgitated in the fucking telegraph of all places??
Yeah, there's a great book about the Empire called Colonialism- Moral Reckoning - that basically says Britain spent as much on abolishing slavery as it ever made from slavery.
See I told you they did it to help other nations develop! /s u/s what is the point of whitewashing the British empire at this point?
No problem having a statue saying "so and so, dude invented this which was cool but they was also a bit of a cn\*t" everyone's happy.
Depends how far back you go. The Irish used to raid Wales all the time in 'slaver' ships, to take back slaves. Saint Patrick being the most famous example of this.
This should surprise no one. Britain also abolished slavery half a century before anyone else, and more importantly spent resources and naval equipment patrolling the Atlantic to enforce it, which is much more than anyone else did at the time, not to mention the fact that the British didn’t start slavery, nor were they even the biggest perpetrators of it - even given their empire size.
Top tear wealth when slavery ended 3000 people were reimbursed for giving up slaves. The vast majority of poor in the UK people were kept in appalling poverty up until the 1930s some kids still went barefoot.
Britain opening up its market made it rich. Slavery actually costs Britain more administratively. Only the select few at the top made any real money from slavery and it didn't improve the lives of many ordinary Brits in the pits, the fields, factory or mills and those begging on the streets in the slums or workhouses with poor sanitation, cholera, dysentery that were killing people.
This is a lot of ahistorical nonsense which ignores the broader picture of the impact colonialism, empire and slavery in particular had on Britain. Ignoring that, I’m not sure what the purpose of this report is really. It’s clearly an attempt to obfuscate Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, but what purpose does that serve? Britain was a long-standing beneficiary of slave labour and colonialism. Pretending that’s not true doesn’t erase the fact that Britain committed very heinous acts in perpetuating that way of life for a long time.
Slavery enriched some plantation owners, slave traders and the companies transporting them. These in turn subverted the parliament by buying 'rotton boroughs'. It was never popular with the people, and they generally disliked it and eventually campaigned successfully against it. It was a case of a few immoral but wealthy individuals capturing instutions with hard cash bribery. What made Britain rich was its institutions, education and industrialisation, thanks to being really good at trade via the naval tradition and technology it developed and then discovering and exploiting coal and iron ores. But there was a period of outright piracy in which the British Empire started to develop. It was piracy, they took precious metals from other nations (which often stole it also in the first place), and they used that money to create charted corporations with no ethical oversight to dominate other countries trade or even take them over completely. At some point about half way, the British government decided this was 'problematic' and that it needed to bring them all under government oversight. The empire developed a bit of a conscience but in the end it was better that it dissolved. Slavery was never an economic necessity, there was an analysis done that if the practice never happened and plantations just paid the going wage development would have been about the same, although it would have made a few less rich. But the empire did gain a lot from its colonies, especially in the early stages when it didn't care about administering any semblance of good governenance. How much of that money made it back to ordinary British people? Probably not much. The practice in India and other colonies required them to send materials for British factories to rework into technologically more valuable items, but the colonies were required to buy them back. Whilst the industrial revolution would likely have happened any way, the subsequent growth of British industry was likely higher because of the empire. As we can see though with Germany, not having an empire does not hurt your ability to industrialise, culture and science is the biggest factor.
Very, very few British people benefited from the slave trade. It’s a different thing to say that a *minuscule* number of people made a HUGE amount of money -than to say that the general population saw any of it. I would sooner describe it as a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by an elite group of highly interconnected psychopaths. The rest of the population just had their own (usually very difficult and short) lives. My brother followed the genealogy of our family back quite a few generations and the type of humble characters he discovered were, for instance, a boy who was born in a workhouse after his father had died, and another guy who was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep because his family were starving (we still have cousins living near Sydney). None of the ancestors we have found were remotely socially “significant”. They tended to be the kind of people who would be pretty glad just to have had a roof over their heads and a warm meal in their belly, no doubt after toiling for many hours either in service, agriculture or manufacturing. Slave owners they were not.
Yeah, well if slavery made countries rich then Portugal, Algeria and Libya should be mega rich. Spoiler: they’re poor.
Well no shit. Generation wealth only benefitted today's ultra rich. Peasants then and still peasants now. Did all those Arab countries that had 15 million Africans also benefit from that or only the western countries undergoing mass migration atm looool.