This is a moral argument. The point about slave descendants in Georgia being better off than descendants of slave sellers from West Africa is reasonably strong (though look back in everyones ancestry and youre likely to find, far back enough, a mix of slaves, owners and probably traders too). He saw how enslaved people who had risen up were burnt to death, castrated or mutilated, punishments he regarded as merited. The following decades were taken up with popular and political rhetoric about immigration and parliamentary acts to limit blacks coming to Britain. She had no interest in esoteric discussions of the war. There is no reason to think that slavery was nicer in Africa. and while the responsible state still exists, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant.. 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Nevertheless, we live in a society that generally regards slavery as an absolute and eternal wrong, and a grave one at that, yet which has historically (at least certain people and places, and including the state itself) benefited from imposing slavery on others. It costs money to replace them and after a famine the price of slaves would rise. Pope Nicholas V gave his blessing, so long as the Vatican benefited. Thats why when the question is raised, I always point out that they owe me lots and lots of money. That involved killing the adult men. And the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Moreover its arguably unjust that only victims of still-extant states have a route to compensation whereas people from ethnic groups roughly contemporaneously massacred, enslaved and sacrificed by the Aztec Empire have nobody to sue. Olusoga has benefited from and added significantly to the work of Fryer and other historians such as James Walvin. I havent the faintest idea whether slavery in the Roman controlled areas of Britain was more along the continental Roman model or retained Celtic characteristics. They included Josiah Wedgwood (the pottery entrepreneur), Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. The New Statesmans global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. I was doing some genealogy research when I discovered my great grandfather was a well known member of the 18th Kentucky Infantry. His current research focuses on stress, burnout, and wellbeing in sports, with a particular interest in high-performance environments and elite coaching. Not many remember anything about segregation either. But that is not the argument I am making. people like Olusoga would have to pay their share of the greatly increased taxes Ill disparage them. John Mandeville, whose travelogue (circa 1356) was one of the most widely translated books of the later Middle Ages, presented Africans as naked savages living amid heaps of gold to which they gave no value. Abolition was the first mass philanthropic movement in Britain, and it ended the slave trade in 1807. First launched in London in 1987, it aims to highlight and celebrate what black people have achieved in Britain throughout history. . Roman writers such as Pliny who chronicled or rather fabricated African life shaped perceptions of a continent populated by anthropophagi and other fantastic creatures, half-human, half-animal. See, five years ago I wouldnt have written a crass comment like that, but hey, times achanging and as financially independent with some FU-money, I dont have to worry about cancellation culture, LOL. It isnt happening now. But there have been other societies with slavery where slaves had more autonomy and a greater chance of buying their freedom. Or they may discover how little black lives do matter. And the Domesday Book even counts slaves as a separate category below the unfree peasants (villans, bordars and cottars) those owed service to a Lord who could order them to move about and could say yes or no to their proposed marriages, but unlike slaves he didnt own them, couldnt sell them, and they had property rights to at least a smallholding. Maybe heard of Saint Balthild, seventh-century English lass sold into slavery, exported to the Continent, served in a palace and ended up marrying the Frankish King?). (Im just presenting the case here in reality there are obviously some big questions about the logic of Nuremberg etc, just as there are questions about how judges in Common Law occasionally summon up things as if they had always and forever been a part of the Law, albeit previously unrecorded, rather than something the judge just made up.). The novel became the bestselling book of 19th-century Britain; it was adapted for the theatre and generated mass-produced merchandise playing cards, jigsaws, tableware. Presumably there were normal times when food was cheap that you fed your workers and didnt seek to replace them in the way Olusoga means. What difference has it made? A House Through Time returned to BBC Two in May for its third season, and once again is fronted by historian extraordinaire David Olusoga. If Olusoga is looking for apologies or compensation for slavery, I am quite prepared to meet him, accept his apology, togehr with cash, cheque or even a postal order. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxc5ENT8ajg, https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-real-vikings/articles/eyewitness-to-the-vikings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/world-of-domesday/order.htm, Apparently Essay Mills Must Be Made Illegal, Why Oxfam Can Go Boil Their Heads Over Vaccine Patents, The real point about climate change is how cheap the solution is, The excellent Tim Worstall- The Register, Tim Worstall is a darn good economist- Don Boudreaux, Tim Worstall, you pendant- Polly Toynbee, .more sensible than most right wing nutjob bloggersBob Piper. It doesnt end with the parties saying Well that was pleasantly intellectually stimulating, now lets have a nice game of cricket Youre opponents are not playing by the same rules as you are. In the case of slavery the answer is clear. Its a shame Its very noticable how nobodys mentioning that the Spanish Empire were doing this for several centuries before the British got involved. 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The Celtic version of slavery (which ran to quite a different model) was still going on in the places the Romans didnt reach. at scales that were unusual in the long and varied history of slavery, and levels of brutality that stood out too. There is the Push argument and the Pull argument. Very little sugar on the mainland. Yet theyre so many centuries and generations removed from the crime, everybody involved with the decision-making is long-dead and while the responsible state still exists, in practice compensation comes from taxes paid by citizens who had no part in it all. In the UK its not white people enslaving blacks anymore, but Asians enslaving other Asians, as in Leicesters clothing sweatshops. @ Boganboy Less flippantly, Western countries are not of one mind when it comes to the age of consent sex with a 14 year-old is legal in some countries, criminal in others (yes yes, paedophilia versus ephebophilia etc, you got me).. By David Dabydeen (Photo By Alamy) Nineteen eighty-four was a transformative year for David Olusoga. In 1796, a bill was defeated by only four votes: a group of abolitionist MPs went to the opera and missed the vote. TV historian David Olusoga claims it is "palpable nonsense" to say that removing controversial statues "somehow impoverishes history". Their demands should simply be refused. But slaves were more valuable, so the British fought the Spanish for a share in the trade and eventually came to dominate it. And Britain worked for the whole of the 19th century to put down slavery in Africa. And yet Africans and West Indians were banned from the victory parade in 1919. The system he witnessed and wrote about was one in which human beings were worked to death. In 1986 I came across the book Staying Power by the British journalist Peter Fryer. Then a young teenager, he was driven out of his council home, together with his grandmother, mother, two sisters and younger brother, by a sustained campaign of nightly stoning of their windows. The Coldest Case in Laramie: yet another bleak true crime podcast, From Sophie Mackintosh to Stephen Moss: new books reviewed in short, Universal Credit falls short of covering the bare essentials. is that the extra demand distorted the market, led directly to more armed slave-raiding expeditions against rival tribes and so on.. That someone did something 200 years ago means double ought nothing.. It began to alter (slightly) the history curriculum at university level: the first undergraduate one-year course on black British history and culture was taught at the University of Warwick in 1984. "So when black history was missing - the history of empire, the history of slavery - was missing from my history lessons, I didn't have a place to go to discover those missing chapters. It happened. Fryers book was monumental, inspiring conferences, publications, the setting up of local history groups, the establishment of Black History Month, and radio and television programmes. And so many hundreds of thousands of British workers were directly dependent on slavery (from sailors to those who built, rigged and repaired ships) that it was easy to turn a blind eye to the inhumanity. Would probably have taken your suggestion as a challenge. Slavery is bad or it isnt. (If the likes of SMFS believe Western society will fall apart without a return to traditional Christian-inspired values, I suggest they either don a pessimists crash-helmet or just cling on and enjoy the ride to Hell in their top-gear handcart. And the fact youre moved to tears by discovering for the first time a great-great-great-grandmother of yours was a prostitute single-mum with seven kids or a great-x5-uncle you had never heard of was imprisoned for murder, well, your utter lack of knowledge simply reveals how little youve been influenced by them, so youre hardly discovering a new facet of yourself at all. But as someone who is damaged by slavery I have lived in racially mixed communities and I am happy to see Obama and Kamala pay up. Read about our approach to external linking. You might have heard of a Romano-British chap called Patrick, got enslaved and nabbed to Ireland? This is nothing to do with slavery or as with black lives matter, blacks being shot, and everything to do with a shakedown of the white man. And this of course neatly addresses MBEs arguments. So wherever the wealth came from, it wasnt just slavery (or even mainly), Olusogas an alright presenter but a class A race hustler, Edward Lud August 30, 2020 at 9:12 am We could just cut to the chase, and impose a reparations tax on anyone who is descended from from anyone who did something, er, wrong.. That is a strawman argument at its best. Dont even get me started on the Moors, Arabs and Ottomans, As for getting rich many African tribes kept slaves and their societies did not get rich. Africans had a demand for female slaves. Prof David Olusoga has presented numerous documentaries including A House Through Time and Black and Black and British: A Forgotten History, Olaudah Equiano played a role in Britain's abolishment of slavery, Performer Giles Terera has written a play featuring Equiano, Prof Olusoga said when it was published, people did not believe the book was by an African as it was deemed so well written, Bernardine Evaristo (second left) has launched a series called Black Britain: Writing Back which features novels by black British authors that have been overlooked, Should black history be taught all year round? A covering letter would be a courtesy but probably not a necessity. I think a case could be made. (I suppose it makes a point about blame not being distributed homogeneously, or that a certain group of people shouldnt be guilted just because they share the same colour of skin with another bunch of people you do think are guilty. 5 quotes from David Olusoga: 'On a peninsula protruding into one of the great highways of the Atlantic slave trade, a few hundred refugees from British slavery in North America were attempting to recreate the social structures of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages.', 'Time and again events and phenomena that we think we know and understand contain within them lost or camouflaged connections to . Sooner or later, we whites are going to have to take a stand, and say we aint taking this any more. The Barbados slave code of 1661 stripped Africans of all human rights, and set out ways in which they were to be punished, to exert control over their labour (mutilation of the face, slitting of nostrils, castration, execution). "I have," he admits, "a habit of . Hey, we do not even have to go that far. Do I feel like I had anything to do it? Instead he has become a campaigner working to discredit Britain, the country that has educated him, promoted him and brought him fame and acceptance. But it is Olusoga who keeps insisting that its the Brits who are uniquely responsible.. Olusoga was born in Lagos to a White mother and a Nigerian father who, I hate to say nautrally, did a runner. Re putting the argument for paedophilia they actually gave Gide the Nobel prize for literature didnt they? "He was the voice of somebody who wasn't speaking about the past as a historian, but was living it. Or anything to do with slavery. We pretend we do not like slavery but actually we do not like slave traders. Macmillan, 624pp, 25, David Dabydeen is a novelist, broadcaster, academic and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford University Press), This article appears in the 16 Aug 2017 issue of the New Statesman, Trump goes nuclear, Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics. Should almost go without saying except of course that it doesnt, since clearly not every culture has the same moral gut reaction to it that I do. And that still stands even if there really are a bunch of torturing murderers out there too. From Roots. Id say theres enormous dangers in treating this as if it was some public school debating society gig. He was Chairman of Moneysupermarket Group from 2014 to 2019 and Senior Independent Director of Close Brothers Group plc from 2006 to 2014 and is a Past President of the Chartered Management Institute. No one has said we should not consider someone elses viewpoint. In dealing with the black contribution to the First World War, for example, he cites popular gratitude and admiration for black Britons among them Walter Tull, who fought on the Western Front. He is the author of the 2016 book Black and British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award 2017 and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2017. Reasonable estimates have some 50% of the inhabitants of the Sokoto Caliphate as late as the late 19th cent being slaves. You may concede a point here, a point there. You can be redeemed, you worthless pasty people. My great grandfather fought to end slavery in a war. David Olusoga MBE: The problem with the UK paying reparations is that people like Olusoga would have to pay their share of the greatly increased taxes. The agreement is being touted as a . Watching @worstall execute @richardjmurphy is like watching a very, very clever cat slowly killing at ataxic mouse. This year, return to Neverland. 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