EMPIRE- did you know this history?

Yes, all empires (which of course have existed throughout the world for 1000s of years) have their nasty sides. Depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting.

This surely isn’t news.

Will other empires be covered in this series? Or is it a BBC series?

Second King Leopolds Ghost - excellent book.

I read a lot as a child, and my dad was very wc historian/ vive la revolution, so i knew this growing up.

We definitely learned about slavery in primary school, I remember a trip to Liverpool to the exhibitions and museums.

I'm always more surprised that people manage to get to adulthood without knowing any of this stuff.

What did he mean about south Asians ‘exploiting the UK system’? Did you ask him to clarify?

I’ll raise your Belgians with my VOC! For sheer wanton entrepreneurial bastardry, the Dutch had no peer. They instigated a genocide of the Spice Islands just to drive a bull run on cloves in the Amsterdam bourse!

It was an A level text at one point! I noticed, but one of my ancestors was an Abolitionist. I do think it’s important to remember that slavery was normal for the whole of history across the whole world up until the abolitionists. While there had been no slavery in England since the Norman Conquest, there had been feudalism and people hadn’t thought about the rights and wrongs of slavery. There are even examples of English sailors on slave ships being enslaved in West Africa and not realising slavery was wrong. It required a particular set of historical circumstances and a particularly determined group of people to change opinions on a vast scale in opposition to strong financial interests. It required Christian ideas about being equal before God, English ideas about being equal before the law, Locke’s bill of rights and the witness of enlightened people who saw the brutality of slavery and were willing to risk their reputations to end it. It looks so easy with hindsight. I don’t think it was.

We are in Udaipur at the moment. We were chatting to the hotel owner this morning. He said he recently visited Bath. He made a couple of observations that I thought were thought provoking.
Firstly, he said there were a lot of South Asians exploiting the UK system.
Secondly, he thinks too many young people in the UK feel guilty about the British Empire.
I'd guess he is in his thirties. He is obviously a very privileged Indian as he owns a hotel and has visited the UK. I thought his comments interesting but also wonder how widespread his thoughts are in India generally, especially his second comment.

And in Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester’s family wealth came from the colonies and he was encouraged to marry his wife Bertha in Jamaica. There’s a school of thought that she was mixed race, if not Black.

I would recommend 'Breaking the Chains', by Adam Hochschild, on how, and why, Britain was at the forefront of abolishing the slave trade.
He also wrote King Leopolds Ghost, about Belgian involvement in the Congo. Another great read.

And even further back-the feudal system meant slavery for the serfs and villeins, all of the great ancient civilisations were built by the labour of slaves-Egypt, Rome and Greece. And the huge civil engineering works in the Chinese colonised Himalayas were built on he forced labour of the Tibetans.

The Belgians were the worst!

I knew most of it, but not the bit about the "black loyalists" who were given help to leave the US. It's a good series. Olusoga's book Black And British is great too (and obviously touches on a lot of aspects of empire).

I don't think anyone needs to apologise for stuff that was done centuries before they were born, but they do need to acknowledge facts, which museums and historic houses are increasingly doing in relation to the slave trade, and good for them.

I'm in my late 60s and I did. It probably depends which O level exam board you had.
I'll never forget the lesson where we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And yet you’re doing exactly that, by deciding that your own method of dealing with contemporary abuses of power, whatever it is, is more of a ‘goodie’ thing than an art gallery indicating which paintings used to belong to slave owning families.

Read up on what the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch were up to at the time. Makes the English East India Company look like a hippy commune.

I don’t get why people are talking about school, and whether or not it was on the curriculum — that Britain had a huge empire whose wealth generation was profoundly implicated in slavery is general knowledge! That shouldn’t be news to anyone!

I think the danger is to divide the issue into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

Plenty of Africans got rich as a result of the slave trade, as well as Europeans.
A white Englishman campaigned to end it.
And there were millions of people caught up in it, who suffered terribly.

At the end of the day it was about abuse of power and inequality, which hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’d rather deal with the manifestations of that which are still everywhere today, than feel better about myself because someone put a red sticker on a painting in an art gallery to show it used to belong to a slave owner.

I haven’t listened to the series - Empires were the way of the world for so much of human history- the Ottoman Empire, Russian empire, Spanish empire, Persian empire, Roman Empire, Byzantine etc.
I’m going off my dodgy memory here but I think the British was the biggest in the sense of most far-reaching/sprawling.
Democracy is still in its infancy in comparison

Same. I'm going to watch David Olusoga's series though. He is such a good presenter.

Of the stately homes near me, the wealth of one was built on coal mining, another on iron works and another was built on slavery. The estate built on slavery is very open, and apologetic about it.

Do you think this programme is absolutely unbiased?
No. DO has an agenda. Which is fine (as long as one is aware of it) but reduces him as a historian IMO.

Do you think that there were any positive benefits of it?

Do you think this programme is absolutely unbiased?

If you answer No and Yes, then fair enough but I might suggest that it is always a good idea to read something from another viewpoint because the truth usually lies somewhere in between,

Depends on your exam board. I did history up to A level, and a little bit at undergrad before I changed courses, and we didn’t touch slavery, apart from a bit on the abolition of serfdom in Russia.

It’s not an age thing.

It was a different time.

I think yes there were regrettable things that happened… but, you can’t judge the Victorian era by the standards of today.

And - it wasn’t all bad. Look at the commonwealth, many countries actually like the links to the UK.

And it wasn’t just us - all the Europeans were at it…!

Fwiw, what's wrong with people educating themselves (horrible phrase)?
I didn't do history at O level, but have always been interested in the subject.
And my husband, in his 70s, remembers being taught about the slave trade at school, so it's not a hidden history, as some claim.

He does. Which is seen as a Good Thing.