The English started the slave trade

[Annamaria14]

I just saw a black American woman post online,

"The English started the slave trade. They caused all our problems, they hurt generations of people. I will never set foot in that country".

What do you think? I felt a bit guilty, because the English did cause a lot of problems around the world. Have we learned from our past. How can we do better in the future

My family certainly didn't benefit from the slave trade. In fact, my paternal side were fishmongers and musicians who fled London and UK in the 1840s due to antisemitism.

rosetti agree. Another horrific fact is that on our (British) abolition of slavery we simply reregistered slave ships to other flags - a lot ‘became’ Portuguese - so we could carry on. I am ashamed to say I didn’t know that until watching a great episode of ‘who do you think you are’ I think the actress who has been in bond films. In fact the black subject episodes have consistently been extraordinarily eye opening generally.

I do not understand why anyone would feel GUILT !!

As a PP said, were you there ? No , you were not there.
No blood on my hands as we were working class or , sadly in workhouses
Was not the poor who dealt in slaves !

@Pumperthepumper

And I know you don't do facts but there may be others reading who are interested in them. If the Elgin Marbles hadn't been removed at the time they wouldn't exist for you to score woke points about them on mumsnet. The Ottomans were storing munitions in the Parthenon and they regularly blew up. The site was being looted. Elgin saved the marbles from destruction. If they had been left in situ there would be no artefacts to argue about. And as a previous poster has pointed out to you, traffic pollution in Athens is among the worst in the world. Anything left would have eroded by now.

Those pesky foreigners can’t even look after their own stuff! Thank god for the looting British - who damaged them beyond repair after they stole them, of course, but who cares about that? So long as it was us who did it and not the people they actually belonged to.

If you prefer a juvenile response to engaging with facts, that's up to you.

But stop saying 'us'. Your ancestors must have been landed gentry but mine certainly weren't.

Still, another stick to beat the ENGLISH with ay ?!

No they didn't. I am a direct descendant of slaves and have researched extensively.

And Tribal leaders enslaved other tribal people to take their homelands. African slaves were in the main part sold to Europeans by African traders. As they are now to buyers in the middle east.

All cultures, creeds, races and religions have the exact same proportion of exploitative sociopathic cunts. To say otherwise is racist.

Of course European countries could repatriate artifacts if they wanted to. The practical issues can be worked out.

Macron has promised to repatriate items from France and while progress is slow, his government is still committed to doing so:
news.artnet.com/art-world/france-restitution-26-benin-1735425

New museums are being built across Africa so these items will have a proper home, like this one in Dakar:
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/arts/design/museum-of-black-civilizations-restitution-senegal-macron.html

"The scale of artifacts in question is staggering. Up to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums."

Do we really think this is acceptable?

According to this:

www.slaverysite.com/Body/facts%20and%20figures.htm

4.65 million by Portugal, mostly to Brazil, 2.6 million by Britain to the WI and North America. 1.6 million by Spain. 1.25 million by France. 0.5 million by Holland.

The interesting point I suppose is that many slaves went to the West India and also many to the USA, but the former is now almost entirely the descendants of slaves, whereas the latter is dominated by the descendants of European settlers.

The actual number of slaves going to the US was relatively much smaller than to the West Indies.

Also many US slaves were descendants of slaves.

Slavery was essentially a global phenomenon, until recently. Mauritania outlawed it only in 1981, and it continues today. www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/08/the-unspeakable-truth-about-slavery-in-mauritania

If you prefer a juvenile response to engaging with facts, that's up to you.

You are the one pretending the British looked after them better than the people who actually owned them. They didn’t. What kind of fact is that?

@Chiochan

Not when you buy it from someone who isnot the owner.

If you're referring to the Elgin marbles, they belonged to the Ottomans at that time. See my previous post.

Who is this "We" that profited from slavery? Not my ancestors all toiling away in the fields. Not the Lancashire mill-workers who gave Gandhi such a warm welcome and supported his calls to boycott Indian cotton.

And drawing the strands together, worth remembering that the ancient Athenians were the citizens of Athens, who were slave-owners, some of whose slaves might have come from Brittannia.

Don't Look Back In Anger. Let us all move forward together as brothers and sisters.

She is wrong about who started it but not wrong about British involvement.
I wonder if she is as invested in modern day slavery as she is in inaccurate historical facts?!

David Olusoga has done some really balanced programmes on Slavery and Black Britain that I accessed through iplayer.
As this thread has demonstrated there isn't one single route of racism that is shown in the world now but rather over time many different people have exerted their authority over others for their own gain leading to opinions and prejudices that are held today.

No, no they didn't belong to the Ottomans at that time or any other. I believe the UN does not recognise conquest as a legitimate means of establishing property rights.

England was the first country to stop slavery.

Only in the minds of English exceptionalists.

Britain banned slavery in 1807. Denmark banned it in 1792, although the law didn't come into force until 1803.

The school textbooks implied that the Arabs were good to the slaves so it didn't count but the wicked British etc

Thanks hoxtonbabe

I agree that a big part of the problem is that most people have literally no knowledge of African history. Plan has posted some great facts here too, things that most people are never taught in schools.

It's easier to erase the true impact of British imperialism and intervention when you don't know what was there before. When you think it's all just 'uncivilised' people living in medieval conditions, as some have posted on this thread.

Doesn't anyone concede that the British brought civilisation to many of these countries and started their journey to modern life?

I would concede that’s what they thought they were doing.

I would concede that’s what Nations who meddle in their affairs still think that’s what they are doing today.

Perhaps they were a catalyst, but it’s wrong to think they wouldn’t have done it without the raping and pillaging the Emperialists did.

Entirely wrong to say what happened to these Countries has resulted in them being a rip roaring success in the modern world.

Nope we were probably slaves first

England was the first country to stop slavery.

Maybe so, but it has been erased from the history books. It was only very recently I had any idea of the level of slavery we had here in the U.K. I never learned a thing about colonialism at school, despite doing history right up until 6th year.

Doesn't anyone concede that the British brought civilisation to many of these countries and started their journey to modern life?

No. They slaughtered nearly all of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population. No benefit there.

@Moonmelodies

I guess when air travel is back to normal she could campaign to get the English to repatriate the slaves' descendants back to their ancestors' homelands, if they are still so aggrieved.

There are some really vile posters on this thread.

No, no they didn't belong to the Ottomans at that time or any other. I believe the UN does not recognise conquest as a legitimate means of establishing property rights.

Oh dear.

I once tried unsucessfully to explain to someone online that the Bombing of Dresden in 1945 was not a war crime under the Geneva Convention of 1948. I didn't get anywhere.

The UN Charter is not retrospective. If it were, what fun we could all have.

Anyway, back to the Athenians, not the Greeks. There were no "Greeks" in the modern sense until modern times. Heroditus spoke of Ελληνικό or 'Greek-ness,' sometimes called "The Greek Thing" as a shared cultural outlook, but nationalism is a 19th century concept.

The idea that the Parthenon marbles belonged to the Spartans, Corinthians, Thebans etc would have struck the ancient Athenians as ridiculous and outrageous.

@Pumperthepumper

If you prefer a juvenile response to engaging with facts, that's up to you.

You are the one pretending the British looked after them better than the people who actually owned them. They didn’t. What kind of fact is that?

I'm pretending 'the British' looked after them, am I?

How come they still exist if I'm pretending? You've never been to the British Museum. The fact that they still exist is the kind of fact you can see right in front of you. Hope that helps.

Please explain who owns them. The Ottomans who sold them? The Ottoman Empire doesn't exist any more. You want to give them to Turkey? Or do you mean Lord Elgin's descendants - he sold them for less than he paid. You think they're entitled to a cut? After the British Government bought them it gets more complicated. What do you think should happen to government property? Are you proposing they should be removed from the British Museum and put into Number 10 or Chequers? Or some civil servant's office? They belong to the British Museum to be put on public display so technically they belong to the British public. With you being descended from landed gentry, maybe you think the plebs don't deserve them?

To me, whether we need to be apologetic or not about the slave trade/colonialism etc etc depends on how much we are still profiting from it without trying to redress the balance, and how much of our present thinking and acting is still influenced by that past.

The Romans had slaves, but one of the most pernicious effects of the Anglo/American slave trade was concept of race and the idea that black people were genetically inferior. That is still around. It affects us every time a teacher gives a black student a lower grade than their work might warrant, or a black teenager is stopped by a policeman while his white chum is allowed to pass, or a black junior scholar has to have published more than their white counterpart to have a chance at the same job. Every time that happens the ideas of the slaveowners are still allowed an outing.

As for "my ancestors were poor so didn't benefit from the slave trade/colonialism" there are more ways than one to benefit. If you use public buildings built from plantation money you are benefitting from the slave trade. If your working class ancestors, say in the early 1900s, had a slightly better diet or slightly better access to affordable clothing when similar populations in non-colonialist countries didn't, then that almost certainly means they benefitted from colonialism.