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

Planderaccordement

Thanks for the information, interesting to know.
Rule Brittania is still very much about building an empire and ruling the waves though. It is jingoistic.

"Rule Britannia" was oringinally "Rule, Britannia!" It was a command to seek an overseas empire. It was part of a palace feud between King George II and his son Fredrick Prince of Wales. Dad was a German-Born Remain and Fred was more of an early Brexiteer.

The Slave Trade was a trade. It started in Africa where Africans got rich selling other Africans to Europeans who came looking for gold and ivory and were offered people instead. That's how it started.

Let’s be honest the Europeans were actually looking to buy slaves. It wasn’t an accident of, oh I wanted Ivory, but that’s all that was on sale.
The Spanish started the trans Atlantic slave trade because they needed slave labour to prop up their conquests in the Americas. Then, over the next century, other European countries followed their lead partly for conquest but also because the sheer wealth generated only fuelled the arms race and the constant international warfare between the European countries.

The EU like it or not, has resulted in the longest period of peace in Europe. Before it, there was always a war going on.

Britain didn't start the transatlantic slave trade but they were a major part of it being brought to an end.

allthatsinteresting.com/west-africa-squadron

Let’s be honest the Europeans were actually looking to buy slaves.

Not in the first instance. But they soon got the hang of it, just like the Africans had been doing for centuries before.

PlanDeRaccordement

Let’s be honest the Europeans were actually looking to buy slaves. It wasn’t an accident of, oh I wanted Ivory, but that’s all that was on sale.

Lets not pretend that Africans where also looking to sell the slaves.

Neither side has the high ground in this.

It started in Africa where Africans got rich selling other Africans to Europeans who came looking for gold and ivory and were offered people instead. That's how it started.

Slavery, rape, repression has been around for eons and at some point in all our genetic history we are the product of that, whether it be black slavery and repression, Irish, Scottish, China, Africa, Spanish, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Viking, etc. Yes we must be educated, but to feel guilty would mean carrying the sins of our fathers to our mothers forever.

In the case of the Caribbean, sugar was a low volume high margin product at the top of the market. The like of Jane Austen and her chatty mates in Bath could afford it in their tea, but the vast majority of the British people were still drinking nine pints of beer a day, including the children.

Everyone ignored the point before so I will try again: the Barbary coast slave traders were at it before, during and after the transatlantic slave trade, and they took about a million Europeans including British and Irish - sometimes from these shores (certainly Ireland). So how about apologies and reparations from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria et al.

Secondly, Britain stopped the transatlantic slave trade and the Royal Navy patrolled against it for a century, which never seems to be acknowledged. So to single out Britain for slave trading is ludicrous.

Sorry pressed post too soon.

It started in Africa where Africans got rich selling other Africans to Europeans who came looking for gold and ivory and were offered people instead. That's how it started.

So... those innocent Europeans were just looking for gold, when the Africans tricked them into 300 years of the slave trade?

Yes, Africans enslaved other Africans. They did it a hundredfold when Europeans took over their coasts and paid out huge sums for captives. Let's be clear on how demand drove the trade.

Yeah, there were these African kings just sat around with these huge populations of slaves for years then one day along came these European ships...

The US Navy was established to protect American shipping from attack by the Barbary Corsairs. Some white Americans were taken slave by black Africans.

...Yes, demand drove the trade and made it into a genocide rather than the little local trade it had long been. And the British sent the Royal Navy to end it, and have yet to receive an official thank you for so doing.

For all those bleating on about Africans enslaving Africans pre-colonialism, there are important things to consider.

1. This in no way excuses the European slave trade.
2. The type of slavery in Africa was often much different. Slaves could become prominent people in society in many cases. Sometimes they intermarried with the families. It was not nearly as brutal as European slavery.
3. Africa was not one society, but numerous societies. People were capturing their enemies to sell to the Europeans. It was the Europeans who created their idea that Africa is one, black people and Africans are one inferior group.
4. The beliefs underlying European slavery of Africans are what persist to this day in diluted form. This is the problem we are fighting against, the lack of perceived worth in white eyes of a black life.

'oh they were for sale so i just had to buy 3.1million of them'

Saturdays maybe if the Barbary Pirates had used the proceeds of that slave trade to build a global empire that led to the deaths of millions, and if the descendants of those slaves were still living in Barbary and being systematically oppressed, we would be looking for apologies.

“Rule Brittania is still very much about building an empire and ruling the waves though”

Oh yes, agree that it is most definitely about ruling the waves/seas and ruling its American colonies who were stirring up trouble over things like the molasses tax of 1733 . But as an island nation, if you don’t rule the seas, you are subject to invasion by anyone with stronger sea power. Which had happened in 1066 and attempted pretty regularly by Spain and France for next 800yrs....

France and their superior navy was the contemporary sea based threat when the song was being written in 1740 when the war of the Austrian succession began; putting France and Britain at war (again).

The African slave trade was well established long before the British arrived, dominated by the Arabs and with the complicity of the indigenous tribes (raid a neighbouring tribe and sell the captives to the Arab slavers). Arab slavers even raided European shipping. The British certainly turned the transatlantic slave trade into big business, but we certainly did not create the African slave trade.

1. Nothing ever excuses slavery. It was the cancer that destroyed Ancient Greece and ate the Roman Empire from the inside. It is always wrong in every way.
2. Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off. Slavery is Wrong. Have you got that?
3. Africa was a mix of different sociieties. There were peaceful pastoral people who were minding their own business farming when they were captured by the martial raiders from the coast. The new world wanted farmers, not gladiators, and farmers is what they were supplied.
4. European slavery was feudalism in the middle ages. It was New World slavery in the Americas. Slavery was illegal in British law.

@NotNowPlzz you're 'bleating on' yourself, trying to make out inter-Africa slavery was somehow warm and fuzzy compared to the horrible Transatlantic slave trade. It's just not true - no one comes out of this well. But the idea that Europeans suddenly pitched up on the shores of Africa and stole millions of people isn't true either. Everyone was complicit.

This filthy notion that black-on-black or brown-on-black slavery wasn't so bad really is not even worthy of contempt.

And it is, in its apologism, deeply racist.

Fuck Off.

(Have I said fuck off enough yet?)

But the idea that Europeans suddenly pitched up on the shores of Africa and stole millions of people isn't true

Well .... it's not not-true, is it

@dreamingbohemian um, no, it's not true. They didn't 'steal' them - they were sold to them by other Africans. A very small number were captured by raiders, but the vast, vast majority were traded to the Europeans, as they had been within Africa for centuries. None of this excuses any of it - it's beyond horrific, and so are the effects that last to today.

I think rather what people are trying to point out is that there are in fact different types of slavery, with chattel slavery what African slaves in the Americas experienced being at the most brutal end of the spectrum.

In other societies throughout history, slaves have had more protected status, were not considered property, etc.

I thought this was a thread about historical accuracy?

@dreamingbohemian

Saturdays maybe if the Barbary Pirates had used the proceeds of that slave trade to build a global empire that led to the deaths of millions, and if the descendants of those slaves were still living in Barbary and being systematically oppressed, we would be looking for apologies.

Lol. Bohemian. Barbary isn’t a country. It’s a shortened form of barbaria, or Latin for foreign lands and was used in medieval times to refer to nonchristian foreign lands. It was what Europeans called Muslim pirates before they knew the words Muslim or Islam and the name stuck.

The Barbary pirates were from a of caliphates of the Islamic Empire: the Umayyad, the Abbasid and the Ottoman. It was one of the largest empires in the world. And, yes, the proceeds were also used to expand that empires borders from its founding in 750 to its fall in 1922. And yes, millions were killed and enslaved and yes, the descendants of their slaves still live in the regions and are systematically oppressed as well.