Page 8 | Royal commentator says that African descendants of past kings should pay reparations for slavery

MsPincher · 25/09/2022 19:53

Daftasabroom · 25/09/2022 16:02

Yes they did, it's incredibly well documented. Many ordinary people inherited slaves in the same way they inhertied Uncle Albert's rocking chair, or 1/100th of Auntie Doris's estate.

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Slavery was always illegal in the uK. If you have any evidence that a substantial number of people in the uK ever owned slaves abroad please post it.

MsPincher · 25/09/2022 20:02

Endlesssummer2022 · 24/09/2022 08:29

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade is the only one where the slave owners received compensation.

The British government paid 20 million pounds – the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves. This payout was a massive 40% of the government's budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law. Their descendants are some of the wealthiest people on the world.

The government didn’t finish paying off the debt until 2015, hundreds of years after slavery was abolished. So if the slave owners descendants were still getting paid a monthly cheque into their bank account until less than 10 years ago, the argument that it happened hundreds of years ago and thus the descendants shouldn’t get anything doesn’t hold up.

No one was “getting monthly cheques into their bank accounts” as compensation for slavery in 2015. The compensation that was paid was nearly 200 years ago. as has been discussed the 2015 date was just when undated gilts were redeemed.

The slaves and slave owners are long dead. You can’t hold people responsible for what their ancestors did or reward them for what happened to their ancestors nearly 200 years ago.

it’s in the past. There are plenty of wrongs to right now.

MsPincher · 25/09/2022 20:10

Endlesssummer2022 · 24/09/2022 08:13

‘Up until 2015 we were paying back the slave owners via our taxes. Why wasn't any of that money paid to the enslaved?’

Exactly. All slave owners were extremely generously compensated when slavery was abolished. Their descendants live in the life of luxury. Meanwhile the actual slaves got nothing and their descendants therefore inherited nothing and suffered from the impacts of discrimination based on the fact they are the descendants of slaves.

Can you imagine an alternate reality where the Nazi’s had been compensated for losing the war and their descendants became rich and respected and the Jews were ‘freed’ from concentration camps, got nothing, had nothing to pass on to their children, suffered discrimination from state institutions all because they were despised for having ‘no history’ apart from being held in concentration camps?

The descendants of those who received compensation for having ‘their’ slaves taken away and are pictured in Tatler sitting in homes in Mayfair or The Hamptons should be charged a percentage to be given to Caribbean countries, African American institutions and South American African institutions. Alternatively, all Caribbean countries should have their debts cancelled. They do not owe European countries or America a brass tack. It’s they who are owed.

Article on the financial disparity between those families who owned slaves and those who were slaves. Mitch McConnnel is one. Lording it over people due to his ancestors crimes against humanity.
www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1028031

Alex Scott’s ancestors were slave owners. But I understand she grew up in relative poverty. yet she’s doing well now because she is is a talented footballer and presenter.

Just because someone got someone’s ancestors got some money nearly 200 years ago doesn’t mean they are wealthy now.

tbh (I’m a mixed race person) in the uK people of black Caribbean origin are probably most likely to be descendants of slave owners. Are you still ok with them paying compensation?

Daftasabroom · 26/09/2022 15:21

MsPincher · 25/09/2022 19:53

Slavery was always illegal in the uK. If you have any evidence that a substantial number of people in the uK ever owned slaves abroad please post it.

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Slavery was not always illegal in the UK. It was increasingly illegal from the mid 14th century and laws had to be changed to allow the ownership of chattel slaves. Any argument that slavery was normal in the UK at the time is utter garbage. (I know that's not the point you're making).

Evidence that a substantial number of ordinary people in the UK owned a slaves is here.

This might be a bit more manageable.

Daftasabroom · 26/09/2022 15:32

And to those who claim the wonderful Royal Navy were working hard to stop slave trading. They weren't, the UK was at war with France and the RN were bent on disrupting French income streams from slavery. The Portuguese (our allies) were allowed to go on their merry way.

MsPincher · 26/09/2022 16:38

Daftasabroom · 26/09/2022 15:21

Slavery was not always illegal in the UK. It was increasingly illegal from the mid 14th century and laws had to be changed to allow the ownership of chattel slaves. Any argument that slavery was normal in the UK at the time is utter garbage. (I know that's not the point you're making).

Evidence that a substantial number of ordinary people in the UK owned a slaves is here.

This might be a bit more manageable.

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slavery was never legally a concept of Scot’s or English law. In the last few hundred years at least. It could not be enforced in these jurisdictions ever. British people could own slaves overseas before abolition though.

it seems that about 46000 British people owned slaves in 1833. That’s out of a population of 16.5million or so. That’s more than I thought but it’s small overall. Slaves were not legally held in the uK though as I said above.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vast-scale-of-british-slave-ownership-revealed-10383768.html

Daftasabroom · 26/09/2022 16:54

@MsPincher slavery or ownership on many levels was very much a part of the feudal system and from prehistory. As others have pointed out this is common across many times and people's. But, the north Atlantic slave trade was the first and only time that entire economies were built solely on chattel slavery. The Europeans were the first to build slavery specific transcontinental transport.

TomPinch · 27/09/2022 00:58

Daftasabroom · 26/09/2022 15:21

Slavery was not always illegal in the UK. It was increasingly illegal from the mid 14th century and laws had to be changed to allow the ownership of chattel slaves. Any argument that slavery was normal in the UK at the time is utter garbage. (I know that's not the point you're making).

Evidence that a substantial number of ordinary people in the UK owned a slaves is here.

This might be a bit more manageable.

Show quote history

Do you mean serfdom? I think it's important to distinguish between that and chattel slavery, which is what we are discussing here.

I'm pretty sure you couldn't own people in England from about the eleventh century onwards, only land that people had to live in

Trainbear · 30/09/2022 13:23

Getoff · 22/09/2022 17:08

Thomas Sowell (a black american economist) has some interesting videos on Youtube on the subject of slavery.

According to him, it was ubiquitous throughout history, in almost every civilisation in every part of the world, slavery was a normal thing.

It almost never had anything to do with race, across history as a whole most slaves looked like their owners. (Even though prisoners-of-war was one of the most common ways of creating new slaves.)

Thomas More's "Utopia" envisaged that there would be slaves in Utopia! Among his rules for more humane slavery were that only prisoners-of-war and serious criminals could be enslaved, and the children of slaves would not be slaves. (But apparently Utopia was a satire, so not sure if we should take this seriously.)

Sowell says that 19th century European imperialists did in fact make a unique contribution to the history of slavery - by deciding to end it. The British made the biggest contribution, once they decided slavery was wrong they sent (or threatend to send) warships to many places to end it, including in countries that weren't part of the British empire. But it wasn't just the British, the French and some other European countries also got involved in ending it. He claims this is the first time in human history that it became widely accepted that slavery was wrong. (Although my own googling found that one Chinese emperor banned it a thousand years ago, but it returned after his death.)

With regard to black American disadvantage being a legacy of slavery, I don't remember the details, but he claims that the discrepancies people blame on slavery only came into existence after the American welfare state was founded, a long time after the end of slavery. (I think he was focusing on single parenthood, which only became more prevalent among black Americans than among whites in the 1960's.) (I may not have got the details in this paragraph right, please refer to YouTube if this matters to you!)

is this from the “Black rednecks/White liberals “ book? It is very much worth reading. Also “Black Lies Matter” written, inconveniently by a black anthropologist.