Britain without the slave trade?

[FancyFanny]

There's lots of talk of how the Britain's wealth was a result of the slave trade an colonialism and how we should all be trying to pay that back and rectify it some how.

I just wondered what people think Britain would be like today if those things had never happened?

No sugar so nice and slim.

#fascetious

It's pointless speculation. We can't know or even reasonably guess. Historians do know that it's a lot more complicated than 'it was all due to slavery' though. We did have a trading and growing economy before then.

You really can't do this kind of speculation with any kind of historical event like the world wars etc. There are so many variables and everything is interconnected. It's not a simple linear chain of events.

The endless revisionism gets a bit pointless. Maybe we should claim Normandy back from France.

Perhaps the super rich wouldn’t have got quite so super rich so there would’ve been more room for ordinary families and a more even distribution of wealth.

who knows with counterfactuals? there’s a million and one permutations of what could’ve happened

What a brilliant question. What about other countries equivalent to ours in size / population etc that didn’t get involved?

Can't begin to imagine. A lot of British working class people (eg., workers in cotton mills) would have had totally different lives if slavery hadnt existed. Better or worse? Absolutely impossible to know.

A lot of people working in cotton mills had the odd share in a slave.

Probably a lot richer as a country but with poorer aristocrats. We spent more on abolishing it and fighting wars to get others to abolish it than we made. Almost all of the wealth from it went into private hands of the upper class aristocrats, so it’s not like it the wealth from it helped the majority of people- the working class. Then the costs of abolishing it and the wars were paid for with working class taxes and lives (being conscripted into the armed forces, especially the Royal Navy.)

🤣 This is ludicrous. Cotton mill workers could barely feed themselves. They didn’t have the means to buy shares in private enterprises and no self respecting upper class twat would sell them a share even if they did have the means because of classism.

Am genuinely struggling to think of an existing country that was neither former colony nor colonised. Admittedly my history isn't great...

Like who? At the time, everyone was involved in some form of slavery and slave trade.

I reckon a bit like iceland.

That’s why I asked 🙂

There hasn’t been a civilisation in all of human history which hasn’t exploited and enslaved other populations. If you disagree, find one.

If there are reparations to be had, I’ll claim some based on my own family history, as we all can if we’re not descended from the landed gentry

There is no country to compare to. Slavery was global and ubiquitous before England banned it on home soil during the reighn of William the conquerer. We have many things to be ashamed of in our history but how Britain led the anti- slave movement is something that we can be very proud of. We had dedicated military units blockading slave shipping routes. Slaves that arrived on British soil stopped being slaves simply by being here.

There was really no appetite to stop the slave trade and we did it anyway.

This is such an odd question. Slavery and colonialism is woven into the very fabric of Britain. It's intrinsic to so many things we consider 'our culture' today. There are many people who even today don't see anything wrong with Britain's role in the slave trade and indeed think it was for the greater good. People take pride in the notion of the 'sun never setting' etc etc. That kind of mentality and culture is impenetrable.

Trouble if most British people don’t seem willing to understand their own history.

its well worth a visit to the slavery & Maritime museums in Liverpool and if you ever get chance the “castles” in Ghana.

maybe we’d be more compassionate to immigrants now if we at least accepted and understand our history

even looking at how the uk fucked Ireland.

Yet we shit all over the counties we robbed blind. And because we where the first to stop slavery doesn’t forgive the previous 400 years.

I suppose the uk would have been colonised by one of the other big colonisers.

I think it's really wrong-headed to clap Britain on the back for campaigning for abolition and stopping the slave trade without mentioning the 2.5 million of people bought from Africa by British slavers and exploited to death in British Caribbean colonies. And let's not forget that up to the War of Independence the American colonies were British too.

I'd hope we'd be more like similar European countries who didn't have a Transatlantic slave trade. Norway or Austria or somewhere.

Absolutely this.

What country didn’t get involved in the slave trade? I honestly can’t think of any!