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Britain without the slave trade?

249 replies

FancyFanny · 07/05/2023 19:35

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?

OP posts:
Thread gallery
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Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 22:53

ChopperC110P · 07/05/2023 22:49

There is no one overall “the slave trade.” There is slavery/slave trades. Transatlantic slave trade was one slave trade among many slave trades.

The Europeans began the transatlantic slave trade, not Africans.

Slavery was begun in prehistoric times, no one knows who “started it” and it’s irrelevant really because you’d be going back to 30,000 years ago at least. So we all began slavery which in historic times operated along many recognised slave trades with specific trade routes. These have been mapped out by historians and were on every continent before Europeans age of exploration brought them globe trotting.

Slavery was still a global fixture at the time the transatlantic slave trade began. It was a new slave trade.

But then why all the criticism that focusses on the Europeans ?

ChopperC110P · 07/05/2023 22:54

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 22:48

Then how would you characterise the slavery in African kingdoms because apparently Africans didn't get rich from it ?

It was a fixture of society that had been around for time immemorial, the same as with every other poor or rich society on the planet at the time.

DownNative · 07/05/2023 22:56

TragicRabbit · 07/05/2023 19:40

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

Portugal was the European country most active in the Atlantic Slave Trade with 3.9 million Africans enslaved and taken to Brazil. Hence Portuguese being the dominant language there.

The Portuguese were the most dominant in the first 130 years.

UK is second with 3.2 million. People from all parts of the UK, including the then Ireland took part in enslavement.

France is next with approximately 1.5 million Africans enslaved.

Spain next and then Denmark.

These were the most active countries in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Europeans were responsible for enslaving 11 million Africans. Germany was a latecomer to the Atlantic Slave Trade too.

In total, 20 million Africans were forced to leave their continent during the times of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the trans-Saharan, the red sea and the Indian slave trade. People forget the Atlantic Slave Trade wasn't the only one in history.

Of course, Europe has its own internal history of slavery too. Arguably the most famous slave was St Patrick who wasn't Irish at all and was taken by the Irish who the Romans called Scoti.

It's as old as human history.

Flopsythebunny · 07/05/2023 23:02

finallygotospeaktoSky · 07/05/2023 20:19

Why is Britain always picked on about slavery? There were many other countries that had and sold slaves including Africa. Why aren't they being hectored over this?

Or the Portuguese and Spanish. Their slave trade was far worse than the British and for much longer.

Museya15 · 07/05/2023 23:03

somewhereovertherain · 07/05/2023 20:01

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.

If you feel that way about it, start paying a percentage of your wage back to the countries we robbed blind?

ChopperC110P · 07/05/2023 23:06

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 22:53

But then why all the criticism that focusses on the Europeans ?

Because they began the Transatlantic Slave Trade which was the biggest, baddest, most destructive slave trade in world history. And among the Europeans, the worst of the worst were the British and Portuguese.

It’s well deserved criticism.

Wakandian · 07/05/2023 23:13

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 22:53

But then why all the criticism that focusses on the Europeans ?

Surely, you could just do some independent reading on all of this yourself, instead of asking anonymous people on the internet to explain it to you without references.

Flopsythebunny · 07/05/2023 23:14

Ylvamoon · 07/05/2023 20:29

Because Brian is the most successful coloniser in the "old world" (Europe)

No it wasn't. That prize goes to Portugal

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 23:16

Wakandian · 07/05/2023 23:13

Surely, you could just do some independent reading on all of this yourself, instead of asking anonymous people on the internet to explain it to you without references.

True, but always good to partake in discussions to gain different perspectives that can then help with independent research and academic study's.

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 23:18

ChopperC110P · 07/05/2023 23:06

Because they began the Transatlantic Slave Trade which was the biggest, baddest, most destructive slave trade in world history. And among the Europeans, the worst of the worst were the British and Portuguese.

It’s well deserved criticism.

Much appreciated for your time and analyses.

DownNative · 07/05/2023 23:19

LaMaG · 07/05/2023 20:34

Its not a black white thing. Don't simplify it. I'm Irish and we suffered years of brutality and genocide at the hands of colonial Britain. 1 million died during Victorian years of a so called famine because our food was exported to feed British, anyone who rose up or tried to steal food was shot. Yet we were subjected to harsh institutional and social racism after gaining independence. There are those in NI who would argue its still unresolved. Please don't make it about colour.

This is ahistorical and not one professional historians agree with.

For one thing, Irish people absolutely WERE involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Indeed, Irish people were amongst those compensated by the British Government when slavery was abolished.

For another thing, the Famine was NOT genocide as any historian will tell you. Even the Irish Government officially agreed it wasn't genocide decades ago.

See below:

"Doyle Expounds Official Famine Line

It has taken a Government Minister, Ms Avril Doyle, to put Irish-Americans straight about the Great Famine"

  • Irish News headline and article on 14th December 1996

"The woefully inadequate response of the then British authorities and the misguided relief policies which they pursued are now well established in the professional literature of Famine studies. It was a rigidly doctrinaire and ideological administration, remote from the people whom it allegedly served and determined to pursue a programme of economic modernisation, even at the cost of thousands of people's lives.

However, it goes way beyond the boundaries of acceptable analysis to argue that there was a genocidal intent on the part of the British Government at the time and that the Irish Famine is therefore directly equivalent to the Holocaust. By using that argument, we are letting the British authorities off the hook. Their hands appear to have been clean but they certainly were not.

In my comments in America and elsewhere, I have made my position abundantly clear. The British response during the Famine was entirely inadequate, but the genocidal argument has no validity and this inaccuracy does a disservice both to the victims of the Holocaust or the Famine."

  • Minister Of State At The Department Of The Taoiseach, Mrs Avril Doyle speaking in the Irish Parliament on Thursday 19th December 1996

Avril Doyle was also the chair of the Republic of Ireland's National Famine Committee charged with organising the official commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine.

"It is not good for continuing Anglo-Irish relations to term the famine as a deliberate act of genocide. What happened was more a case of appalling neglect and disinterest on the part of some of the reigning officialdom. Serious mistakes were made but there was no official genocide policy. It was really the manifestation of a laissez faire philosophy — let market forces reach their own level and, in the meantime, let the people die or try to survive, as inevitably they would. Certainly it was a philosophy that failed disastrously and for which we still pay."

  • David Andrews (TD representing the Constituency of Dún Laoghaire) speaking in the Irish Parliament on Thursday 19th December 1996.

"In the case of the Great Famine no reputable historian believes that the British state intended the destruction of the Irish people, and the Famine-Holocaust comparisons provide no support either. Yet one million died. Does intentionality matter?

It does matter, for at least three reasons. First, it directly determines the scale of the tragedy. It is easy to forget that had Germany not lost the war, many more Jews would have been killed, such was the strength of commitment to the Final Solution. By contrast, when the Irish economy recovered some strength at the end of the 1840s the crisis was largely, though not wholly over – to the evident relief, not only of people in Ireland but of British policy makers also.

But to narrow the focus simply to the role of the British government for a moment: for all the massive irresponsibility and buck-passing that characterised the five years of crisis, the state succeeded in organising public relief schemes that employed three-quarters of a million workers, and at one point was responsible for feeding three million people on a daily basis.

These are not the actions of a Government or a state bent on genocide."

  • Liam Kennedy, emeritus professor of economic history at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland and author of "The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust" on the QUB website

"The belief that the authorities in London did little to prevent the Irish from starving underpins the recurrent claims of genocide from some quarters in Ireland and particularly Irish-America. There is a sense in which England "slept". However, two points need emphasising here.

First is that any worthwhile definition of genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish. Certainly, stereotypical images of feckless peasants and lazy landlords abounded. They underpinned an interpretation of the Famine as a divine solution to an otherwise intractable problem of overpopulation, and justified tough policies. If policy failure resulted in deaths, then (as in the Netherlands in the same years and in India and elsewhere later) they were largely the by-product of a dogmatic version of political economy, not the deliberate outcome of anti-Irish racism. In the late 1840s, Whitehall policy makers were no less dogmatic toward Irish famine victims.....Yet even the toughest of them hoped for better times for Ireland and, however perversely, considered the harshest measures prescribed as a form of communal medicine. A charge of doctrinaire neglect is easier to sustain than one of genocide.

Second, modern accusations of genocide underestimate, or overlook altogether, the enormous challenge facing relief agencies, both central and local, public and private, at the time."

  • Cormac Ó Gráda, Irish economic historian and professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin as well as author of Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory

"One word, however, is not open to our usage.....This is the term "holocaust". When you see it, you know you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred."

  • Historian and author of twenty-four books on Ireland, Professor Donald H. Akenson speaking 150th Famine commemorations at the Ulster-American Folk Park in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in September 1995

Akenson is considered to be the "world's foremost authority on the Irish Diaspora." He lectures at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

"In 1944 the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined a new word, genocide, to describe what was happening. Four years later the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since then the term has been applied to other situations, sometimes retrospectively, for example to Armenia in 1915–18 and our own Potato Famine. But how appropriate is this? The key word in the Convention is ‘intent’. I’ll leave readers to argue whether this has been established in the Armenian case (see Letters), but as I listened to our guide, Vitold, relate the grim details of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, I couldn’t help but conclude that, notwithstanding British culpability for the millions of victims of the Famine in Ireland, genocide it was not."

  • Editor of History Ireland in an Editorial in Issue 5 September/October 2015, Volume 23

Remember these are Irish Government officials and professional historians from multiple countries.

Teriyakieverything · 07/05/2023 23:22

What a tedious, boring ,unoriginal, pointless , toxic OP.

Brittl · 07/05/2023 23:22

Um throughout history all humans have done is fought for land or resources. So its likely our ancestors might have been enslaved or occupied. Great Britain won the game of thrones many other countries were also involved in slavery it wasn't a unique thing but the scale was.

5foot5 · 07/05/2023 23:23

There's lots of talk of how the Britain's wealth was a result of the slave trade

It's not the only source of wealth though. For example, I believe we were very successful in medieval times at selling wool to the Flemish.

Somebody else referenced the Industrial Revolution.

Brittl · 07/05/2023 23:27

I wonder how far back you can go, could we sue the Danes for the viking invasions or Rome for colonising Britannia? I don't feel I owe anyone anything my ancestors were scottish travelling salesmen they were dirt poor.

LaMaG · 07/05/2023 23:27

DownNative thanks for that info.

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 23:27

Teriyakieverything · 07/05/2023 23:22

What a tedious, boring ,unoriginal, pointless , toxic OP.

i thought it's quite educational and helps to explain that the slave trades were in existence long before the Europeans.

Teriyakieverything · 07/05/2023 23:31

@Hawkins003 yes, the rest of the thread may be educational (although the po8nt you make should be obvious and goes without saying anyway), but I was referring to the opening post specifically.

rewilded · 07/05/2023 23:32

thought it's quite educational and helps to explain that the slave trades were in existence long before the Europeans.

How can you not know this?

Hawkins003 · 07/05/2023 23:33

Teriyakieverything · 07/05/2023 23:31

@Hawkins003 yes, the rest of the thread may be educational (although the po8nt you make should be obvious and goes without saying anyway), but I was referring to the opening post specifically.

Fair points

Wakandian · 07/05/2023 23:34

‘It’s hard to believe but it was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished ‘paying off’ the debt which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners in 1835 because of the abolition of slavery. Abolition meant their profiteering from human misery would (gradually) come to an end. Not a penny was paid to those who were enslaved and brutalised.
The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.’

I’m not providing references; you need to do the work. This particular extract is not hard to find and was written nearly two weeks ago in one of the main tabloids.

NurseCranesRolodex · 07/05/2023 23:36

somewhereovertherain · 07/05/2023 19:59

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.

And Wales & Scotland, involuntary clearing of Highland & island communities in order to install sheep which were more profitable, banning the language, killing the Queen.... FFS..... The Royal family represent alot!!

Wakandian · 07/05/2023 23:38

And you can Google this one too (or whatever search engine you prefer), in order to read the full article.

Google
is
your
friend.

‘The descendants of some of Britain’s wealthiest slave owners have launched an activist movement, calling on the government both to apologise for slavery and begin a programme of reparative justice in recognition of the “ongoing consequences of this crime against humanity”.

A second cousin of King Charles and a direct descendant of the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone have joined journalists, a publisher, a schoolteacher and a retired social worker, to create the Heirs of Slavery campaigning body, which will lobby the UK government to acknowledge and atone for its role in the transportation of 3.1 million enslaved African people across the Atlantic.

“British slavery was legal, industrialised and based entirely on race,” Alex Renton, one of the group’s founders, said. “Britain has never apologised for it, and its after-effects still harm people’s lives in Britain as well as in the Caribbean countries where our ancestors made money.”
The group includes the Earl of Harewood, David Lascelles, the retired social worker Rosemary Harrison, businessman Charles Gladstone, the former BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan, her film director cousin, John Dower, the author and publisher Richard Atkinson, retired schoolteacher Robin Wedderburn, and the journalist Alex Renton. They hope descendants of other slave-owning dynasties will come forward to join them.
Members of the group acknowledge that their families’ wealth was derived in part from the profits made on plantations worked on by enslaved Africans. Their slave-owning ancestors all received compensation from the British government after slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833.’

NurseCranesRolodex · 07/05/2023 23:39

Naunet · 07/05/2023 20:07

Or the Arabic countries that castrated their African slaves and still buy them today. The numbers they traded easily swamp Europe.

That Africans were huge slavers and Portuguese.

DownNative · 07/05/2023 23:41

LaMaG · 07/05/2023 23:27

DownNative thanks for that info.

No worries.

It must be said though much of Irish history has been distorted by the efforts of people such as John Mitchel and whose words greatly influenced Irish Republicanism.

Mitchel was himself in favour of the Atlantic Slave Trade and he's a hero within Irish Republicanism for other reasons. His statue still stands in Newry today, IIRC. Nobody within Irish Republicanism wants to take it down and outsiders dare not try given PIRA still has access to weapons.

I'd say most Irish people are in denial about Irish involvement in the British Empire and also how many of them owned slaves in the New World.

Unfortunately, quite a few Irish Republicans push the Irish slaves nonsense which began in the United States in the late 20th Century as well. Irish Historian, Liam Hogan has done sterling work on debunking the Irish Slaves myth, especially because its actually based on racism.

The Irish Slaves myth is used against Black Americans in a "we were slaves once too and look where we are now...stop playing the victim!" manner. It's sheer racism.

I recommend checking out Liam Hogan's work on the subject. Indentured Servitude was absolutely not the same thing as Chattel Slavery. Most Indentured servants chose that as a way of travelling to the New World for a better life. Indentured Servants could be freed after seven years and could also seek redress in the courts in Maryland, for example.

Chattel slaves had zero expectation of freedom and absolutely no recourse to the courts for justice.

Hogan and other historians explain all this. 👍

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