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?

We literally grow suger beet to make suger in local factories

Domestic slavery wasn't banned until the late 1990's.

Actually 2010.

but every single one of us is descended from slaves, and every single one of us is descended from salve traders, so by your logic, we all have to make reparations to ourselves

What would Egypt be without slavery? Without pyramids.

It's a moot point. Every country has enslaved others. No matter caste or creed. We used and abused many different walks of life. Unmarried mothers, prisoners.
You can't change the past. It's what got us here. But learn from it.

When you know better, you do better.

Only because Prussian scientists were asked by Frederick the Great to research a way of extracting sugar from plants that could be cultivated within Prussia, rather than relying on imports (Prussia didn't have much in the way of overseas colonies, nor a navy to protect trade).

Yes, I mentioned the Industrial Revolution. But you should have read the entire post rather than just remember those two words. The linked article is very interesting.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/slavery-and-british-industrial-revolution

This is just revisionism though isn't it? The African kingdoms weren't involved in slavery for survival, they were involved for profit. And let's not pretend they gave a shit about the fate of the people they sold.

Basically the same with Genghis Khan era too.

Even here we find a distortion of Scottish history. Take the sheep, for example, their introduction to the land around that time actually stemmed the tide of emigration. Sheep weren’t part of clearing the land at all!

Think about how the local economy was built around and diversified by the presence of sheep.

This link has tons of information on the real history of the Highland Clearances. If it was A4 paper, it'd be twenty pages long!

https://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-truth-about-the-highland-clearances/

But here's Excerpts from the conclusions:

"What we can say with certainty, is that the popular story of the “highland clearances” as “genocide” is totally at odds with the evidence of a growing population and growing economic prosperity as new urban centres developed in the late 18th century. Whilst many evictions were brutal, in comparison to those in other areas like London, many Highland landlords appear to be almost the paradigm of virtue (for their time). Not only did they provide alternative accommodation on their estates, but in some cases they paid the families to emigrate (although perhaps out of self interest to secure labourers for their own expanding estates abroad)."

And:

"Our modern view of the highlanders comes to us through the distorted lens of Celticness, clans, tartans and most of all “highland oppression”. That lens paints a picture of a clansmen in the Noble savage tradition as a victim. In doing so, it portrays Scotland as an oppressed backward country: a huge Disneyland theme park for tourists to come a gawk as the quaint Scots in the Victoriana Kitch of Kilt, Sporran and whisky.

The real truth is that many of the highlanders who emigrated were themselves responsible for oppression of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Is that the reason for this obsession with repression? Is it some kind of guilt complex by home-coming Scots trying to claim that they were the victims and not the indigenous peoples they forced of their own lands?"

It's completely ahistorical for anyone to portray the history as "how the UK fucked" Scotland.

History has been distorted by those with political agendas, unfortunately. Real history is always very complicated, so beware oversimplified versions of faux history anywhere.

and lets remember the result of the eventual peace with the people of Ghengis Khan..... half of the population killed by the black death.

Causes and effects are complicated and unpredictable - the plague spread across the world from trade with Mongolia, if there had continued to have been war and conquest and slavery instead, the world's worst ever humanitarian disaster would have been avoided

UK power was built on science and tech progress. In the 18th and early 19th century there was a series of inventions that made for cheaper, quicker production of things like iron and steel and power generation from coal. There is an argument that slavery funded this. The problem with this argument is that other countries were bigger slavers but never had the technological advances: Portugal being a classic example.

The French were also pretty good at science but not so good at making money from it. French scientists developed steam engines, but the British were the first to build commercially viable ones.

I don't think it makes any difference. The UK government should front up and apologise for slavery, and institute development schemes by way of reparation. Apart from being the right thing to do it makes good diplomatic sense (as long as the funds don't get embezzled and laundered back to the UK.)

And I bet that if William Wilberforce were alive today he'd want the government to apologise too.

While we're here, what reparations should be made to women for their being fucked over/exploited and killed by, er...men of all countries for all time?

People go on about historic slave trading and yes it was wrong.
But we can't change the past, just learn from it.
Unfortunately it seems we haven't. All people seem interested in doing is pointing the finger when there's thousands of people enslaved right now

I am all for reparation. But not just for Slavery but also for wars, and given the devastation that Covid has had some sort of compensation package should be worked out

There are a few countries that owe the worlds populations huge amount of money even with current day history.

Either every country takes responsibility for their countries History or we wipe the slate clean and move on

By paying reparation for the past are we saying that modern day slavery no longer exists.

This.

By paying reparation for the past are we saying that modern day slavery no longer exists.

It would be hypocritical to make an issue of past slavery but ignore modern slavery. So why not do more about them both?

An honest apology and actions to put things right would do a lot more good - and look an awful lot better - than all this prevarication and evasion. So what if the Turks, or the Algerians, or the Portuguese don't apologise? That's their problem- be the first, build some bridges.

By the way, what do people think of the Guardian's recent campaign?

Regardless of what I've just said I think it's a crock of shit.

Apparently they have just made the terrible discovery that the Guardian was founded on dirty slave money, and they needed some researcher to make this terrible discovery. But I thought anyone who knew anything much about Manchester knew a) it was the cotton weaving capital of the world and b) the cotton came from US slave plantations. So why the pantomime horror? Anybody would think-- ... !

This really annoys me. Britons as a whole didn't benefit from the slave trade - some rich mill owners benefitted. Look up life working in these hellish factories in the early years of industrialisation and you'll see that life got much worse in Britain for many ordinary people. It only got better after Britain had abolished it's slave trade. Many workers in Britain went on strike and campaigned against the slave trade. Many tribal leaders in Africa made huge amounts of money from the trade.

I hate the idea of personal profit and public guilt.

Doubt people working in cotton mills had the disposable income to invest in part share of a slave, they were practically slaves themselves. But the middle classes did invest in slaves

Slavery in Britain ended when the government agreed to compensate slave owners for the financial value of their slaves. The last slave owners were paid off as recently as 2018!!!!!!!

I think that means money borrowed to compensate the slave owners was finally repaid in 2018.

I think this would be a very good use of the "wealth tax". I also think there should be some sort of additional/ specific help for (particularly boys but girls too) of Caribean extraction at school. They are the students least likely to go to university and have the poorest outcomes. IMO this would be money well spent.

I'd also probably include traveller children who have had their fair share of exploitation and cultural disadvantage too.

I think we should worry about modern day slavery.