EMPIRE- did you know this history?

[Needacupofteaandcrackers]

Just watched Empire on BBC….. I didn’t realise the timelines of how long it was tolerated. I’ve been to a few trust sites and only now I’m made to connections on wealth. 🥹

It’s interesting some people have jumped to slavery, do you all realise that the British Empire was huge and it could be argued, only ended in 1997 when we gave back Hong Kong.

Even without that, many colonies only gained independence in the 1960s-1980s. The Windrush generation mainly travelled on British passports because they were British at the time. The British Caribbean didn’t actually have autonomy - it was a British colony.

I’m not taking anything away from the horrors of slavery and British involvement in the not just the trade but also the mechanisms of enslaving human beings, but the Empire and exploitation/oppression of people spans a much greater time and geographic expanse than it portrays.

Slavery was just 1 horrendous aspect…

I am ethnically Indian and no fan of the British Empire. I would however note that the British Empire was the first empire ever to abolish slavery and to employ significant military force to stop slavery taking place. Slavery survived in many countries into the 20th Century and there are still versions of it around today.

www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-end-of-the-british-empire-after-the-second-world-war

I thoroughly enjoyed bingeing a few episodes last night. I got hooked on Dr David Olusoga from the first series of a House in Time and everything he does is fascinating and really engaging.

Every historian has bias of some sort. Good historiography makes you aware of the bias. It shoukd be part of any analysis of history - why is this being told now, why is it being done this way, what has been left out or ignored? History is about the present- there are fashions in what gets studied at history as much as any other subject, and that tells us about current society as much as anything in the past.

I can't remember when I learnt about the slave trade at school, whether it was part of GCSE (Industrial revolution) or before then. I was aware of it before I covered it at school - my father's first job in the '60s was on a farm owned by a family who had made their money in Carribean plantations a couple of centuries earlier.

I was at the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich yesterday, which had a lot about slavery (the triangular trade was very reliant on shipping.) Amsterdam museums have a lot about the VOC, particularly the Tropenmuseum (museum of the tropics, I guess, my Dutch isn't great,) which went into a lot of history about the Dutch in Suriname and Batavia (as it then was) and so on, which i didn't know about (despite having a history degree.) I don't know how much they cover st school in NL. I know some of my German colleagues felt hugely guilty about the Third Reich after what they covered in school, yet in most cases their grandparents had been no more than children, and parents weren't involved at all.

It’s interesting some people have jumped to slavery, do you all realise that the British Empire was huge and it could be argued, only ended in 1997 when we gave back Hong Kong.

We still have 14 overseas territories. HK wasn't the last.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories

Whilst not as abhorrent as slavery, building staggering wealth on the backs of miners and steel workers is also something that should draw raised eyebrows. The workers were paid a pittance and worked under awful conditions.

Hear hear!
I read Drax of Drax Hall recently with a foreword by David Olusoga, all about the history of one family (the Drax family obvs) and how they pretty much invented chattel slavery in Barbados. Definitely old and definitely monied , the current ‘scion’ of the family was the richest MP in the House of Commons until he got booted out in the last GE. He still owns land there and is quibbling with the Barbadian government about the price of the land he owns which they want to buy done of for social housing…. even for that goal, Drax refused to drop the price 🙄

The shadows of slavery and the impact of the British empire are still being felt - certainly on the island of Barbados anyways.

@Loadsapandas, people are discussing the David Olusoga tv series, though, whose chief focus is on slavery and the oppression of indigenous peoples.

Exactly. And this issue is precisely why the collective guilt and, controversially, reparations, gains no traction with the working class. It's only three, four generations ago that the majority of people in this country had a landed gentry boot on their own neck, never mind what they were doing overseas. Yes, they weren't in literal chains. But so what?

Its the same old story. Middle class do gooders falling over themselves to virtue signal. I gave up my National Trust membership a while ago. I got tired of shoving my nose up against the window of old money (who still won't pay their fair fucking share) and mixing with the aforementioned do gooders in the cafes. 😬

Saying British imperial slavery was “just the same as any other slavery” is a bit like saying a hurricane is “just windy weather.” Technically, yes, but you’re missing the entire point.

The transatlantic system Britain helped build was uniquely brutal: the Middle Passage, hereditary slavery, racial dehumanisation written into law, families torn apart, forced labour, the bodies of black women used by slave owners to grow their own slaves, all on an industrial scale – the whole package. This wasn’t some mild historical footnote.

And no, slavery didn’t end because people suddenly grew halos. Black abolitionists–men and women–spent years fighting, resisting, writing, revolting, and pushing themselves into a political conversation that often wanted nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, plenty of white reformers campaigned for equality for themselves (many white women) while happily benefiting from a world where Black people were treated as less than human. To add insult to injury white slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of freeing the enslaved. Many slaves were not even freed straight away thanks to the sleight of hand that allowed slavery to be replaced by the 'Apprenticeship' system. This allowed the former slave owner to keep a form of slavery a few years more. The real kicker here is that slave owners, not the enslaved were compensated for the ending of slavery. The loan it took out to pay them was only finally paid back in 2015!

Post-slavery was not all roses either. In some earlier slave systems, once freed you could work your way up, even become skilled or wealthy. Not in the British model. This one was deliberately built on racial hierarchy (easy when your skin marks you as different), and the legacy of that design is still obvious today.
So no – British slavery was not “the same.” It was its own uniquely destructive system, with consequences that didn’t magically disappear because Parliament finally caught up with basic humanity.

It important to remember who wrote much of the history that is written...

And though technically not enslaved the ones in the worst circumstances often didn't have much freedom, nor the time or good health to enjoy what freedom they had, without autonomy over things like employment or housing, justice system stacked agai st them etc And of course for much of history didn't have the vote. And working class women were horrifically abused, working while bringing up children without the welfare state.

Great post.

It really isn't.

Yes. For me the single most interesting thing about the Barbados section of the first episode of Empire was the difference between two documents dated 14 years apart from a particular sugar estate. The first one listed the full names and rights and how much time they had left to serve of European indentured workers. The one from 14 years later had no indentured workers, but a whole new category of enslaved Africans whose names weren’t given, just the Anglo nicknames they’d been given since being enslaved, who had no rights, because they were racialised estate property, not employees, and who had no amount of time left to serve, because their slavery had no endpoint.

It’s a disturbingly quick shift to the wholesale dehumanisation of an entire category of people to fuel a growing appetite for sugar. There’s some astonishing stat like Britain consuming six times as much sugar in 1770 as it had in 1720, almost all from the Caribbean colonies.

Thanks for this context!

I thought people were having a general discussion about Empire.

I haven’t watched the series (though I am aware of it) - I find it all triggering as it’s too close to home.

I am a descendant of enslaved people.

I’ve only watched the first episode, but it struck me as pretty sensitive. It deals with the Jamestown plantation in Virginia in part by talking to descendants of the displaced indigenous people speaking their languages. It explores the beginnings of slavery in Barbados by focusing on an African burial ground on an estate and a planned memorial. And on Clive and the East India Company by talking to British Asians.

I think most of the first travellers travelled without passports at all. They didn’t need passports, just some form of ID to travel between different parts of the British empire and Britain. HMS Windrush arrived before British citizenship was created at a time when passports declared the holder a subject of the monarch, not a citizen. My parents had a friend who was only eligible for a British Indian passport until after 1947 because he was born there while his father was working there. He was then described as ‘British by descent’ which always riled him because, as he saw it, he was of 100% British ancestry and born in a place that was British at the time.

It is. I don’t think he covers it, but racism really emerges at this point as a means of justifying this. If you look back to the 16th century, aside from the fact that there was less contact with people from outside Europe, the general paradigm for judging people as being what you might crudely call ‘fully human’ and worthy of being afforded the same dignity as they would afford their neighbours, was whether they were Christian / believed in God in a recognisable way. Quite soon after the Atlantic slave triangle started missionaries travelled to the new world with the ambition to save the souls of new people and introduce them to the glories of Christianity. They were very successful. There’s a lot about the Christian message that resonates with the enslaved and the destitute. But that meant slave owners had to justify their continued enslavement some other way.

If you are enjoying life in Britain you are enjoying the proceeds of the Empire.
We didn't become one of the worlds top economies from selling apples from our green and pleasant land....
I just thought everyone realised this at some point...

Evidence?
Many countries are now regretting their links to the U.K and actively trying to shake off those links

The Empire improved certain things but made other situations worse.

As with every other nation on earth, Britain has a chequered history.

That was how it was then.

And yet many retain the monarch as head of state and remain members of the commonwealth.

The Empire induspitably made some individual families wealthy but the extent to which it benefited the country as a whole is much more debatable.

If you look at a graph of UK GDP over time what causes it to shoot up is not the onset of colonialism but the onset of industrialisation. Innovation has driven wealth creation far more than exploitation.

Where did the cotton come from, @NotDavidTennant?