David Olusoga on Britain and slavery.
The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.
Lots of Sir Thomas Bertrams with plantation off there across a big ocean, where we don’t have to think about it.
George Orwell once likened Britain to a wealthy family that maintains a guilty silence about the sources of its wealth. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, had seen that conspiracy of silence at close quarters. His father, Richard W Blair, was a civil servant who oversaw the production of opium on plantations near the Indian-Nepalese border and supervised the export of that lethal crop to China. The department for which the elder Blair worked was called, unashamedly, the opium department. However, the Blair family fortune – which had been largely squandered by the time Eric was born – stemmed from their investments in plantations far from India.
The Blair name is one of thousands that appear in a collection of documents held at the National Archives in Kew that have the potential to do to Britain what the hackers of WikiLeaks and the researchers of PBS did to Affleck. The T71 files consist of 1,631 volumes of leather-bound ledgers and neatly tied bundles of letters that have lain in the archives for 180 years, for the most part unexamined. They are the records and the correspondence of the Slave Compensation Commission.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”. The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn.
Compensation to the owners, notice. Not compensation to the slaves. Oh god no; far from it. The slaves were made to pay for the compensation – the compensation to people who had stolen their labor for generations.
The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.
Imagine if you kidnapped some girls and held them prisoner for years, the way Ariel Castro did…and then after ten years they escaped. Imagine the state making the kidnapped girls go on being Ariel Castro’s sex toys for another four years to “compensate” him for not being able to own them forever. It’s like that. The former slaves were owed billions, and they were never paid a dime.
The large slave owners, the men of the “West India interest”, who owned huge estates from which they drew vast fortunes, appear in the files of the commission. The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone’s maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.
The records show that for the 218 men and women he regarded as his property, Charles Blair, the great-grandfather of George Orwell, was paid the more modest sum of £4,442 – the modern equivalent of about £3m. There are other famous names hidden within the records. Ancestors of the novelist Graham Greene, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott all received compensation for slaves. As did a distant ancestor of David Cameron. But what is most significant is the revelation of the smaller-scale slave owners.
There were lots of them. It was just an investment like any other.
Sometimes I just don’t like human beings very much.
Well, that capacity for self-hatred might be one of humanity’s more redeeming qualities.
Apparently Benedict Cumberbatch’s family were afraid they’d be asked for reparations for their slave owning ancestors, if he got famous using their name, and wanted him to use a stage name instead.
Wilberforce is a particularly anemic champion to hang their reputation on. He did not want slavery to end immediately; he did not want the slaves to be freed. No, it had to be phased out sloooooooooowly…
I submit, were this true, you would be undismayed by slavery.
Would I tell someone not to worry about having their inheritance (unjustly acquired by their ancestors) taken away? I think it’s unlikely to happen. But they probably should worry about it. Their inherited benefits are the other side of the burdens inherited by others.
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I’m in favour of reparations. But I’m not sure that going after individuals for the sins of their ancestors is the best solution. Yes, the people in family A might be rich, in part, because of their ancestors’ use of slaves; and the descendants of those slaves are in a worse position today as a result. But what about the descendants of slaves that were similarly abused, but by family B, whose descendants today are not rich? The descendants of those slaves could be just as deserving of compensation, but unable to get any since the living descendants haven’t managed to stay rich. Another problem: record keeping. Why should someone’s compensation depend upon whether or not there is a sufficient paper trail? It is possible that those with the best claim to reparations are those who are least able to prove their claim.
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This is not to say that reparations are unjustified. They are. But the injustice in today’s world that can be traced to slavery in the past cannot be remedied with some good forensic accounting and a few civil court cases.
It’s not like that. It’s worse. Ariel Castro’s slaves were acquired illegally, and he had to keep their slavery secret. The slavery that was ended in 1833 was completely legal, and existed within a legal framework that the government of the day recognized and protected.
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Yeah… sometimes I don’t like humans much either. Sometimes I find myself hoping that I’m not human (surely I was adopted… right?)
Silentbob @4, you respond to Ophelia:
How so? I don’t see how that follows, seeing as how some people benefited from slavery.
Care to clarify?
But I’m not sure that going after individuals for the sins of their ancestors
It makes so much more sense to continue to effectively punish people for having ancestors that were unfortunate enough to be enslaved, by starting them off in a position of economic disadvantage, right?
I do know at least some ancestors of mine were involved in the slave trade because my great grandfather apparently gave it as a reason why he was involved in the anti-slavery movement from the 1920s-1950s (another probable reason was he married into a Quaker family that was already in the anti-slavery movement). He doesn’t seem to have started life with much money (I would guess lower middle class) so I suspect any wealth had vanished due to death and divorce.
I’ll note most supporters saw ending the international slave trade and slavery as a long battle; there were too many powerful people involved. Some of the women’s antislavery organizations had a reputation of being more radical. See Elizabeth Heyrick.
@ 7 John Morales
Alright then.
The quoted statement doesn’t indict slavers particularly, but humans. Yet the victims of the slavery were also humans. I was suggesting that misanthropy and compassion over human suffering are contradictory.
… And the comment @4 was meant as a compliment on Ophelia’s compassionate nature, not some kind of gotcha.
I appreciate that, Silentbob above.
(Just noting that discretionary misanthropy is an oxymoron)
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PS we’re risen apes, not fallen angels — to mangle a pertinent sentiment.
I have to say that it’s been buried between the pages of history books, periodicals and, in some cases, textbooks… but not, apparently, between the pages of that well-known work, The Dictionary of National Biography?
Actually, there are a lot of things the historic elites still cover over with a veneer of legitimacy. Every single aspect of their wealth, from land to capital, was obtained by foul means. They invented the concept of property, essentially by writing title deeds to places, things and people and putting their own name at the bottom. Now, we look on the ownership of people with horror, and wonder how such a thing could have happened, forgetting that ownership of land and the products of other people’s labour were acquired by exactly the same means – because the guy on the biggest horse said they were his. And we ‘bury the history’ of how much hardship, premature death and dehumanisation those other privatisations also caused.
@ 8 Marcus Ragnum
I strongly believe the proper solution to this problem is economic and social justice in the here and now, the costs of which should be born by society as a whole. But since I’m a historian specializing in the history of Carribbean slavery, I’ve given some thought to what you would have to do to make reparations happen, in practice, leaving aside any moral consideration.
If you want to sue someone for the ‘sins of their ancestors’ in a court of law, you run up against all sorts of problems. You would have to establish precisely who has standing to sue who, and for what amount of money. Slave owners were dead individuals who owned other dead individuals, so what would you do? We can imagine some kind of class action lawsuit by the descendents of slaves against the descendents of slave owners. There are lots of problems in finding these groups… it’s notorious that many are the very same people, in fact, you probably have a very diffuse group of both descendents and ancestors. Some of the descendents of slaves only are doing very well. There are no descendents of slave owners only, but many people with slave-owning ancestors have fallen into poverty. From the point of view of restoring economic justice these classes just wouldn’t work well.
So then you say that what you really would have to do is identify is the class of owners of wrongly acquired wealth versus the class of victims of wrongly inflicted poverty. Identifying those people, and quantifying the amount of their wealth or poverty due to that specific cause would be, let’s just say, a very hard task. It would no doubt make lawyers and historians rich, but it would probably cost society as a whole more money than simply instituting economic justice. It would involve a vast amount of accountancy work, followed by the recovery of money and property that’s been transferred multiple times doubtless by relatively honest means, something like confiscating a once stolen car from someone who bought it honestly and in good faith from someone who also did.
Again, leaving aside the problem of dealing with newly and brutally impoverished inheritors of ‘slave-owning wealth’, it’s debatable whether restoration would achieve the goals we hope for the descendents of slaves. This was about an explicitly British situation, and I suspect you’re thinking in American terms, Marcus, where the descendants of slaves and slave-owners are still sharing the same society, and there are still gross economic inequalities between them. Many of the descendants of British slaves suffering the effects of poverty now live in independent nation states. Some of their problems are undoubtedly due to the difficulty of building successful island economies in a globalized world. It’s certainly a problem ‘the world’ should address collectively, but it can’t be solved simply by pouring money in. A small proportion of descendents of British slaves are living in Britain and the majority of Britain’s black people aren’t descended from British slaves. It’s also notable that those who are aren’t Britain’s most disadvantaged or underprivileged group by a long way, and would likely end up left out of our ‘victims of wrongly inflicted poverty’ class anyway.
All of this is completely irrelevant because England beat the Australians in a game of cricket the other day.
Silentbob @ 10 – sure, they were, but then it’s not that I think they belonged to some Special category of humanity that could never violate other people’s human rights.
Still, I take your point, and that’s why I included the “sometimes.” Enslavement and genocide and torture aren’t all there is to human history…just too big a chunk.
This post must have been way more cryptic than I realized, because a QC on Twitter called it a “determined effort to avoid a sense of contemporary morality that would do credit to the any fundamentalist.” I can’t for the life of me figure out how he got that from what I quoted or said.
Marcus Ranum @8: That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all. And I certainly don’t think that there are only two possible options (punish living individuals for the sins of their dead ancestors to compensate the descendants of the original victims).
My comment above was going to be longer, but probably not clearer.
Luckily, Pen @14 has said much of what I wanted to say, but with an expertise and eloquence I lack.
Stewart found this item:
Thanks, Ophelia. Just to add the reference, I found it in the Sydney Herald of 30 Jan. 1837.
So then you say that what you really would have to do is identify is the class of owners of wrongly acquired wealth versus the class of victims of wrongly inflicted poverty.
#14 Pen, if we want to do that right here and right now, then all the wealthy business owners and corporate officers vs. all minimum wage employees.
Eric “George Orwell” Blair’s family connection to slavery has come out, but what about that other Blair – Tony?