The brutality of British history

June 18, 2018 4:10 AM

If you, or you ancestors are British, and paid tax between the 1830s and 2015 you contributed to reparations for the slave trade, not for the slaves but compensation for the owners. There are 32 images of William Wilberforce in the National Portrait Gallery, but just four images of black abolitionists. It's argued that slavery in the British empire was only abolished after it had ceased to be economically useful. When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity? (has descriptions of slave punishment and torture)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (39 comments total)

This article lays out the sordid history. As recently as this February HM Treasury was proudly proclaiming that "your taxes" helped end the slave trade.

My own observations are that misplaced pride in the British Empire and ignorance of how it was a malignant force, have indeed shaped modern British politics, including of course Brexit.
posted by vacapinta at 4:43 AM on June 18, 2018 [18 favorites]

Narrator: "They won't."
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:44 AM on June 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

I wrote a long comment and deleted it. Every time I think about British imperialism, I get so angry I am barely able to speak. The list of atrocities stretches back so far and the way history was rewritten and reworked over and over - even today, The Crown and Downtown Abbey and vomit vomit vomit rage.

The wealth and economic gentility of the English slave trade was hideous, the hand washing clean and swift burying of it to happen away from polite society - oh for the people who get loud and shout, who look through the accounts and read for what's not written.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:44 AM on June 18, 2018 [23 favorites]

Of all the tihngs to get hung up on, the bribe paid to the slave owners to get abolition through has got the be the least appropriate. A dirty deal that ends the ownership of human beings and replaces it with a lump some of undeserved money to a class of rentiers js such a clear cut of the end justifying the means.
posted by ocschwar at 4:48 AM on June 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

UCL has a searchable database of the British slave estates that were paid off here.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:52 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Maybe it was a decent solution in 1835, but I think decency demands the debt forgiven or reneged upon sometime long before 2015. I think that's what's getting people more upset than that it happened in the first place. Or at least so it seems to me.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 4:58 AM on June 18, 2018 [11 favorites]

If anyone is interested in reading more deeply into some of the history, I can recommend Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood by Emilia Viotti da Costa. It's a clear, readable and accurately brutal look at the conditions of slavery in the British colony of Demerara, the 1823 slave rebellion and its repression.
posted by jb at 5:02 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I don't know who said it, but someone described Britain as Schroedinger's Empire: You can either admire it or know anything about it, but not both.
posted by whuppy at 5:03 AM on June 18, 2018 [55 favorites]

As this visualization shows, the Caribbean was the main destination of the slave trade......how can you fit so many slaves there? Because they did not live for long, under the brutal conditions. Based on what I have heard, I'd rather take my chances as a victim of almost any other human atrocity than be sent to those sugar plantations.
posted by thelonius at 5:07 AM on June 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

"Maybe it was a decent solution in 1835"

1835, with American mercenaries fighting one war to expand slavery and more than ready to do the same in the Carribean. Not just maybe. It got the job done, and it got the slave owners to walk off the stage instead of indulging in revenge schemes like in the US, foor 160 years (and counting.)

And if you wanted the bond refunded, how would you do it? Find the descendants of the slave owners and bill them? Demand that the Rothschild bank refund the bond?
posted by ocschwar at 5:11 AM on June 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

That's the convenient thing about the triangular trade, isn't it: trade goods out, profitable sugar and tobacco in, and the slavery happening so far out of sight everyone can just politely pretend they don't see it. And still don't. There's a reasonably okay understanding of the grim conditions of the British working classes during the industrial revolution, but the extra factor of slavery and its role in all that producing wealth is still far less known than it should be.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about slavery 'turning people into fuel', and that is precisely what we did: fuel to produce the tobacco and the sugar, fuel to build our grand merchant-city buildings, fuel to ratchet ourselves up as a great industrial power.

Here in Scotland, I don't think it's a coincidence that the great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment were generally not so great on challenging the practice of slavery. If you're a grand thinker in 18th century Scotland you exist in a world where Glasgow is the tobacco capital of Europe and where your wealthy patrons and employers are making money from the plantations, and you can't opt out of benefiting from that. We had a lot of the most educated, innovative and influential minds in Europe - and the furthest they got with tackling the moral issues of slavery was vague theoretical disapproval and an opposition to any radical social change that could actually have stopped it.

Great article. Thank you for posting.
posted by Catseye at 5:25 AM on June 18, 2018 [30 favorites]

And if you wanted the bond refunded, how would you do it? Find the descendants of the slave owners and bill them? Demand that the Rothschild bank refund the bond?

This isn't such a bad idea - especially if those payments were income-based. It seems far-fetched, but fortunes were made through slavery that continue to this day - and those families continue to benefit from property and wealth based on slave-labour. The money, of course, should not go back to the UK but to the descendents of those slaves.

But on a more macro-level, maybe we all owe, at least those of us with white British ancestry anytime from ~1700 forward. While some families made fortunes, the rest of us also benefitted: the influx of cash and cheap raw materials were essential to the economic growth of the industrial revolution. Looking around at the wealth of the first world, this all has its roots in colonialism and slavery.
posted by jb at 5:25 AM on June 18, 2018 [10 favorites]

I think it's the way the Treasury (and the 'mainstream' tellings/understandings of the affair) try to whitewash it as something other than what it was is the problem, really. The sunny "we bought freedom for everyone!" thing when that is quite the distortion of the truth. The happy ambiguity which just happens to read as reparations, not compensation for dispossessed slave owners, etc, etc. It's the way the narrative around it tries to erase any hint of grubbiness that is the issue. It's the failure of the government and government departments and institutions to admit that it wasn't a purely heroic effort on the part of Britain even today that is at issue. It's revisionist history.

A dirty deal that ends the ownership of human beings and replaces it with a lump some of undeserved money to a class of rentiers js such a clear cut of the end justifying the means.

If that is the case, then it should be no issue to speak plainly and truthfully about the matter. And yet, what we see is yet another rah-rah-Britain attempt to brush the dirty deal under the carpet, and pretend it was something other than what it was.
posted by Dysk at 5:29 AM on June 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

And yet, what we see is yet another rah-rah-Britain attempt to brush the dirty deal under the carpet, and pretend it was something other than what it was.

Not, I should clarify, by anybody here, but by the Treasury and the prevailing narrative in schools and the media.
posted by Dysk at 5:30 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

But on a more macro-level, maybe we all owe, at least those of us with white British ancestry anytime from ~1700 forward. While some families made fortunes, the rest of us also benefitted: the influx of cash and cheap raw materials were essential to the economic growth of the industrial revolution. Looking around at the wealth of the first world, this all has its roots in colonialism and slavery.

As a side note, this is worth remembering even for folks who suffered under the empire in other ways. Ireland endured centuries of Britain imperialism but Irish men and women were also instrumental in spreading and maintaining even the most brutal elements of that same imperialism. A lot of folks did benefit materially from it.

rhamphorhynchus's excellent link to the UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database is worth a look but it's also worth looking at Liam Hogan's map of that data to highlight absentee Caribbean landlords in Ireland who got the pay off. For all that it's a valuable historical source, it really is horrifically grubby.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 5:41 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

https://crimesofbritain.com is a solid collection of British foreign policy from Empire through the Troubles.
posted by anthill at 5:46 AM on June 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

Oy... what with this and the recent post on how the DWP treats disabled people, I'm wondering if I can find an alternative citizenship...

*sigh*
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 5:49 AM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also that treadmill punishment the "freed" (after a fashion) slaves were subject to is familiar to me. Britain also employed it here in my home city as a punishment for convicts. It wasn't deemed appropriate to flog female convicts, but they'd treadmill torture them. Euck.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 6:11 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I went to a Scottish private school, where the "founding story" was about a local lad made good, who made a tonne of money in trade and then came back to his village and paid for a school to be built, free to attend for all the local children (that's long gone by the wayside, of course, not even a discount).

They don't mention much that all this money was actually made in the slave trade.
posted by stillnocturnal at 6:32 AM on June 18, 2018 [15 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted. Just as a quick reminder, it would be good not to turn this into a US-centric discussion. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:43 AM on June 18, 2018 [13 favorites]

Certainly if we were given the choice in the US--that we could somehow pay higher taxes now for a timeline were a deal had freed the slaves in 1840, without the civil war--I would be arguing we should take.

The article is about way more than that, and my disagreement is limited to the initial framing. Slavery was brutal and Caribbean slavery managed to be worse than the norm, and still I learn I didn't realize how bad it was. I had no idea about the apprentice thing for example.

Maybe it was a decent solution in 1835, but I think decency demands the debt forgiven or reneged upon sometime long before 2015.

This makes no sense to me. It was a debt, not a stipend to slave owners or their heirs. The government deciding not to pay it would be basically be letting itself off the hook.
posted by mark k at 7:11 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Maybe they could have offered a tax credit to the descendants of slaves?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:13 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm comfortable with the goverment letting workers off the hook for paying debts related to reparations for slave-owners. Either the relevant bank can cop the loss, or someone can look into charging those who are still living off the profits of their slavery a couple of centuries on. I'm not fussed. I'm not here to look after banker's profit margins.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:22 AM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

The government may not have been able to stop paying, but those being paid sure as hell should have turned round and said "hey, never mind, it would be blatantly immoral for us to accept this money" or at least passed the money on in true reparations.
posted by stillnocturnal at 7:23 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm comfortable with the goverment letting workers off the hook for paying debts related to reparations for slave-owners.

Or better still, redirecting those payments to a reparations fund for slaves and their descendents. It shouldn't be about saving the expense.
posted by Dysk at 7:24 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Well-written and informative, I would add that the slave trade was still very profitable at the time Britain discontinued it.

The arguments that Great Britain ended slavery in its empire because it was not economical are based on the virtual (but not actual) slavery of the early industrial revolution and the fact that industry rather than agriculture was become the new way to fortune (also in the northern states of America). That was true, but the back-breaking labor of slavery in the colonies was still generating fortunes.

When slavery ended you could not pay laborers to take the place of slaves: sugar-cane raising was practically a death sentence. (I've read the average cane-field slave lived five years, but I read that number a long time back, so I won't vouch for my memory.)

Freeing slaves was actually an anti-capitalist act of goodness even if it came with such repulsive actions as reimbursing the slaveholders.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:31 AM on June 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

Thanks for posting, great article (great feels the wrong word, but you know what I mean).

I wish that the UK government would, along with pursuing avenues to make reparations, do more work to educate people on the ongoing effects of slavery and the ripples of impact it has had down the generations. I feel that there is this gaping divide in many people's minds: yes I understand that slavery was bad and wrong and happened a long time ago; no I do not see how that affects me and other people in this country today.
posted by greenish at 7:41 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

I went to a Scottish private school, where the "founding story" was about a local lad made good...

We Scots must face up to our slave trading past (2015), by Kevin McKenna: When abolition did come, we spent the next 40 or so years arranging extravagant compensation for the slave drivers who had lost their livelihood. There are a significant number of families in Scotland today whose continuing opulence and influence was built on their family’s administration of pure evil.

The slave trade made Scotland rich. Now we must pay our blood-soaked debts (2017), by Stephen McLaren. When you consider that in 1948, all Jamaicans, and 800 million fellow citizens of the British empire, were entitled to migrate to Britain, and nowadays just obtaining a tourist visa to visit is a stretch, it shouldn’t surprise us that the reparations issue is now being pursued more forcefully. Clear connections to be made here to the recent Windrush scandal.
posted by rory at 7:53 AM on June 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

Yeah, that McKenna article was really underlined for me by searching for my own surname in the UCL database. Chilling.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 8:18 AM on June 18, 2018

I think decency demands the debt forgiven or reneged upon sometime long before 2015

I feel like some people here are maybe not clear on the mechanism involved? The slave-owners were "compensated" (blergh) a century and a half ago. The ongoing payments are to pay off the people (and their successors, obviously) who put up the cash to do so in the first place. Putting aside the collateral damage caused by reneging on any bond, which is not trivial, the people who would be hurt in this situation aren't the people who benefited from slavery in the first place (except in the diffuse sense that everyone did, of course).

I think it's excellent that reparations are returning to the discussion in the UK, though. I think one can argue that "compensation" was the most expedient route to emancipation in the early nineteenth century (while I have done some reading on this, I'm not sure I know enough to pronounce confidently on the subject) while recognizing and correcting the horrible irony entailed here in the twenty-first.
posted by praemunire at 9:30 AM on June 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

Oh no I'm aware that the repayments were funded by a loan from a private entity. I'm just wholly disrespectful of said private entity's right to reclaim that debt. If you can afford to loan the government 15-20 (unclear?) million pounds in 1835, you stole that money from workers anyway.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 9:41 AM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm just wholly disrespectful of said private entity's right to reclaim that debt.

Perhaps, then, you might not be fully aware of how much of the government's operations, overall, are debt-financed, and the general implications of a sovereign government's defaulting on a bond.

Also, from a more equitable, less pragmatic point of view, I get that you want to punish somebody for this, but punishing the people who ultimately put up the cash seems...fairly random. The Rothschilds underwrote the bond, I'm sure many people who bought a piece from them were rich, but so were a lot of other people at the time. Every white person in the UK benefited directly or indirectly from slavery. Why them in particular? Because they provided the funds to make the government's emancipation policy possible?
posted by praemunire at 10:21 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

When slavery ended you could not pay laborers to take the place of slaves: sugar-cane raising was practically a death sentence.

Ex-slaveholders could and did pay laborers to take the place of the people they had recently been brutally enslaving. It was a whole thing. They just preferred importing masses of desperate people being squeezed by British colonialism on the other side of the world to developing any kind of reasonable business relationship with ex-slaves who knew what canefield work was like and what it was worth, and who were finally free to walk away.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 10:36 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

If you're worried about the general implications of a sovereign government defaulting on a bond, I suggest you don't look at the rest of what I'd put on the agenda for solving racism & other issues, because it's going to involve an awful lot of reparations and somewhat reprisally actions against the wealthy, who are disproportionately white. That said, disproportionately implies that there is some good ratio of extreme wealth by race. That's not something I'm keen on keeping in any sense.
Defaulted bonds are only a concern if you're keeping the capitalist economic system. In some sense, good for them that they put up the funds in 1835. I think that should have been rendered irrelevant in 1848. Any year past then that we give a half-ounce of consideration to capitalists is a year of bad politics.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:36 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Because they provided the funds to make the government's emancipation policy possible?

Sorry if this is in TFA, but one reason you'd overlook the ill-gotten funds used to finance this policy change is if it incentivizes future behavior in a similar way. Were there other examples of this?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:37 AM on June 18, 2018

Haiti was forced to pay devasting reparations to French slaveowners, after winning their own revolution. The rest of the white powers backed France, even though they were at war.
posted by jb at 10:46 AM on June 18, 2018 [10 favorites]

> Or better still, redirecting those payments to a reparations fund for slaves and their descendents. It shouldn't be about saving the expense.

...and if they don't want to get into the messy details of determining which individuals should be eligible for reparations, they could have just paid reparations to the relevant Caribbean countries.

Lots of avenues for Britain to make this less-wrong. Ugh.
posted by desuetude at 12:10 PM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm currently part-way through reading (and highly reccomend) Inglorious Empire, about the British in India. When he mentions possible reparations to India by Britain, his analogy is with the actions of Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. That action was massively symbolic of a Germany that was taking responsibility for its past, a way of saying 'never again' - and a symbolic gesture of apology by someone who had actively resisted the Nazis, who could genuinely say that those actions of his country had nothing to do with him, but he chose not to, and instead chose to take that responsibility. It's a really powerful statement of 'never again' - and it's a statement that Britain (and I say this as a British person) has never made. There has never been that symbolic apology, an owning up to the terrible wrongs of the past; instead we get a neverending nostalgia for Empire, where we brought railways and were never beastly but were always decent - which the narrative of "aren't we wonderful for abolishing slavery" feeds into. That version of history is the one I was taught in school, right up to A-Level, with omissions and elisions of the truth that in retrospect are genuinely shocking. Perhaps as is discussed above, the logistics around dealing with this debt taken on in the early 19th century would have meant that in practical terms it would have been difficult to 'end' it before 2015. But there was no attempt, (perhaps debts could have been shuffled so technically at least it was no longer on the books), no acknowledgement at all.

I don't know if you can put a value on the lives destroyed by the slave trade, the resources extracted from the Empire by the British, the economic and political trajectories stifled by Britain's Empire. But we haven't even reached a point in the UK where those things are acknowledged to have value.
posted by Vortisaur at 1:11 PM on June 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Haiti was forced to pay devasting reparations to French slaveowners, after winning their own revolution. The rest of the white powers backed France, even though they were at war.

The reason so much of Haiti is a desert moonscape is the Haitians overfarmed their land to grow the sugar cane to pay that bond, and the reason they did that, knowing what it would cause them, was that every time they fell behind on their bond, they got invaded, including by the US.

The British emancipation bond, meanwhile, was collected from the better part of the British people, to pay off the lesser part, numerically and morally, since this was non-slaveholding Brits bribing slave-holding Brits to stop holding slaves.
posted by ocschwar at 9:19 PM on June 19, 2018