Slavery – Observations and Misunderstandings

There is a common theme running through our historical education at school. It is usually the simple narrative that supports our national identity and message; that we as a country haven’t really done much wrong. We learn about the two World Wars from the British perspective, the industrial revolution, The Soviet Union and never in a favourable way and sometimes the Napoleonic Wars but are taught about it and him from a very different angle than the French are. Which means every country does it and that is why this isn’t a piece bashing the UK and suggesting we’re wrong in a world of right. There is currently much discussion about Churchill or the philanthropic slave trader Edward Colston and we as a populace are being forced to explore their roles in our national identity with a different set of eyes. This can only be a good thing because to describe someone such as Churchill as the greatest Briton of all time must only ever sugar coat the actions he took that led to people suffering. Equally not everything he did was bad so it’s important to examine him and his legacy from all angles and in a fair way. We live in an age of trial by social media but once the furore dies down I suspect their will be a few historic individuals with slightly different identities than before.

We are re-addressing our own history then and as long as that’s not with corrupted intentions it can only ever be a good thing. It is important to realise though that we are doing so with our modern take on morality and while it doesn’t absolve people of their wrongs it is still important to take into consideration the times in which they lived. That doesn’t entirely excuse them of course because there are plenty of examples of people in their time expressing beliefs more attuned to our contemporary ideals. Slave traders can not be excused when there are so many examples of people trying to eradicate the practice at the time for example. It can be used by apologists as an excuse but it is important to remember that we are viewing a different time when trying to understand previous takes on racism, sexism and power.

Which begs the question of whether we need to take into consideration how future generations may view us now. Will they understand our actions on race, sex, religion or economic productivity and think us simply abhorrent. On the other hand will they view all religion as abhorrent. I have called people fascists in the past in a derogatory way but had historical events turned out differently that word would have a different meaning. Ultimately we have no idea how our societies and our moralities will evolve and how we will be viewed in the future but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it into consideration. Our behaviour in combating climate change is one such example. If we carry on like this I suspect it’ll be pretty clear how we’ll be viewed. It could be argued this will tie in with whether we manage to overcome neoliberal capitalism and what kind of society we manage to create in the next fifty years. It is easy to criticise people from the past and sometimes rightly so but it’s important now in understanding our own actions that one day we too will be someones past.

Let’s be honest you’ll struggle to find many complaints from me about the toppling of a statue in honour of a slave trader in Bristol or the latest vandalism of a statue in honour of Winston Churchill, the aptly entitled ‘complex character’. I was chatting with someone today who seemed to agree with me on those points but who also mentioned that war memorials had been vandalised and that she disagreed with attacks on these as they honour people who fought for our freedom. This exhaustively well worn and manipulative word makes me cringe but I can understand why she felt it unnecessary. To understand why people may damage memorials then we must look beyond the obvious surface rational for these protests.

Clearly black lives do in fact matter and the police are responsible for excessive violence. This violence which comes in many forms only serves to exacerbate a systemic racist imbalance within society. This alone is worth rioting over. It’s abhorrent and urgent change has never not been required. The issue of how we are in this situation though relates to our imperial past as a nation. While the Americans may have been conquering the world for the last eighty years, Britain got there long before those upstarts from over the pond even existed. The statue in Bristol celebrated a slave trader who operated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Britain used slavery in the same way modern corporations and their national protectors use Asian sweatshops and cheap African labour in mines. These modern corporate empires are built on the back of the economic descendants who died on the sugar plantations. They also mined the lithium for the battery in this laptop I’m writing on which mustn’t be overlooked even if I inevitably will with any tangible actions beyond sentiment. While war memorials honour those who fought Nazi tyranny or were massacred in the trenches of Verdun, they are also emblems of an imperial past, one which relied upon the extortion of other nations and played upon the notion of a supreme race of white Britons. While they may represent your Grandfathers, as they do for me in many ways, for others they’re nothing more than a constant reminder of the injustice inflicted upon their ancestors which is still being felt in communities across the country and the world today.

There will be narratives pushed on these issues, the Conservative MP’s making an embarrassing self serving show of scrubbing the graffiti from Churchill’s statue doing just that. This concept of freedom means nothing if it doesn’t apply to all, people need more than sentiments. Once you believe, even unconsciously, that there are a deserving free and an undeserving then you’ve already lost the argument. I’ll leave you then with the quote made by the previously mentioned ‘complex character’ in 1937 to the Palestine Royal Commission;

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may lain there for a long time…I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Tag: Slavery

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