Dont even get me started on the Moors, Arabs and Ottomans, As for getting rich many African tribes kept slaves and their societies did not get rich. So he calls himself a Geordie. Then the adult men became profitable too. If we went down this route thered be goodness knows how much fun and games to be had with legal claims over the treatment of Irish by Cromwell, the clearing of the Highlands and so on, before you even get on to the globe-spanning imperial stuff. Not to say it was nice.. He talks about slavery because YOU care. As a nation, we still have only a dim understanding of the slave system that funded Sloanes collecting. West Indians fought with the Allies more than a hundred were decorated. Now Im trying to imagine just what the strongest case for reparations might be, but even in this thought experiment its hard to see what the eligibility criteria for receiving payment should be, what sum should be due, how much proof is required of eligibility not everyone will have a good set of family records etc. I could just as well feel something else entirely, and Im sceptical of all approaches to impose a supposedly universal, timeless or even just coherent, thats a challenge in itself ethical system. No? The following decades were taken up with popular and political rhetoric about immigration and parliamentary acts to limit blacks coming to Britain. It doesnt end with the parties saying Well that was pleasantly intellectually stimulating, now lets have a nice game of cricket Youre opponents are not playing by the same rules as you are. I agree BIS. A covering letter would be a courtesy but probably not a necessity. His exposure to Nigerian culture seems quite limited. Should black history be taught all year round? He was born in Nigeria but arrived in the . I havent said anything about my personal sense of guilt or responsibility. People seem pretty much agreed on what is right and what is wrong. Black and British: A Forgotten History Viking Dublin was a major slave-trading centre (English, Irish, Scots, anyone else they could get their hands on). Away from the creative arts, the Equiano Project aims to promote race equality and he was mentioned in Parliament during a debate on Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum. I think a case could be made. Sugar plantations were bad. Just how much should Olusoga receive? Davids all done. But morals are very transient things. This history of the black presence in . Pretty much everybody in the West is against slavery. The New Statesmans weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. Which of those societies does Olusogas ancestry come from? If the alternative was that they were killed? Although the bottom line is that no Black person remembers slavery. They included Josiah Wedgwood (the pottery entrepreneur), Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. Olusoga, who is half-Nigerian, traces this focus to his mother telling him when he was a child that Nigerian soldiers served in World War II. But werent they lucky compared to the other Germans in Stalingrad? He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. He was Chairman of Moneysupermarket Group from 2014 to 2019 and Senior Independent Director of Close Brothers Group plc from 2006 to 2014 and is a Past President of the Chartered Management Institute. We do not know enough to be sure. There is the Push argument and the Pull argument. TV historian David Olusoga claims it is "palpable nonsense" to say that removing controversial statues "somehow impoverishes history". Watching @worstall execute @richardjmurphy is like watching a very, very clever cat slowly killing at ataxic mouse. Surely the US has already spent much more than that on black Americans. Peter Olusoga. Various among the societies that were agglomerated into Nigeria were more or less involved in that slave trade from the supply end. Its extraordinary success rested upon the foundation of sympathy laid down during the previous 70 years of abolitionist activity in Britain. There is an alternative argument that it is their ancestors who were wronged hence deserve compensation and as descendants theyre entitled to an inherited share (so their portion depends on how many slaves at what position in the family tree) plus interest, regardless of how well theyre doing now. Their demands should simply be refused. The book accompanying. The strongest case I can see against reparations is not fundamentally a legal one but perhaps one degree abstracted the law if we can litigate that, we can litigate a heck of a lot of stuff from centuries past, tie our legal systems up in knots with no obvious limits in sight. is that the extra demand distorted the market, led directly to more armed slave-raiding expeditions against rival tribes and so on.. Women such as Elizabeth Heyrick continued to lobby for the abolition of slavery. If more African-Americans started to vote Republican and the Democrats felt they needed something radical to boost their offer, and had enough support from liberal whites and other groups to risk further losses among blue-collar whites, for example. What do you think their stongest argument is? That star stuff wont last. Note, hes a renowned economist. As for the future, the University of Manchester professor says younger generations give him hope. "I have," he admits, "a habit of . Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The UK, Norway, Benelux, Spain, Malta and Switzerland are, I believe, the only western European countries to set it at 16. You dont have esoteric discussions with paedophiles any more than you would with serial killers. Then a young teenager, he was driven out of his council home, together with his grandmother, mother, two sisters and younger brother, by a sustained campaign of nightly stoning of their windows. Needless to say they should pay us reparations for this too. This is nothing to do with slavery or as with black lives matter, blacks being shot, and everything to do with a shakedown of the white man. This year, return to Neverland. It built slave forts on the African coast, some such as Bunce Island in Sierra Leone furnished with a rape house. Like I said before, tolerance is in the gift of the powerful. Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade is part of the national curriculum, although it is not statutory. He is the author of the 2016 book Black and British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award 2017 and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2017. And so, equipped with the fruits of Islamic learning (new navigational instruments, books on astronomy and trigonometry), European explorers set sail for Africa to relieve the natives of their gold. You may concede a point here, a point there. Oh man. Anybody can do this. And he might not find the society withdraws it nearly as comfortable for him to live in. But Ill tell you what, slavery and human sacrifice, still awful. In the 15th and 16th centuries, thousands of pounds of gold were shipped to Europe. It happened. In the case of slavery the answer is clear. He has discovered new and exciting research materials in African archives, among them the Register of Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, which list names, bodily details, ethnicity and origins, thus putting a human face on people otherwise treated as fodder and statistics. My family did nothing. Had a vault for the more inflammatory pieces. Id say this to Mr Olusoga. By this logic, we ought to sue the African American community. The German survivors of Stalingrad were sent to camps and most of them worked to death. Not good. Not a big fan of the odd human sacrifice Im afraid, even though I might just be of very partial Scandinavian descent myself. I generally reckon cant blame me, my distant relative was on your side arguments are pretty weak since relying on a doctrine of virtues of the fathers risks implicitly accepting sins of the fathers. MyBurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:31 pm Deliberately shipping that many people that far in order to participate in a newly-created society whose economic system was designed, pretty much from the ground up, around slave labour?, True that unlike certain other examples of slavery, you werent likely to be killed as part of a religious sacrifice or as part of your owners funeral., But there have been other societies with slavery where slaves had more autonomy and a greater chance of buying their freedom.. What has Nigeria ever done for him? Both of these need proof. But its still awful, even on a historical scale.. As it happens, I dont believe in sins of the fathers passing down the generations. I have done nothing. If there were African states with legal continuity to those political entities which established and encouraged the African slave markets, they would be on the hook too, but theres a discontinuity due to colonialism and besides, everyone knows to sue the rich guy not the poor guy. Guess wed have to print it. Definitely didnt die out with the Romans. What has he got to say about that? Might, in this case, being 100% of the debating point. Rapidly promoted to sergeant, then second lieutenant, he led white British troops into action and died in 1918, having been mentioned in despatches and recommended for the Military Cross. No one has said we should not consider someone elses viewpoint. Presumably there were normal times when food was cheap that you fed your workers and didnt seek to replace them in the way Olusoga means. Over 1000 years in Britain. Olusoga patterns his narrative after Fryers, starting with the North African presence in Roman Britain. 5 quotes from David Olusoga: 'On a peninsula protruding into one of the great highways of the Atlantic slave trade, a few hundred refugees from British slavery in North America were attempting to recreate the social structures of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages.', 'Time and again events and phenomena that we think we know and understand contain within them lost or camouflaged connections to . Although I would expect the Germans, and perhaps even the Japanese, to be happy they lost the war. "The phenomena of which he is iconic is one that we have written out, edited out of our nation. Roman writers such as Pliny who chronicled or rather fabricated African life shaped perceptions of a continent populated by anthropophagi and other fantastic creatures, half-human, half-animal. The historian tells Michael Segalov about getting up early, reading George Orwell, taking his dog George for a walk, playing his guitar Its very noticable how nobodys mentioning that the Spanish Empire were doing this for several centuries before the British got involved. So how much have considered paedophilia? Rather that certain western states, still in existence therefore potentially still liable, regulated and indeed encouraged the development of both the transatlantic slave trade and the slave-labour economic systems of the colonies, at scales that were unusual in the long and varied history of slavery, and levels of brutality that stood out too. That was at the least unusual, particularly from a West European perspective bearing in mind the practice of slavery had pretty much fizzled out there. And, of course, being half white, he is only entitled to half the reparation payment. Two men managed to escape and were rescued, but not before my great, great, grandfather was beaten, starved and worked to death, his body thrown into the jungle for the animals and insects to dispose of. Abolition was the first mass philanthropic movement in Britain, and it ended the slave trade in 1807. Hey, we do not even have to go that far. And the Domesday Book even counts slaves as a separate category below the unfree peasants (villans, bordars and cottars) those owed service to a Lord who could order them to move about and could say yes or no to their proposed marriages, but unlike slaves he didnt own them, couldnt sell them, and they had property rights to at least a smallholding. He is the undisputed King of the Internet Pedants and Lord of the Unnecessary Snark. Theres no point pretending Europeans who profited from either the transatlantic slave trade or the use of slave labour in the Americas were somehow doing a favour to the slaves involved. In 1860, cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports. Again, not that these market forces absolve the sellers of a moral responsibility, but there is an argument occasionally deployed that slaves would have been slaves anyway. Duke University professor, William Darity Jr, and writer, Kirsten Mullen, jointly published a report for The Roosevelt Institute, an American liberal think tank, laying out a case for slavery reparations. I have that estimate saved and ready to be critiqued as part of a larger project. In the end, wholl be proven right about the matter practically, in terms of what the outcome is and what the first drafts of history say? It isnt happening now. I assume he is not very bright and Race Hustling is very lucrative. It was, I believe, the first book I ever bought for myself with my own money. Certainly they killed them casually often for religious reasons. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, details how he was sold into slavery aged 11, his experience of travelling the world as slave to a Royal Navy officer - who renamed him Gustavus Vassa - and how he bought his freedom from his final master, an English merchant in Montserrat. It's possibly a deeper change than some people realise because I don't think what we're living through is a series of political events; I think we're living through a generational shift," he says. They arent going to concede anything. (Im just presenting the case here in reality there are obviously some big questions about the logic of Nuremberg etc, just as there are questions about how judges in Common Law occasionally summon up things as if they had always and forever been a part of the Law, albeit previously unrecorded, rather than something the judge just made up.). His current research focuses on stress, burnout, and wellbeing in sports, with a particular interest in high-performance environments and elite coaching. My first reaction, years and years ago, was thats awful. "Incorporating the stories of people like Equiano is merely part of a process of looking at all of British history; not just being selective, not only going to the chapters that make us feel good about ourselves or proud.". Pretty much everybody in the West is against slavery. Dr Peter Olusoga is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology. Separated from home and family and landed in the West Indies (countless numbers dying of suffocation during the journey, given that the people traffickers were packing the holds to maximise profits), the Africans had no recourse to the law, much less the conscience of their captors. Long after slavery ended in the British colonies, British people continued to lobby the American government to free their slaves. John Mandeville, whose travelogue (circa 1356) was one of the most widely translated books of the later Middle Ages, presented Africans as naked savages living amid heaps of gold to which they gave no value. From Roots. and while the responsible state still exists, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant.. Mans a loon. Maybe someone should advise him to button his lip before he stirs up something he may not like. I learned the hard way. The government has said the "flexibility within the history curriculum means that there is the opportunity for teachers to teach about BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) history across a spectrum of themes and eras" so it did "not believe it was necessary to change the curriculum". Anyway, I digress, we did have at some point, a gang of pedos turn up and put their case, reasonably, and were tolerated and conversed with. Theres a flaw in arguments of the form frankly you should be glad I murdered your sister, since had I not done so, its quite possible though we cannot be sure that someone else would have tortured her then murdered her, which is even worse, so whos the real criminal? Which is that I still murdered your sister. Its a shame June 16, 2020 - 20:29 BST Aisha Nozari. Good point, I wonder how he squares the obviously comfortable living he has writing, opining and broadcasting about slavery with his principles. I was uncomfortable using it. That was a bad experience but he should know that you cannot judge a whole country by what happened when he was young. In the UK its not white people enslaving blacks anymore, but Asians enslaving other Asians, as in Leicesters clothing sweatshops. But you need a different approach if you dont think great-grandkids of the Confederacy are still fair game.) One in which enslaved people suffered and even died from malnutrition, as the economics of the slave trade meant that it was cheaper, at times, to starve people and then replace them than it was to provide them with food. The many African-American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, who visited Britain from the 1840s onwards, were well received and, again, thousands of people greeted them and raised money to support their cause. Macmillan, 624pp, 25, David Dabydeen is a novelist, broadcaster, academic and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford University Press), This article appears in the 16 Aug 2017 issue of the New Statesman, Trump goes nuclear, Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics. But that ignores how the demand of outsiders led inevitably to far more supply being provided. You might have heard of a Romano-British chap called Patrick, got enslaved and nabbed to Ireland? Youre right, MBE. They did not pay for them and were going to kill a lot of them anyway. Once insignificant villages, great cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow sprang up on the profits of slavery. As Black British History Month draws to a close, TV historian Prof David Olusoga looks at the impact it's had - and how young people are taking it on. MBE, do not entertain these people, not for one second. Different people can argue the toss from different viewpoints and perspectives but in many ways their arguments pass each other like ships in the night, because they havent all got nobodys got an absolute frame of reference to judge things with respect to. I am not so sure about that although it is another argument. It does not take people long to starve to death and slaves were paid for. 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