Why everything you know about the British Empire and slavery is wrong

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are visiting Australia this week, living symbols of the British Empire past and present. After he addressed federal Parliament on Monday, Senator Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal activist, began shouting, reproaching the King for the disastrous effects of colonialism. “This is not your country … You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist,” she shouted. “This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king.”

The embarrassing incident made headlines around the world. Some Aboriginal leaders said that the Senator had been rude; others agreed with her. In any case, her moment of fame is a good chance to examine the legacy of the British Empire

Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2021) is a much needed corrective to the lies and misinformation being taught in schools. For instance, after nearly 150 years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, the British abolished the slave trade and spent the next 150 years deploying the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade across the world.

Not only was this the first time a major superpower abolished the ancient practice of slavery, but it was also the first instance of an empire suppressing it beyond its borders.

Up to 36 ships from the Royal Navy, over 13 percent of the Empire’s total manpower, were stationed off the Coast of Africa, policing the Atlantic Ocean until the late 1800s. Britain was able to pressure countries like Brazil in passing legislation which outlawed the slave trade. Before his death in 1865, the twice prime minister Lord Palmerston wrote that “the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade”. Ultimately, 2,000 British sailors gave their life to stop the international slave trade.

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But what most people have never been taught though, is that the anti-slavery movement actually began much earlier than 1833. In fact, in 1791, about 30 percent of the adult male population of Britain signed anti-slavery petitions. Few people realise today that the largest department of the British Empire’s Foreign Office for two decades was the Slave Trade Department, which was set up to suppress slavery worldwide. (The East India Trading Company abolished it in 1843.)

It is also a little-known that, according to historian David Eltis, it cost the British Empire more money to end the slave trade than it received in profits from it. It cost taxpayers nearly two billion pounds every year for half a century. To put that in context, the British today spends two percent of their GDP on national defence. In comparison the British Empire nearly 2 percent of its GDP every year for 50 years just to end the slave trade. In fact, British taxpayers only finished paying off the debt of ending slavery in 2015.

However, despite these astonishing facts about the British Empire, recent You Gov polling found that 60 percent of Britons who were proud of the British Empire in 2014, had drastically halved to almost 30 percent by 2020. Other polling has also shown that only one in five young people view Winston Churchill favourably.

Today, colonialism is routinely called essentially evil, genocidal, greedy, and racist. These attitudes have generated a wave of riots tearing down statues and rejecting anything that has been a product of European colonialism.

So how did attitudes about the British Empire change so quickly? Is the legacy of the British Empire good or bad? Was it built on slavery or cooperation? Did it expand through violence or trade? And was the British Empire essentially racist?

These are the questions at the heart of Cambridge academic Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Here are some of his most important insights.

Why was there a British Empire?

Before asking whether the British Empire was evil, we first need to consider how a small European island at its peak controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass.

Why did England choose to expand? There was no single driver. For example, the British Empire began expanding when the Kingdom of Wessex sought to secure its borders in response to Danish and Welsh invasions. Even the conquest of North America was driven by the threat of Catholic Spain, which was committed to overthrowing Protestant Europe.

Additionally, British privateers established colonial ports at key strategic locations in Africa and America in response to Spanish competition.  Many young British officers of the East Indian Trading Company, they were driven by the intention to trade and the excitement of adventure. Sir John Malcolm, for instance, joined the EIC to escap poverty after his father had gone bankrupt. Malcolm ended up learning and documenting the Persian language and history, and eventually became the governor of Bombay.

British colonialism often began with the support of the local population. For example, the EIC secured trading ports in India, and after hiring and training Indian troops, it developed small colonies. Many Indian rulers paid the British military to protect their kingdoms against other native rulers, who began giving land to the British as payment. As Tirthankar Roy, one of the leading Indian historians of the 21st century states in his book Economic History of India, 1707–1857:

“Turning the emergence of the empire into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state. The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’. The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to.”

Interestingly, the British were keener about documenting the culture and languages Persian, Hindu and Bengali people than the locals. EIC officer Warren Hastings pioneered the revival of Sanskrit.

Money and knowledge were not the only motivation for colonies, It was also agreed by officers like John Malcolm and James Abbott, that to leave India would be dangerous, because it would cause a power struggle between warring states.

What about Africa? Again, the British were motivated not just by one goal, but by many.

First, Britain wanted to stop the spread of militant Islam to protect trade with Uganda and Nyasaland.

Second, Britain wanted to end intertribal warfare between kingdoms like the Zulu and Ndebele, which was a cause of human misery, slave trafficking and trade disruptions.

Third, as Lord Salisbury argued in the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement Bill, acquisition of land would stop the escalation of European nations going to war over local conflicts.

Fourth, in places like Egypt, Britain was duty-bound to protect investments in the Egyptian government which was on the verge of bankruptcy. London’s aims in Cairo were not to govern directly, but to enact fiscal reform to benefit both countries. This, at least, was the view of the British comptroller general in Egypt, Lord Cromer. In fact, the colonial office did not want to directly govern Egypt because of the financial responsibility and burden of administration.

Fifth, as early as Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1819-27, Britain saw its role in many of its colonies as the precursor to self-government. After the American War of Independence, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa became self-governing dominions.

As Biggar points out, there was no single “set of motives that drove the British Empire”. It was a collection of reasons which differed between “trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesmen.” These ranged from,

“The aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government.”

But what about slavery? Wasn’t the British motivated by the benefits of buying, working and selling slaves?

The colonial slave trade

Slavery is ancient and universal and not unique to the British Empire.

In Asia, for instance, slavery could be found as early as 7th century AD in China. In North and South America, the Comanche, Aztecs and Incas all ran slave economies. Since Muhammad, the Islamic world has utilised slavery, even receiving white European slaves from Viking traders in the 8th and 9th centuries.

The word “slave” comes from the “Slav”. One historian estimates over 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in the North African trade before the end of the 18th century. It is estimated that while Europeans transported 11 million slaves from Africa, 17 million were shipped by the Islamic slave trade. African tribes have been enslaving each other for centuries. Many of these slaves were even used as human sacrifices. Biggar quotes a 1797 report that between 1400-1500 people were sacrificed at a royal funeral in Asante Africa.

The British were not the first or the largest slave trader in Africa. The Portuguese began shipping slaves from West Africa in 1440. By 1866, the Portuguese had almost shipped 5.9 million slaves, which is 46.7 percent of the total African slave trade by Europeans, compared to the 26.1 percent of the British.

So why does the criticism for slavery often rest on Britain? The influential historian Eric Williams argued in 1944 that slavery made “an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development” in his important study Capitalism and Slavery.

Unfortunately for Williams, his thesis has since been widely discredited by academics familiar with British economic history. In the 1960s, Roger Anstey calculated the profits of slavery to be far below the revenue needed to finance the Industrial Revolution. This view was confirmed by David Robertson Richardson, who estimated the total profits of the slave trade to be around 1 percent of Britain’s total domestic investment around 1790. More recently, David Brion Davis, an expert in 20th-century slavery, pronounced the death of William’s thesis, declaring that it “has now been wholly discredited by other scholars.”

Was the land stolen?

What about countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where native tribes did not always negotiate formal treaties with the British government?

In 1768, Captain Cook was instructed to “endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with [the native peoples]” and “with [their] consent to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain”.

So why didn’t the British build alliances as it had done with local groups in India?

First, most of the local tribal groups had shifting borders due to conflict and migration. The Canadian historian Tom Flangan points out that it is hard to do justice:

“to the war of extermination waged by the Iroquois against the Huron, or to the ferocious struggles between the Cree and the Blackfoot over access to the buffalo herds. The historical record clearly shows that, while aboriginal peoples exercised a kind of collective control over territories, the boundaries were neither long-lasting nor well defined and communities must have been repeatedly formed, dissolved, and reconstituted with different identities.”

In America, the Comanches launched “an explosive expansion”, which obliterated “the Apache civilisation from the Great Plains and carved out a vast territory. From 1750 to 1850, their empire dominated the region, building “the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest”.

In Australia, the historian Geoffrey Blainey points out the rate of violent deaths in some areas between Aboriginal tribal groups was greater than the rate of violent deaths in almost every European country during World War II. There are several documented accounts of early Aboriginal tribes wiping out other tribes in what is now northern Victoria.

In New Zealand, Polynesian explorers began what has been called “the Maori colonial era”, which by the 15th century gave rise to intertribal warfare, enslavement, generational vendettas and sometimes cannibalism. As Biggar points out, “The bloodshed ended thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, which forbade cannibalism and slavery, and whose influence was spread by Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves.” According to a leading New Zealand historian,

“By 1850 the balance sheet of benefits and disadvantages of British administration might well have appeared favourable to many Maori. There appeared to be a place for Maori people in a variety of colonial activities. They profited from the increased pace of development as settlement expanded. Through government employment on road and other public works, as well as through private contracts, Maori earned considerable amounts in cash. The new authority in the land also gradually overcame some of the old tribal antagonisms and made it possible for tribes to mix and communicate more freely. Under [Governor George] Grey’s administration, some of the long-promised welfare benefits were provided: hospitals were opened and the Education Ordinance provided for Maori education.”

Admittedly, there were many instances of hostile conflict between natives and settlers, which were often one-sided, brutal and devastating for the local populations. Unfortunately, most of it happened outside of government control, which could not stop the individual expansion of enterprise. As Biggar writes,

“Sometimes native peoples lost territory to colonists because the latter mistook land that was unoccupied or uncultivated for land that was unowned. Sometimes the natives lost it because they were conquered by ungoverned settlers in war that easily flared up on lawless frontiers, where fear was abundant and trust rare. However, where British imperial authorities succeeded in asserting their ‘sovereignty’ over territory, native title to land was recognised and its transfer to settlers regulated – in principle and sometimes in practice – for the sake of justice and of peace.”

A dissenting view

Why are these accounts of the British Empire so rarely discussed? As Biggar points out, “The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.”

Some of the most important debates in today’s Australia, from changing the constitution to establishing a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people, and the international push for reparations, have been justified by a one-sided view of colonial history.

The anger towards the British Empire is so strong that Biggar’s book was pulled by Bloomsbury Publishing right before its release because “public feeling” was “not currently favourable”. The book had already gone through rigorous peer review from leading authorities. It was not cancelled because its research was inadequate, but out of fear of a backlash from anti-colonial activists.

Today, academic papers like “From Colonisation to the Holocaust”, “The Erotics of Resistance” and “Colonisations impact on climate change and the queer community” pass as serious research. The truth is, all of the most prosperous nations in the world are heirs of the British Empire, its institutions, laws, customs, and language.

If anyone wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going, we must have a better and more balanced understanding of our history, which includes the good, the bad, and everything in between. 


On balance, was the British Empire a force for good in 19th-century history? 


Mark Powell is the pastor at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Hobart. He and his wife have six children. 

Image credit: World War II poster / Imperial War Museums


 

 

 

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  • Peter Sammons
    commented 2024-10-30 01:49:36 +1100
    A good corrective article, so thank you!
    I think I’m correct in saying the British Empire never ‘invaded’ any country.
    The Romans did! But no one today seriously suggests that the Roman Empire did not bring rather more benefits than dis-benefits.
    Right or wrong, the era of empire/colonialization is now behind us. Ironically, former colonial powers are being collonised by economic migrants. Britain, at a rate of 700K a year net, and with one per cent of the population of UK now actually illegal (‘irregular’) migrants!
  • Tom Mullaly
    commented 2024-10-28 03:02:02 +1100
    “He felt the Africans were not ready for independence and that he had wasted his life trying to help them.”

    A brutally honest line that says it all, on so many levels, and reveals the utter futility of colonialism. One is left scratching one’s head wondering why the Africans would ever have sought independence, seeing as they were on the receiving end of so much benevolent ‘help’ from us Brits?

    “He felt” …. but … Who asked him, I wonder?

    We could waste all of time until Judgement Day on endless historical counter-factuals. One can highlight the situation in one former colony post-independence (e.g. Haiti) V the massive successes in others (Ireland, India). One is still left with the question of what might have happened had the ‘help’ never being forthcoming in the first place.

    It’s time for people in the Western world today to grow up and ‘own it’. Western colonialism (British or otherwise) began with exploration, but it became unmistakably a project first and foremost of pillage, designed to steal (yes, ‘steal’) the natural resources of other territories and peoples at different stages of economic and societal development. This is a situation that has gone on since the Neolithic revolution. As one society becomes more settled, better fed and its population grows, it begins menacing neighbouring territories in search of more booty. It’s human nature, original sin, avarice and envy, Cain and Abel. In the long-view the recent four centuries of Western European colonialism is fairly small beans; huge in scale and exceptionally agressive in nature it has to be said, but shockingly short-lived relative to many empires of the past. Moreover the greed of competing European powers led to the implosion of the whole of Europe itself in two civil wars (‘world wars’) characterised by apocalyptic violence and death – 60 million+ RIP. Sure, as their power grows and the stick they hold grows bigger, the ‘narrative’ of empire becomes more paternalistic: about, “lesser peoples” “God wills this”, " We are chosen", “A city upon a hill” etc, etc. None of that is remotely true – the black slaves were not the ‘children’ of their masters – no matter how many times you keep saying it to yourself. I have already tried to illustrate how the failure to challenge this narrative is now causing serious self-harm to Britain today. Don’t believe me? It’s all easily researchable online.

    If one really wants to save the good from Britain and British culture and its historical legacy as an empire, then a mature, objective, constructively critical approach is what’s now required more than ever. The British for example have left an admirable legacy of ‘common law’ to many parts of the globe. That’s certainly a good thing … even though Britain itself is currently chafing under the consequences of that, ironically enough – Antinomianism: the rules don’t apply to ‘the chosen’. However, British ‘help’ from before WWI up to the ongoing ‘help’ they’re still supplying to the Middle East has been prejudiced, heretical, short-sighted, selfish, ignorant and has led to the deaths of thousands upon of thousands of innocent people. It is the most ignominious ‘end’ of all the former Western European empires, and as a Brit I am profoundly ashamed it is happening in my name. Moreover, I think before this debacle is fully ‘played out’ over the coming years it is also going to have very negative conseqences for the US. I think also of future generations of Brits who will have to live with the legacy of all this. Far too high a price to pay to keep some ‘chaps’ with plum accents in the manner into which they have been accustomed, one would have thought?

    If you really admire Britain, you will help her come to terms with her past maturely, not engage in presentist rewritings of history to whitewash past crimes. It’s a pointless exercise anyway, as those crimes will never be forgotten by those they were perpetrated against and one can’t eat a flag.

    To think, this OP and the interesting discussion that ensued was provoked by a ‘bolshie’ native Australian woman who had the ‘neck’ to speak aloud in front of the king of England. How dare she? Who does she think she is? Who asked her?
  • mrscracker
    Thank you so much for sharing that Mr Rob. I have childhood memories also of former colonies and places that were once functioning and safe. Sadly, those locations are now some of the poorest and dangerous on the planet.
    I was shopping for groceries in the capital of a British territory earlier this year and chatted with the store manager. I told him that I had just visited a former British colony and was so saddened to see its crumbling infrastructure, crime, and poverty and shared that his British territory reminded me so much of happier times in the former colony.
    His reply was: "They went independent and we chose not to. "
  • Rob McKilliam
    commented 2024-10-27 16:14:41 +1100
    So we now have two competing narratives about the British Empire and its Colonialism. One side will highlight stories suggesting that the Empire was ‘bad’. The other side will highlight stories suggesting that the Empire was ‘good’.

    My parents worked for the British Colonial service in ‘Adult Education’. I grew up in the little townships of Aura and Gulu in Uganda in the early 1950’s. I remember wandering around the area with friends as a child and feeling completely safe. The local people were happy. I was brought up by an African nursemaid and Swahili was my first language.

    My Dad resigned shortly after independence in 1962 because of the inevitable corruption. He felt the Africans were not ready for independence and that he had wasted his life trying to help them. Idi Amin soon took over power and caused devastation.

    My wife is a 4th generation refugee from Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). It used to be known as ‘the breadbasket of Africa’. Then the white farmers were forcibly kicked off their land. There is now virtually no economy, the corruption is a joke and the people are not happy.

    Colonialism is past history and I am proud of it and the work my parents generation did. What is the point of dredging up all the negative stories and ignoring all the positive stories of colonialism? Is the intention to make our children feel bad about our Western culture? If so why?
  • David Page
    commented 2024-10-27 01:33:36 +1100
    The majority of black slave owners “owned” a wife or child whose freedom they bought. If they didbn’t, for some reason, fill out the manumission document that made a slave free. So claiming these people were owned by black “masters” is at least cute.
  • David Page
    commented 2024-10-26 08:22:34 +1100
    Mrs Cracker, did anyone own white slaves? You forgot to mention.
  • mrscracker
    Mrs. Susan, even in North America slavery wasn’t strictly based on skin colour. Free people of colour owned slaves as well. This was especially true in non-Anglo areas. Some Creole people of colour were very wealthy plantation owners with many slaves.
    I’m not quite sure what you mean about Britain’s reimbursing slaveholders & US plantation mortgages? British abolition in their colonies occurred after America seceded from British rule. And in the British West Indies slave holders of colour were reimbursed along with their “white” counterparts. Britain freed Black Loyalist slaves belonging to people like George Washington & evacuated them to freedom in Nova Scotia. Some of their descendants live there to this day.
  • Susan Rohrbach
    commented 2024-10-26 06:14:51 +1100
    Black transatlantic slavery and ancient slavery were literally like night and day because with black slavery the slave has been whole body branded by color very easy to return to the plantation when escaped. Also the Transatlantic made it impossible to escape and reunite with family.

    Consider also that Britain paid off its slaveholders on emancipation which arguably money was rolled back into buying up mortgages of US plantation slaveholders. So Britain wasn’t that virtuous in its emancipations.
  • Jürgen Siemer
    commented 2024-10-25 05:38:00 +1100
    On a business trip to Peru decades ago I asked a Peruvian how it was militarily possible that a few Spanish knights were able to conquer the Inka empire in Peru.

    His answer: there were many local tribes, who greeted the Spanish as liberators.

    It is also interesting to note that various local civil wars started after the Spanish rulers in these latin American countries had kicked out the Dominican and other catholic orders. The Catholic church and these orders in particular had done a lot for the Indians, and the Indians loved them and many Indians were happy to get baptized and become Catholics.

    But the local Spanish oligarchs did not like that, they wanted to have cheap labor including indian slaves. But the Catholic church fought against it.
  • David Page
    commented 2024-10-25 00:29:55 +1100
    I might point out here that Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1783; 5o years before England. And it was the industrial revolution that precipitated that event in England. Slavery was no longer economically viable. Slaves had to be fed and taken care of. Workers, however, could be allowed to starve in lean times. England had no problem, in the 1850’s, allowing the Irish to starve, while exporting food from Ireland.
  • mrscracker
    I have ancestry in the regions that you list Mr. Tom . I can’t speak for my ancestors but I’m quite proud of what Britain accomplished to end slavery. God bless all who worked towards that noble goal.
  • Tom Mullaly
    commented 2024-10-24 08:15:56 +1100
    @mrscracker I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific, so as to provide some real context.

    That the British empire officially ended slavery a few years earlier than the US is of course to be commended but this argument is a regularly-used polemical canard designed to brush aside any focus on the enormity of the crimes Britain perpetrated worldwide through its empire, nevermind that we are still grappling with the consequences of these to this day, see Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, the South China Sea, Yemen, etc., etc. for further details. I don’t deny that there are indeed good things about Britain and British history and culture relative to other places, but this is why a ‘warts-and-all’, objective history is so desperately required in Britain first, and its former colonies. I grew up, was educated in and live in Britain. In British schools to this day children are taught very little about the empire and of that, it is all ‘glorious’ – something which is additionally ‘laid on’ daily with a trowel by a compliant media, much of which is owned by a particular Australian gentleman – so the premise of this OP, that a new ‘narrative’ is required to counteract some great wave of negative anti-British propaganda is risible. As I said one of the greatest mistakes made by my country in recent years has been (partially) the result of years of unquestioned adulation of empire, Churchill, annual war ‘memorials’, poppies, poppies, everywhere, and everyone must comply. It is no longer funny. Our country is now isolated, its poor continue to get much poorer, the ‘older’ Britons (like I) have denied their own young people simple things that are a formality to other young people in Europe in terms of travel, education and opportunity. Instead of helping a steady integration of British natives with immigrants from former colonies, the whole palava has massively stalled and embittered community relations. Our economy is losing £40 billion annually since we left the common market. We damaged relations with all our closest neighbours – in an extremely ugly manner by the way – and caused a division in European unity, which others (i.e. Russia) are now busy exploiting. Sure, we still have some nuclear missiles, but the US owns them all now, so we are de facto now the US’s lapdog in every global ‘intervention’ with no way out. But its all good, because one can always eat a flag. Much like the modus operandi of the empire itself, this is all about a very small number of people in Britain and their families retaining enormous wealth, and to hell with everyone else. Anybody still defending this needs to give their head a wobble. Either that or try to read history objectively. Wallowing in myths of supposed past glories helps no-one today.

    Frankly, the claim in this OP that the Indian’s ‘invited’ the British in to ‘help’ them is not only historically untrue, its actually profoundly offensive to any Indian who might be reading this. There were no ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ in Mughal India in the 18th century. The British went in to India to oberthrow a market already established by the Portugese and French, and in less than two centuries made one of the world’s wealthiest regions into the poorest. The English were ‘lucky’ essentially. In the 16th century they had a booming population, they were excellent sailors and good traders, and most of Europe was then ‘distracted’ by the power of Spain and France. Like any colonists they of course spotted divisions within the territories they coveted and exploited those divisions for their own ends – divida et imperia. Nor is this a ‘cultural’ or ‘racial’ issue. Ask my ancestors in Ireland, the Scots, Americans or the Afrikaans of South Africa what they think of the British ‘contribution’ to the modern world and you’ll get an earful, I can tell you!

    Believe me I am no ‘woke warrior’ but I find it profoundly disturbing that in the current ‘culture war’, under the guise of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ some fairly nasty ideas (by implication), that should have been safely consigned to the trash heap of history by now, are slithering back into some kind of respectability. They should have no place in an otherwise good socially conservative outlet like Mercator. As a conservative Catholic I for one am getting increasingly disturbed by some of the ‘fellow travellers’ who have suddenly appeared on the road we have been plodding for many decades now, whether it is people excusing the barbarity that is currently being perpetrated against thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Holy Land (often in ‘our’ name) or whether it is this kind of “at least they weren’t as bad as the ….” It’s dangerous stuff, historically illiterate, and above all profoundly unjust, which I don’t believe Almighty God is generally a keen supporter of. 15,000 children and counting already, in front of ‘our’ eyes, slaughtered in a ‘great war for civilization’ and using ‘our’ weapons, and purportedly on ‘our’ behalf. States and countries all have their weaknesses. Some have done bad things either now or in the past. Own it, learn from past errors and try to be better next time.
  • mrscracker
    “One would hope that anyone alive today, who has read any modern history is at least ‘anti-colonialist’ in heart, if not necessarily an ‘activist’. "
    ***********
    Not me.
    I think the British did a far better & more civilized job abolishing slavery than the bloodbath it took to end it in the States.
    I visited a former British colony earlier this year & then a current British Territory & the differences between the qualities of life were night & day. The former colony which I remember well from childhood was now crime ridden, gang infested, and impoverished. The British territory was thriving, clean, & safe. And it had many residents who had relocated there from the former colony for a decent standard of life & safety.
    The transatlantic slave trade was smaller than the older trans Sahara route which lasted into the 20th century & wasn’t abolished in places like Saudi Arabia until the 1960’s. ( And it still appears to be functioning under the radar per folks in Togo.) The Eastern slave trade seems to get little mention perhaps because its buyers were/are largely non European.
  • Tom Mullaly
    commented 2024-10-24 05:03:52 +1100
    One would hope that anyone alive today, who has read any modern history is at least ‘anti-colonialist’ in heart, if not necessarily an ‘activist’. If one native Australian woman speaking-up in front of the king of England (“Imagine that, the nerve”) has caused this outpouring, one is left wondering what we ‘really’ think.

    If one wants to know what colonialism looks like today, one only needs to look at the middle east, to see what the Amritsar massacre or the Plantation of Ulster looked like. In fairness to the Israelis, they did not conjure these ‘strategies’ purely out of their own heads; they’re following a well-trod path, one trod by many European countries, but eapecially Britain. This OP calls for balance and yet displays none whatsoever. Its depressing to read, for this Brit anyway. The author is one can only assume unaware that some of Britain’s leading families are living off the proceeds of the transatlantic slave trade, to this day! The British public purse of the time was used not to undo the evils of slavery towards those who were its victims, as is inferred here, but to compensate the British slave owners for their ‘loss of earnings’. This is a very basic, indisputable, historic fact.

    Unfortunately, it is not the case that Britons have come to terms with their past. They’re one of the few European countries who have manifestly failed to do so, which has in turn partially contributed to the recent stupidity and ugliness of Brexit. Indeed, Michael Gove, then Minister for Education directly interfered in the British secondary school history curriculum, narrowing any study of European colonialism to case studies from Latin America. Why? Because LA is one of the few places on earth that Britain did not manage to pillage.

    Personally, I suspect it was WWII that led to this current craziness in both Britain and Russia. Both are currently beholden to a unique but uncannily similar mindset. Both were on the ‘winning side’ of the conflict, the real victor of which was the US. It’s no surprise that both countries are currently engaging in destructive ‘back to the future’ fantasy projects that are harming their own people. Many voted for Brexit out of a belief that the new ‘global Britain’ that would emerge through it would be a reincarnation of the empire. That reveals how much teaching of objective historic facts are needed in today’s Britain.

    The British historian Simon Schama observed some years ago that the first objective history of the British empire would “probably be written in Chinese”. It would seem, sadly, that he may be yet proved right.
  • David Page
    commented 2024-10-24 03:15:14 +1100
    Middle Passage slavery was fundamentally different from “traditional” slavery. The idea of slavery had begun to fall into disfavor. So slavery needed a new excuse. The supposed inferiority of black Africans became that new excuse. And that was what made it so harmful, even after the abolition of slavery. Generation of black children were taught from infancy that they were simply not as good as white children. That only began to change in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
  • mrscracker
    Thank you very much for sharing this.
  • Mark Powell
    published this page in The Latest 2024-10-23 17:54:34 +1100