Afua Hirsch writes for the Guardian Journal (Thu 9 Jul 2020) in this Opinion piece under the subheading:
There is now a global debate focused on all those nations who built their wealth by denying black people humanity
I once asked a British cabinet minister why the country had never apologised for the transatlantic slave trade. After all, this nation trafficked more enslaved Africans than almost any other – at least 3 million on British ships – yet it has only ever expressed “regret”. It’s a strange choice of words for playing a leading role in the greatest atrocity in human history.
The minister explained to me that the UK cannot apologise, because the case against it – watertight in moral and ethical terms – might then become legal too. In short, Britain won’t use the language of apology, out of fear this might pave the way for reparations.
That admission made me sit up and take notice. Because, passionate as I have always been about racial justice, I’m also not immune from the perception of reparations as – in the words of American writer Isabel Wilkerson – especially “radioactive”.
Yet I’m now seeing with increasing clarity how this perception only serves to reinforce systems of race and power. The debate about reparations has, conveniently, been branded extreme and unrealistic by those who don’t want to pay them. We happily listen to the heir to the throne – who on Windrush Day said Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” to the people of the Caribbean – while ignoring the reality that what Britain owes is, in fact, a straight-up financial debt.
The case is unequivocal. The African American intellectual WEB Du Bois was right when he described the enslavement of at least 12 million Africans as “the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice”. In the Caribbean, Britain received, in the words of Nobel prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis, 200 years of free labour – from over 15 million black people, and those who were indentured from India.
The proceeds from this enslavement, and the heavily exploitative years of “apprenticed” labour that followed it, provided the profits with which Britain modernised its economy. The systemic poverty that remains in the Caribbean can be directly traced to the era of enslavement and colonialism, at the end of which Britain walked away leaving 60% of the region’s black inhabitants functionally illiterate.
The conditions in the Caribbean were so bad that, during the second world war, Britain tried to prevent deployment of African Americans on military bases in the islands. Whitehall feared the sight of better-off black Americans might wake its colonial subjects out of the ignorance of their condition on which British exploitation depended.
The Caribbean’s “pandemic of chronic diseases” – as historian Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, has termed it – can be directly traced to British slavery and colonial practice. It is now a global hypertension hotspot. The high diabetes rate has left two of Britain’s former colonies, Barbados and Jamaica, vying for the dubious honour of being the per capita amputation capital of the world. “For 300 years the people of this region were forced to consume a diet based on what we produced, sugar,”Beckles explains.
Beckles was speaking this week as the Caribbean Community (Caricom) demanded reparations for Native genocide and African enslavement from 10 European nations, including the UK. It’s not a fringe set of demands but the formal position of Britain’s former colonies in the region, now its Commonwealth “friends”, including Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados – whose prime minister, Mia Mottley, is a committed advocate of reparations.
These demands are not about money per se. To borrow the language of postwar Jewish reparatory justice claims, which rightly run into the billions, it’s about the “mass murder, the human suffering, the annihilation of spiritual, intellectual, and creative forces, which are without parallel in the history of mankind”.
In fact, reparations speak a language of apology that western nations should understand. They have been profoundly comfortable receiving them.
In the US, the Confederates who lost the civil war received compensation for the loss of their property. France had no issue extorting huge sums from Haiti for generations, as reparations for that nation’s audacity in overthrowing slavery in 1804. This arrangement, euphemistically designed to “indemnify” French colonialists, persisted until 1947.
A common complaint about reparations is the alleged unfairness of burdening today’s generation with debt arising from their ancestors’ wrongs. Yet where is the outrage that my generation contributed towards the more than £300bn in today’s money notoriously paid to Britain’s slave owners for the loss of their human “property”? Their compensation under the Slavery Abolition Act – comprising an astounding 40% of the national budget at the time – was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.
The pattern is clear. Reparations have been paid to those who profited from African enslavement, rather than those who were enslaved.
As the historian Ana Lucia Araujo has written, to this day no former slave society in the Americas, no former slaves or their descendants, and no African nation, has ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.
Some would argue that, with the slavery era having ended so long ago, it’s now too late. But this is a piece of circularity par excellence. During the time of enslavement, and unceasingly since the 18th century, black people have stated the case in petitions, correspondences, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives and judicial claims – advocating in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
As the French colonial writer Prince Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou wrote of Benin, black people “cry ‘Reparations!’ without ceasing”. That this cry was deliberately ignored for so long in the past cannot logically form the basis of a denial in the present.
The language of reparations continually evolves. Recently, it has taken the form of Beyoncé’sBlack Parade (“Need peace and reparation for my people”); Belgians’ resurgent condemnation of the brutalisation, rape, exploitation and deaths of 5 million Congolese during colonial rule; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful testimony before the US House of Representatives that, if the US wants to say D-day matters, then so does the 1921 “Black Wall Street” race massacre. Human Rights Watch has launched a formal investigation into that atrocity, which saw an organised white mob, armed by city officials, destroy a successful black economic hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing hundreds.
The case for reparations is becoming a global conversation to which every nation that systematically enriched itself by stealing black people’s very humanity – not to mention unquantifiable torture and cultural destruction – now finds itself exposed.
Instead of going away, these reparatory justice movements will continue to reinforce each other across the black diaspora. As Beckles puts it, there’s no carpet in the world with enough space under it for this legacy to be swept away.
BLACK PARADE "Black Parade" is a song by American recording artist Beyoncé. It was released as a charity single on June 19, 2020, also referred to as Juneteenth, a day that originated in Beyoncé's home state, Texas, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Released in the wake of George Floyd's death and the protests that followed it, the song serves as a celebration of black culture and the support of black activism. All proceeds from the song benefit BeyGOOD's Black Business Impact Fund, which helps black-owned small businesses in need.
An online directory of black-owned businesses called "Black Parade Route" was launched alongside the single's release. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of The Lion King: The Gift, following the release of Beyoncé's visual album Black Is King.
Prior to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the singer has repeatedly used her platform to raise her voice against racial inequality. A few days after the killing of George Floyd, Beyoncé took to social media to demand justice for his death, urging fans and followers to sign the petition "Justice for George Floyd".
On June 14, 2020, she issued an open letter to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, calling out the lack of arrests in the case of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman who was fatally shot by police in her own home in March 2020. Beyoncé urged Cameron to "take swift and decisive action in charging the officers".
Re:LODE Radio - Slavery and the maritime histories of Liverpool and Hull
Claire Shaw's article for History Today reminds readers back in March this year (3 March 2020) on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery, how visible the memory of Britain's slave trade remains, and especially in Liverpool.
The LODE project and the LODE Zone Line includes the two original and principal nodal locations that define the LODE Line pathway that Re:LODE Radio follows as it girds the planet, the maritime cities of Liverpool and Hull. When it comes to Liverpool's slave trade legacy, Hull's legacy is shared with Liverpool in the history of the Abolitionist movement.
Claire Shawwrites: In 1787 the Quakers of Portsmouth made their anti-slavery campaign official by forming The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, joining forces with prominent abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. So organised were they in their methods of activism, such as civil disobedience, research and evidence-gathering, that they set the blueprint for many future lobbying organisations.
One of their most effective actions was to commission an illustration of the Liverpool slave ship the Brookes, named after its owner, Joseph Brookes, and present it to the nation in poster form, appearing in newspapers, pamphlets, books and coffee houses. The horror it showed quickly established the illustration as a hugely influential part of the abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign.
The architect of the use of the Brookes as political propaganda was the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. In The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), he wrote that the ‘print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and was therefore instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it, in serving the cause of the injured Africans’.
Clarkson’s choice of the Brookes proved to be a revelation to large numbers of people. As he travelled around England, galvanising the anti-slavery campaign, he was attacked in Liverpool in 1787 and nearly killed by a gang of sailors paid to assassinate him.
Over 25 years, Brookes’ ship made ten Atlantic crossings, carrying in total 5,163 captured Africans. Of those, 4,559 survived, meaning that over ten per cent of its prisoners died. Records from The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show that on its 1785-86 voyage it carried 740 enslaved Africans, 258 more than the 1788 poster showed. In 1788 The Regulated Slave Trade Act had been passed, the first British legislation to regulate slave shipping. It limited the number of slaves an individual ship could transport.
Although Liverpool was late entering the slave trade, by 1740 it had surpassed Bristol and London as the slave-trading capital of Britain. In 1792 London had 22 transatlantic sailing vessels, Bristol had 42 and Liverpool had 131. The Brookes was built at the height of Liverpool’s slave-trading empire and, by that time, the city’s shipbuilders had mastered the art of constructing custom-built slave ships: in the early 18th century the average size of a slave ship was 70 tons; by the end of the century this had tripled to 200 tons.
Such was Liverpool’s dominance of the North Atlantic slave trade that one in five African captives crossing the ocean was carried in a Liverpool slave ship. The city had the capacity to build bespoke ships to the exact specifications and requirements of the slave merchants. Consequently, the industry employed 3,000 shipwrights, alongside other ancillary trades, such as rope makers, gun makers and those who supplied comestibles to be carried on board.
Liverpool’s economy and the economies of neighbouring Lancashire and Yorkshire benefited, too. Ships bound for Africa would be laden with goods to appeal to African traders to make the outbound journey profitable. Textiles from Lancashire and Yorkshire mills were the most attractive commodity and made up perhaps 50 per cent of the outbound cargo, alongside guns and knives, brass cooking pots, copperware, clay pipes, beer and liquor. Local craftspeople and small industries supplied the ships and estimates suggest that one in eight of Liverpool’s population – 10,000 people – depended on trade with Africa and 40 per cent of its income derived from the trade.
The slave trade was the backbone of the city’s prosperity and the reinvestment of proceeds gave stimulus to trading and industrial development throughout the north-west of England and the Midlands. Liverpool’s Rodney Street was built between 1782 and 1801, providing town houses for many elite merchants, including John Gladstone, father of prime minister William Ewart Gladstone.
It was named after Admiral Rodney, who defeated the French in St Lucia in 1782 to preserve the British influence in the West Indies. Rodney supported the slave trade. Elsewhere in the city, the Port of Liverpool Building displays stone carvings of slave ships and dolphins on its façade and the Cunard building carries sculptures of a native American and an African man and woman.
The Liverpool street immortalised by the Beatles in their song ‘Penny Lane’ takes its name from the slave trader James Penny, who was vocal in his opposition to the abolition movement. Eager to protect his business, he boldly claimed in evidence to the Lords Committee of Council set up in 1788 that: ‘The slaves here will sleep better than the gentlemen do on shore.’ He was not the only Liverpool figure to campaign – in the build-up to the 1788 Act, Liverpool slave traders submitted 64 petitions to Parliament arguing against abolition.
In 1999 Councillor Myrna Juarez proposed that Liverpool City Council debate a motion to ‘express remorse for the effects of the slave trade on millions of people worldwide’. This unleashed a controversy, as some protested the incongruity of this debate taking place in a town hall where images of African slaves were moulded into the plasterwork. Nevertheless, the council acknowledged Liverpool’s involvement in the slave trade and a formal apology was made. Today the city acknowledges its slaving maritime history with the International Slavery Museum, which opened in 2007 as part of the Maritime Museum.
Meanwhile, support is growing for a new British slavery museum in the capital after the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, backed the proposal, arguing that it would help to tackle racism. Other institutions have also acknowledged the role of slavery in their history, such as Harewood House in Yorkshire. In September 2018 Glasgow University, in a welcome move, published a report into its historical links to slavery, acknowledging that, although the university did not invest directly in the slave trade, it did receive donations from those who did.
In 1807 The Slave Trade Act saw the official end of the slave trade in Britain.As the anniversary of this act on 25 March approaches once more, taking the lead from Liverpool, it is time that more individuals and institutions be transparent about the legacy that slavery has left.
Wilberforce House Museum - Hull
Hull has a museum that tells of the slave trade.Wilberforce House is the birthplace of William Wilberforce, famous campaigner against the slave trade. The museum tells the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its abolition, as well as dealing with contemporary slavery.
Contradictorily perhaps in the context of reparation, the museum's galleries also offer, what the museum describes as"a fascinating glimpse into West African culture".
William Wilberforce was born in Hull on 24 August 1759, the only son of a Hull merchant whose wealth derived from the Baltic trade. The family had originally come from the village of Wilberfoss near York. William attended Hull Grammar School but his Hull schooldays were cut short by the death of his father and he was placed in the care of his uncle and aunt at Wimbledon.
As an adult William became interested in politics and was elected MP for Hull in 1780. Four years later he became MP for Yorkshire, a very influential position. Wilberforce enjoyed the theatres, clubs and parties of London society and was quickly accepted for his wit, charm and conversation. However he was soon to turn his back on this busy social life. A tour of Europe with Isaac Milner in 1785 marked the beginnings of Wilberforce’s conversion to Evangelical Christianity. He discussed his spiritual crisis with the Rev. John Newton, the Rector of St. Mary Woolworth who had been a slave trader before his conversion.
Newton persuaded Wilberforce to stay in public life and joined the group of leading Evangelical Christians who lived at Clapham and were later to be known as the “Clapham Sect”. Not long afterwards he was approached by several Abolitionists who asked him to take up the cause of slavery. In 1787, during a conversation with Pitt and Grenville, Wilberforce decided to give notice of his intention to raise the subject in the House of Commons.
Wilberforce led the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament, whilst the Abolition society collected evidence and organised petitions. Leaflets, songs and badges were distributed to rally public opinion. However, their opponents were also well organised and fought back with their own propaganda.
The progress of abolition was halted by the outbreak of the French revolution and a slave rebellion in San Domingo, but in 1807 the Act to abolish the Slave trade was finally passed, a great victory for Wilberforce and his friends. They believed that slaves would now be treated more humanely as the supply of slaves dwindled, but the illegal slave trade flourished.
Five years later, Wilberforce resigned his Yorkshire seat in favour of a quieter constituency, preferring to spend more time with his family. During his final years in the Commons he was attacked for not helping the poor in Britain. In 1815 he supported the Corn Laws which raised the price of corn and three years later approved harsh laws following the Peterloo massacre.
Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, believing the abolition of slavery to be within reach. On his deathbed he heard that the Bill to free all slaves in the British colonies had passed its second reading in the Commons. “Thank God”, he said “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery”. A month after his death the Bill became law.
And the twenty millions sterling went to compensate the slave owners, NOT reparation for those freed from slavery.
Just as important as a museum about the slave trade, but even more so, as far as Re:LODE Radio is concerned, is the University of Hull - Wilberforce Institute - A centre for the study of Slavery and Emancipation:
Professor Trevor Burnard, Director at the University of Hull’s Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, speaks about the significance of Hull in the abolition of the slave trade, as demonstrations take place across the world as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
“All over the country, councils are currently reviewing statues under their jurisdiction which hold a connection to slavery.
“There are many monuments in this country which celebrate people who made money from slavery and the slave trade. It is reassuring, however, that in such a review in Hull, one statue to be preserved will be the great statue of William Wilberforce, in Queen’s Gardens.
“The people of Hull are proud of their most famous citizen, and rightly so. Wilberforce was not the only person responsible for the abolition of the slave trade, but three days after his death on 29 July 1833, the bill was passed to abolish slavery in the British Empire.
“Black and white opponents of Britain’s extensive involvement with slavery joined him in these historic late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century campaigns. They attacked as immoral something that Britain capitalised on – slave trading – and which brought enormous wealth to highly influential people.
“Many of those abolitionists were women, such as Marianne Thornton, who like Wilberforce, came from a prosperous Hull family. She was so disgusted by learning about the horrors of the slave trade that she joined Wilberforce in turning her Christian beliefs into practical reforming measures.
“We should not underestimate the magnitude of that task. As we are discovering how many statues of slave traders still exist, slavery was accepted in Britain as at worst a necessary evil.
“That it was based on the cruel treatment of Africans did not matter, just as Africans were treated as though they did not matter. What we in Hull can be proud of, as we remember the many things Britain should be ashamed of in its long involvement with African slavery and racial discrimination, is how some people’s strong moral convictions, such as William Wilberforce’s, changed people’s minds.
“What was accepted as normal began to be seen as evil. Wilberforce knew that Black Lives Mattered. That is why we continue to think well of him in the city that he called home.”
The slave trade and the "primitive accumulation" of capital
Karl Marx, in his influential economic history of capitalism, Das Kapital, wrote that;
"... the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production".
He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the "primitive accumulation" of capital, the 'non-capitalist' accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation.
Effects of the atlantic slave trade on the British economy
There is some debate amongst historians as to the benefits or costs to the British economy of the Atlantic slave trade. This map of 1823 is accompanied by a text arguing that import prohibitions and high duties on sugar were artificially inflating prices and inhibiting manufacturing in England. 1823
The Wikipedia article on the Atlantic slave tradeand the effects of this trade on the British economy states:
Historian Eric Williams in 1944 argued that the profits that Britain received from its sugar colonies, or from the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean, contributed to the financing of Britain's industrial revolution. However, he says that by the time of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, the sugar plantations of the British West Indies had lost their profitability, and it was in Britain's economic interest to emancipate the slaves.
Other researchers and historians have strongly contested what has come to be referred to as the "Williams thesis" in academia. David Richardson has concluded that the profits from the slave trade amounted to less than 1% of domestic investment in Britain. Economic historian Stanley Engerman finds that even without subtracting the associated costs of the slave trade (e.g., shipping costs, slave mortality, mortality of British people in Africa, defense costs) or reinvestment of profits back into the slave trade, the total profits from the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to less than 5% of the British economy during any year of the Industrial Revolution. Engerman's 5% figure gives as much as possible in terms of benefit of the doubt to the Williams argument, not solely because it does not take into account the associated costs of the slave trade to Britain, but also because it carries the full-employment assumption from economics and holds the gross value of slave trade profits as a direct contribution to Britain's national income. Historian Richard Pares, in an article written before Williams' book, dismisses the influence of wealth generated from the West Indian plantations upon the financing of the Industrial Revolution, stating that whatever substantial flow of investment from West Indian profits into industry there occurred after emancipation, not before. However, each of these works focus primarily on the slave trade or the Industrial Revolution, and not the main body of the Williams thesis, which was on sugar and slavery itself. Therefore, they do not refute the main body of the Williams thesis.
Seymour Drescher and Robert Anstey argue the slave trade remained profitable until the end, and that moralistic reform, not economic incentive, was primarily responsible for abolition. They say slavery remained profitable in the 1830s because of innovations in agriculture. However, Drescher's Econocide wraps up its study in 1823, and does not address the majority of the Williams thesis, which covers the decline of the sugar plantations after 1823, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, and the subsequent abolition of sugar duties in the 1840s. These arguments do not refute the main body of the Williams thesis, which presents economic data to show that the slave trade was minor compared to the wealth generated by sugar and slavery itself in the British Caribbean.
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