Guardian: The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

[closeupready]

The past has a disconcerting habit of bursting, uninvited and unwelcome, into the present. This year history gate-crashed modern America in the form of a 150-year-old document: a few sheets of paper that compelled Hollywood actor Ben Affleck to issue a public apology and forced the highly regarded US public service broadcaster PBS to launch an internal investigation.
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The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.
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The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”. The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn.

The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed

46,000 people in Britain owned slaves. Wow, that number boggles my mind. Mostly white men, I'd guess.

[Nye Bevan]

1. Was Slavery a Cause of the Revolutionary War? Yes.

On June 22, 1772, nearly a century before the slaves were freed in America, a British judge, with a single decision, brought about the conditions that would end slavery in England. His decision would have monumental consequences in the American colonies, leading up to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and beyond. Because of that ruling, history would forever be changed. This book is about that decision and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States. ( from Slave Nation: How Slavery United The Colonies And Sparked The American Revolution, by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen)

.....

In June of 1772, the British courts issued judgement in what is called the Somerset Case. The case involved a runaway slave, James Somerset, who was the “property” of Charles Stewart, a customs officer from Boston, Massachusetts. Stewart and Somerset came to England from America in 1769. During his time in England, Somerset was exposed to the free black community there, and was inspired to escape his master in late 1771.

Somerset’s escape was not successful; he was caught, and was to be sent (for sale?) to the British colony of Jamaica. However, Somerset was defended and supported by abolitionists who went to court on his behalf, and prevented his being shipped to Jamaica. As noted in Wikipedia, “The lawyers… on behalf of Somerset… argued that while colonial laws might permit slavery, neither the common law of England nor any law made by Parliament recognized the existence of slavery, and slavery was therefore illegal.”

......

The book goes on to tell how major decisions made by the Americans-such as the agreement to break from British rule, the wording of the Declaration of Independence, and the formulation of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution-were all done in a manner that protected the right of the South to maintain slavery. For example: in early drafts of the Declaration of Independence, the language that said “All men are born equally free and independent” was changed by Thomas Jefferson to “All men were created equal” to prevent the implication that slaves should be free.

In the end, though, the Revolutionary War did not prevent the conflict over slavery from coming to a head; it merely delayed it.

https://allotherpersons.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/did-slavery-cause-of-the-revolutionary-war-yes-book-review-of-slave-nation/

It wasn't just taxation without representation. It was also over the right to slavery.

[jwirr]

2. Thank you. But one article states that Britain ended slavery in 1833 and yours says it was in 1722.

Am I missing something here?

[Nye Bevan]

3. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833

At which point Southern blacks could be forgiven for regretting the American Revolution. Or wishing that Britain had won that war.

[jwirr]

7. Thank you and you are correct about how they must have felt about the Rev. War.

[Bluenorthwest]

4. That poster is repeating the very denial the OP is discussing. 1722 applies to the home soil of

Britain, no slaves at home. Slavery in the Colonies, such as the US, perfectly legal and the British themselves very active in both the slave trade and slave owning plantation businesses in those Colonies.
The pretense is that 'we never had slaves' when in fact they just kept them elsewhere. That's what the article in the OP is talking about.

[jwirr]

8. Got it - thank you.

[1939]

21. Before 1772

Before 1772, it was only the northern colonies who felt the burdens of taxation and the strictures on trade caused by British mercantilism. The southern colonies were loyal to the crown and felt they had a pretty good deal. The 1772 case in England put into the hazard their own slave property and they were more willing to unite with the northern colonies against the home country..

[LiberalEsto]

5. The Germans owned slaves in the Baltics for 700 years

My Estonian great-great-grandparents could be sold, traded, flogged and so forth until 1866.

[closeupready]

6. Someone here raised a point, perhaps erroneous, about the pyramids.

There is a belief, becoming discredited these days, that the pyramids were built by slave labor, and 'doesn't it just bring you down realizing that those structures are the product of human slavery?'

And while that claim may not be true, I do agree with the underlying point, that no matter how grand or beautiful, things built by slaves on demands of their owners are things that are kind of self-invalidating.

[Nye Bevan]

10. Monticello would be another example (nt)

[closeupready]

11. Yes. Any of these old towns in the American South or

mid-Atlantic - you want to just love the quaintness of them, but it's impossible to really embrace them, because who isn't aware of the history of human slavery in the US?

[LiberalEsto]

12. And the manor houses in the Baltics

All built by slave labor.



This one is near the manor where some of my ancestors labored in the late 1700s and early 1800s

http://www.mois.ee/english/tartu/vanakuuste.shtml

[KamaAina]

15. As would the White House.

[jwirr]

9. When my great great grandparents came here from Germany in 1855 my greatgrandfather and

his 16 year old son joined the Union Army for that very reason. They did not want to live in another country where slavery was allowed.

[1939]

14. Teutonic Order

The Teutonic Order of German knights controlled Estonia from 1346. Later the Swedes took it over and by the early 18th Century, it was under the sway of the Russians. Were they "slaves" or "serfs". There is a difference (though at times, it may not be apparent to the slave or serf).

[LiberalEsto]

16. The Baltic Germans, as they were called, ran the manors for 700 years

including through the various regimes of the Danes, Swedes, Russians, etc. They finally left Estonia in 1939 when Hitler demanded that they all return to Germany in preparation for his war.
Although Estonians were freed from slavery in the mid-19th Century, most ended up having to rent land from the German barons. Some managed to purchase farms.

The peasants' conditions varied over the centuries. At times they were serfs; at other times, slaves.

At the beginning of the 19th Century, Estonians in Estonia as well as Livonia (southern Estonia and northern Latvia) did not have last names, did not own land or farm implements, could be flogged by their German masters, and could be bought, sold or traded at any time. They were mostly illiterate. It was because of pressure by the Russian czar that various freedoms were gradually granted.

"The position was so bad that in 1777 Rev. A. Huppel, who knew conditions well, could write: "Both these nations (i.e., the Estonians and the Latvians) are complete slaves, the absolute property of another man. They are not persons, but goods, things that are sold or exchanged against horses, dogs or pipes." And, indeed, if we look at the Baltic newspapers of the 18th century, we see them full of advertisements giving notice that at such and such a place there will be a Public Auction of Serfs. In these sales children were separated from their parents, wives from their husbands.' -
source: http://www.latvians.com/index.php?en/CFBH/TheStoryOfLatvia/SoLatvia-03-chap.ssi

[1939]

13. Cheaper to compensate slave owners

The Civil War cost the US a lot more in dollars and one soldier's life for every six slaves freed.

[Uncle Joe]

18. I believe it would've been, to say the national debt exploded from the Civil War is an

understatement.

http://fee.org/freeman/detail/the-economic-costs-of-the-civil-war/

The first and most important point is that the Civil War was expensive. In 1860 the U.S. national debt was $65 million. To put that in perspective, the national debt in 1789, the year George Washington took office, was $77 million. In other words, from 1789 to 1860, the United States spanned the continent, fought two major wars, and began its industrial growth—all the while reducing its national debt.

(snip)

Four years of civil war changed all that forever. In 1865 the national debt stood at $2.7 billion. Just the annual interest on that debt was more than twice our entire national budget in 1860. In fact, that Civil War debt is almost twice what the federal government spent before 1860.

Putting aside just the monetary cost, there was well over 600,000 lives snuffed out, the South was left in economic devastation which took near a century to recover from.

On top of that the bitter Civil War created a major cultural and social fault line from which our nation stills suffers from to this day.

[Uncle Joe]

20. P.S. One other point, I have no doubt that

the bitterness and hatred; which was spawned from the destructive Civil War had a great effect on magnifying and extending racism.

I'm sure Great Britain has racism as well but I don't believe it's to the extent as it is here in the U.S.

[malaise]

17. I was at a history workshop recently and Catherine Hall

and a few others delivered some amazing details on how these scoundrels got rich.

Here's a link to Hall's work
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/catherine/
Eric Williams classic Capitalism and Slavery is a must read text on the subject.

[Liberal_in_LA]

19. Kick