https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxc5ENT8ajg, https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-real-vikings/articles/eyewitness-to-the-vikings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/world-of-domesday/order.htm, Apparently Essay Mills Must Be Made Illegal, Why Oxfam Can Go Boil Their Heads Over Vaccine Patents, The real point about climate change is how cheap the solution is, The excellent Tim Worstall- The Register, Tim Worstall is a darn good economist- Don Boudreaux, Tim Worstall, you pendant- Polly Toynbee, .more sensible than most right wing nutjob bloggersBob Piper. David Olusoga Historian, broadcaster and film-maker. I think a case could be made. I have that estimate saved and ready to be critiqued as part of a larger project. Why are these characterizations needed? Young people - such as Lavinya Stennett who founded the Black Curriculum campaign group - have been calling for change. Will Britain change? If one disproves his assertions would slavery then be okay? Not to say it was nice. In the USA? Used to be on a long-dead and much missed forum where the topics of debate ranged far wider than they do here (as did the viewpoints I think it would be useful if us right-wing brexity mob didnt chase off the sensible non-right-wing non-brexity types so much). He previously worked at JP Morgan for 18 years in a number of senior roles and was . Should black history be taught all year round? Once insignificant villages, great cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow sprang up on the profits of slavery. Sure. To me personally, this is the thing. Hundreds of White women raped every day. A fifty quid note in the hand of the first black bloke you encounter. During the Second World War, thousands of black American soldiers stationed in Britain were befriended by white Britons who opposed efforts by the white military to segregate them. But Muslims were enslaving white Europeans into Africa long before the Atlantic route, usually castrating the males. It seems absurd to me that anyone should be concerned about what happened 200 or 500 years ago. We pretend we do not like slavery but actually we do not like slave traders. The problem with slavery is that it left us with their descendents and weak minded White populations. See, five years ago I wouldnt have written a crass comment like that, but hey, times achanging and as financially independent with some FU-money, I dont have to worry about cancellation culture, LOL. How could Britain, a civilised and Christian nation, indulge in rape, torture, killing and the forced labour of Africans over two centuries? They did not pay for them and were going to kill a lot of them anyway. What is their strongest argument? It isnt happening now. By David Dabydeen (Photo By Alamy) Nineteen eighty-four was a transformative year for David Olusoga. Slavery didnt last much longer for various reasons, fizzled out in a century or so, but we have the records to show it was still part of the system after twenty years of Norman rule: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/world-of-domesday/order.htm. Would the good professor really be so different if genealogical records could prove he had African ancestors who owned African slaves? 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. A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. It could not have happened at all unless African traders and kings had offered slaves to the Europeans. ", TV historian rejects 'nonsense' over keeping statues, What Black History Month is - and why it matters. (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.). Now they do. 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. Although the bottom line is that no Black person remembers slavery. I assume he is not very bright and Race Hustling is very lucrative. But its still awful, even on a historical scale.. 2023 BBC. A House Through Time returned to BBC Two in May for its third season, and once again is fronted by historian extraordinaire David Olusoga. Latin America for instance. If their ancestors had remained in Africa would they be better off than they are now? Fryers book was monumental, inspiring conferences, publications, the setting up of local history groups, the establishment of Black History Month, and radio and television programmes. Sooner or later, we whites are going to have to take a stand, and say we aint taking this any more. Watching @worstall execute @richardjmurphy is like watching a very, very clever cat slowly killing at ataxic mouse. There is no reason to think one system was more or less brutal than the other. Fair point. Looking at what happened in Haiti or Jamaica or chunks of Latin America, I dont find either well, could have been much worse or what do you expect, Early Modern West Europeans, how could they have known better? to be particularly convincing responses. This is a moral argument. Cheap ass presentism. One of the reasons why the American and Caribbean experiences were very different. As a nation, we still have only a dim understanding of the slave system that funded Sloanes collecting. Although I would expect the Germans, and perhaps even the Japanese, to be happy they lost the war. The following decades were taken up with popular and political rhetoric about immigration and parliamentary acts to limit blacks coming to Britain. Tull played professional football for Northampton but instead of signing up for Glasgow Rangers, he enlisted. A covering letter would be a courtesy but probably not a necessity. 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. If you are wracked with guilt, ashamed of your forebears, do it! Those who grew rich on slavery and the slave trade were not neutral and no achievement or act of philanthropy justifies airbrushing their involvement from history.. Id say this to Mr Olusoga. arguments are pretty weak since relying on a doctrine of virtues of the fathers risks implicitly accepting sins of the fathers.. Hes welcome to pursue his line of thought but he should bear in mind that tolerance is, by its nature, in the gift of the powerful. I do not see what is different between a plantation in Africa and a plantation in Virginia. I assume these were usually killed before Europeans turned up and bought them. They arent going to concede anything. The good news is that Black Lives Matter may be that trigger. But any planter who deliberately starved his slaves to death would quickly go bust. My family did nothing. The argument isnt whether historical slavery was right or wrong or who should accept responsibility for it. It was an apt university to experiment with such developments, since Lord Scarman, who reported on the Brixton riots of 1981, was its chancellor. They also ran a slave trade to the Ottoman empire and white slavery in the north without any help from Europeans. My argument is that Africans were probably happily killing each other for women before the West turned up. "He was the voice of somebody who wasn't speaking about the past as a historian, but was living it. Shouldnt Olusoga be writing in Ubangi bantu-language? And Britain worked for the whole of the 19th century to put down slavery in Africa. BurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:07 pm Theres a flaw in arguments of the form frankly you should be glad I murdered your sister. Various among the societies that were agglomerated into Nigeria were more or less involved in that slave trade from the supply end. Nobody will stop you, honest. Hey, we do not even have to go that far. White people will take it. TV historian David Olusoga claims it is "palpable nonsense" to say that removing controversial statues "somehow impoverishes history". The evidence of this is that seasoned slaves, those exposed to the environment, sold for up to 50% more than new ones. But maybe they did not. No? Supported by African authors of slave narratives such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottabah Cugoano, they held meetings all over the country, attracting huge crowds. In 1986 I came across the book Staying Power by the British journalist Peter Fryer. 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. Yet American slave-produced raw cotton continued to feed the 4,500 mills of Lancashire. Olusoga patterns his narrative after Fryers, starting with the North African presence in Roman Britain. Over 1000 years in Britain. 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? I cant see the point of denying it was all pretty awful. Africans had a demand for female slaves. Might, in this case, being 100% of the debating point. No other race / culture was willing and able to do that. But slaves were more valuable, so the British fought the Spanish for a share in the trade and eventually came to dominate it. 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