Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The British Crusade Against Slavery

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April 22, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:06

The British Crusade Against Slavery

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	Britain's criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody by Frankie Boyle.
	For those who aren't aware, Frankie Boyle is a famous Scottish comedian who is most renowned for being pretty damn offensive.
	Needless to say, I'm a fan of his.
	And so when Frankie Boyle writes an article for The Guardian of all places with the subtitle, The Anti-Immigration Election Rhetoric is Perverse.
	We fear the arrival of people we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.
	I can see the misinformation coming a mile away.
	So Frankie begins the article by waffling in an overly verbose manner, reminiscent of Charlie Brooker, another man who I am a fan of, but has been led astray by misinformation.
	And it's full of these sort of contradictions that I'm sure sounded good when he was writing them, but when you actually think about it, a rather silly, I mean here he is pointing out the irony of the leaders being nationalist and warning about the Scottish National Party after making a crack about how the Scottish discovered penicillin and taking credit for this for some reason.
	And for some reason he seems to mix up the concepts of trade and immigration.
	But these really aren't very important.
	I'm not even bothered that he just assumes that an Australian style point system for immigration will obviously be a racist system that caters exclusively to white people.
	You know this is despite the fact that a Cambridge economics professor has warned the sheer scale of immigration has caused problems for the UK's infrastructure, which was largely built in the 70s.
	Being oh none of that really bothers me.
	What really bothers me is Frankie Boyle's attempt to make British people feel ashamed of Britain's involvement in the slave trade.
	That really gets my goat because Britain's involvement in the slave trade is one of the most proud accomplishments of British history.
	And I know what you're thinking, oh my goodness, slavery is bad.
	And that's correct.
	Which is why the British ended it.
	For everyone.
	If we just take a cursory look at the subject, you can see how it is not nearly as cut and dried as Frankie makes it out to be.
	Even the very word slave comes from slav because of the sheer number of slavs taken as slaves by conquering peoples.
	But Frankie is trying to drum up white guilt.
	So let's talk about African slavery.
	The Portuguese were the first Europeans to start exploring the West African coast, and they did indeed capture African natives to be brought back to Portugal as items of curiosity.
	Europeans who traveled to Western Africa discovered that Western Africa had civilizations of its own.
	For example, a Dutch visitor to Benin City wrote in around 1600, as you enter it, the town appears very great.
	You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the warmest street in Amsterdam.
	The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand.
	More than a century earlier, Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal.
	The Portuguese did take a few Africans back to Europe, but they didn't need to set up operations because they discovered that there were already thriving slave trades in Africa.
	And so they bought slaves from African rulers and traders.
	The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and military aristocracy who grew wealthy from the business.
	Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping.
	And before you start thinking that this is excessively barbaric, this was the standard for almost every civilized society all across the world.
	For example, in ancient Greece, Strabo tells us that the island of Delos trafficked in 10,000 slaves a day.
	Even before the Roman Empire, even when we're coming to the end of Roman Republic in the 1st century BC, It's estimated that a third of Italy was made up of slaves.
	Slaves made up of people whom the Romans had conquered and taken back to Italy to do hard labour.
	And so to anyone even slightly educated on this subject, it is absolutely unsurprising to find that, for example, in 1510, the capital of the Empire of Songhei was teeming with slaves.
	Slave trading in West Africa was common, but it was different to what you expect.
	It wasn't for commercial purposes, it was to show status and to give the wealthy African elite a comfortable life.
	And with the appearance of Europeans desperate to buy slaves for use in the Americas, the character of African slave ownership changed.
	Indeed it did.
	The character of slavery on the west coast of Africa changed to look a lot more like the character of slavery on the east coast of Africa, because we're going to talk about the Arab slave trade, specifically the circumstance of Swahili-speaking peoples.
	Unsurprisingly, the Arabs being far closer to sub-Saharan Africa than the Europeans had been taking advantage of it for far longer.
	They were a people with as much commercial nous as anyone else.
	The ruling class of coastal Swahili society, sultans, government officials and wealthy merchants, used non-Muslim slaves as domestic servants and to work on farms and estates.
	And they even had plantations, such as the Omani Sultan Saeed Said, who became immensely rich when he started up clove plantations in the 1820s with slave labor.
	Arab Muslims settled along the coast and intermixed with the locals, forming a people and culture known as Swahili, which started in around the 10th century AD.
	So unsurprisingly, the East Africa slave trade was well established long before Europeans arrived on the scene and was driven by demands for labor by the sultanates of the Middle East.
	You might be thinking, well, that's interesting.
	If the Arabs had been in Africa for about a thousand years taking sub-Saharan African slaves, why isn't there a very large population of black people in Arabia?
	And the answer to that is that the Arabs used to castrate them, cock and balls entirely.
	A practice that was supposed to have ended in 1962 when slavery was finally outlawed in places like Saudi Arabia.
	This of course does not mean that the trade has actually stopped.
	It is still going on today.
	It's impossible to know exactly how many slaves the Arabs took from sub-Saharan Africa on the east coast, but one historian produced a total of 17 million slaves.
	I doubt it was that high, but again we can't know.
	And it was for over a thousand years that this was happening.
	The point is that slavery was ubiquitous.
	No matter where on earth you traveled, you found slaves.
	In Europe, in China, in the Middle East, in the New World, in India, in Scandinavia, in Africa.
	Slavery was as common an institution as animal husbandry.
	The only thing that separated the Christian nations of Western Europe from anyone else on earth was the efficiency with which they could transport taken slaves.
	And it should come as no surprise that this was made possible by advances in technology that the rest of the world simply didn't have.
	The most common number I could find regarding the total number of slaves taken from Africa by Europeans was 11 million.
	And that is in about 400 year time span.
	Portugal took the most slaves, with over 4.5 million transported to the New World.
	Then Britain with over 2.5 million, then Spain and France totalling just under 3 million.
	And just so no one is under any illusions, the transatlantic slave trade must have been close to hell on earth.
	Slaves were taken from Africa and packed into conditions so disgraceful and disgusting it is unsurprising that there was such a high mortality rate for the crossing.
	As offensive as this is to look at, we have to remember that this is a consequence of dehumanization.
	The slaves were not people, they were chattel.
	It will obviously come as absolutely no surprise that the driving motivation behind slavery was economic.
	Portuguese merchants traded with Africans from trading posts they set up along the coast.
	They exchanged items like brass and copper bracelets for such products as pepper, cloth, beads and slaves, all part of an existing internal African trade.
	But the transatlantic slave trade really took off when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.
	The Portuguese initially had a monopoly on the slave trade, but this was broken in the 16th century when England, followed by France and other European nations, entered the trade.
	Unsurprisingly, this was a massively profitable trade for everyone involved except the slaves.
	Africa's rulers, traders and military aristocracy protected their interest in the slave trade.
	They discouraged Europeans from leaving the coastal areas to venture to the interior of the continent.
	European trading companies realized the benefit of dealing with African suppliers and not unnecessarily antagonizing them.
	The companies could not have mustered the resources it would have taken to directly capture the tens of millions of people shipped out of Africa.
	It was far more sensible and safer to give Africans guns to fight in the many wars that yielded captives for trade.
	The slave trading network stretched deep into Africa's interior.
	Slave trading firms were aware of their dependency on African suppliers.
	And these African suppliers were making insane amounts of money.
	For example, the king of Benin was making £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750.
	And his successor said in the 1840s that he would do anything the British wanted him to do, apart from giving up the slave trade.
	Quote, The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people.
	It is the source and the glory of their wealth.
	The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.
	With an industry so profitable to so many people involved and so widespread as to be common to almost every nation on earth, why would the British want King Gezo to give up the slave trade?
	Well, we need to turn back the clock to 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, when a French-speaking Duke of Viking descent called William the Bastard defeated King Harold Godwinson of England.
	William the Bastard was refashioned as William the Conqueror and took the crown of England, and one of the first things he did as King of England was to have the entire country inventoried.
	This record was known as the Doomsday Book, and we still have it.
	Thanks to this hard work, we know that around 1086, 10% of the recorded population of England were slaves.
	20 years earlier, when he had first conquered England, William had enacted a series of laws, one of which prohibited the slave trade out of England.
	I prohibit the sale of a man by another outside of the country on pain of a fine paid in full to me.
	We don't know what William's motivation for making this law was, but given that the punishment for breaking it was a fine, I doubt it was for humanitarian reasons.
	Whatever his reasons, within a generation of 1086, slavery had almost died out in England, presumably because William the Conqueror had outlawed the trade of slaves.
	There appears to also have been a trend for lords to endow their slaves to perform their plowing functions as free plowmen.
	While not a wonderful state of affairs, serfdom is better than chattel slavery.
	And this state of affairs was solidified by the church at the synod of Westminster in 1102, where the church denounced simony, clerical marriages and slavery.
	This made England a very unique case.
	There probably wasn't another country in the world at this time that had outlawed slavery.
	There were practically no motivations to do so.
	It was incredibly lucrative, endemic to the point of normalcy, so it wasn't even viewed as immoral.
	And the chances are William the Conqueror himself made the slave trade in England illegal just so he could make a quick buck.
	Fast forward 700 years and the international transatlantic slave trade is in full swing.
	And yet we still do not have slaves in England.
	And this is where we meet a man named Granville Sharp, a very well-educated, rationalist thinker of the Enlightenment, who became an active campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade.
	Granville had had previous legal success defending Jonathan Strong from his erstwhile slave master after being brought to England from the colonies, but we're going to look at the subsequent Somerset case.
	James Somerset was a slave from Virginia in America, who had come to England with his master Charles Stuart in 1769 and had run away in October 1771.
	After evading slave hunters employed by Stuart for 56 days, Somerset had been caught, put onto the slave ship Anne and Mary to be taken to Jamaica and sold.
	Three Londoners had applied to Lord Mansfield for a writ of habeas corpus which had been granted with Somerset having to appear at a hearing on the 24th of January in 1772.
	Members of the public responded to the plight by sending money to pay for his lawyers who in any event gave their services pro bono publico while Stuart's costs were met by the West Indian planters and merchants.
	Given his prior legal experience with the Jonathan Strong case, Sharp briefed Somerset's lawyers.
	The judgment was delivered on the 22nd of June 1772 and it was a clear victory for Somerset, Sharp and the lawyers who had acted for Somerset.
	Mansfeld acknowledged that English law did not allow slavery and only a new Act of Parliament could bring it into legality.
	The verdict established one thing very clearly.
	A slave becomes free the moment he sets foot on English soil.
	And this was, according to Lord Mansfield, that the air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe.
	No matter what reason William the Conqueror outlawed slavery for, by the time this judgment was drawn by Lord Mansfeld, it had become a point of principle.
	This precedent wasn't set for Mansfeld's personal interests.
	This precedent was set to determine right from wrong.
	Granville Sharp went on to co-found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade with fellow like-minded Enlightenment thinkers.
	And after 20 long years of campaigning in Parliament, which I won't detail here, they were successful in their goal of abolishing the international slave trade in 1807.
	Now, if you know anything about 1807, you'll know that this was during the War of the Fourth Coalition, where Napoleon Bonaparte was savaging great powers all across the European continent.
	The Napoleonic Wars led to new territorial acquisitions for Britain, and helped stuff Parliament with more abolitionists than they had before, which is why the bill providing for the abolition of the slave trade to conquered territories triumphantly passed in both houses.
	And the following year this was superseded by a stronger measure that outlawed the British Atlantic slave trade altogether.
	But given the raging war in Europe, it was rather difficult to enforce due to a paucity of available resources.
	After 1807, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, having achieved its goals, became the African Institution, whose principal aim was to ensure the new legislation was enforced and that other countries followed Britain's example.
	Persuading other countries to join Britain outlawing the slave trade proved more difficult.
	Despite the efforts of the African institution and those of British ministers, the Congresses of Paris and Vienna in 1814 and 1815 both failed to reach a specific agreement.
	Given that this was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it's hardly surprising that there was French opposition.
	Where diplomacy had failed, the Royal Navy had to succeed.
	It's one thing declaring a writ that people may no longer profit from the trading of human beings, it's another thing to enforce that.
	Enter the West African Squadron.
	The West Africa Squadron was a detachment of the Royal Navy that was given the task of blockading Africa, the continent, to make sure that slave traders were not taking slaves to the Americas.
	Needless to say, in 1807, there was only a token force performing this operation, comprising of two ships.
	This number was increased to five ships until the War of 1812 with the United States.
	But after 1815, with Britain victorious in Europe and supreme at sea, the Royal Navy turned its attention back to the challenge.
	The institution of slavery was formally abolished in the British Empire in 1833.
	And by the 1850s, around 25 vessels and 2,000 officers and men were on the station, supported by nearly a thousand crewmen, experienced fishermen recruited as sailors from what is now the coast of modern Liberia.
	It's worth noting that this was not a pleasant job, and the mortality rate was five times higher compared with fleets in the Mediterranean or in home waters.
	To help incentivise the crew, money was actually given to each crew per slave that they freed.
	But there was a real zeitgeist in Britain for the abolition of slavery.
	For example, the pursuit and capture of slave ships became celebrated naval engagements, widely reported back in peacetime Britain.
	They became a source of national pride, so it's no wonder that many of the crews really did have an evangelical zeal about the anti-slavery patrolling.
	However, I don't want to give the impression that this was all for humanitarian reasons.
	There's no doubt that Britain in her foreign policy used her anti-slavery laws as a stick with which to beat her opponents, primarily the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who refused to conform to these demands.
	Britain demanded Spain, Portugal and the very new nation of Brazil to declare slave trading to be piracy.
	And while these nations paid lip service to these principles, they failed to enforce them, which led to a British blockade of Brazil by 1850, which of course forced the nascent Brazilian Empire to capitulate.
	And it didn't end there.
	In the 1860s, David Livingstone reports of Arab atrocities against enslaved Africans stirred up the interest of the British public, reviving the flagging abolitionist movement.
	Throughout the 1870s, the Navy attempted to suppress this abominable Eastern trade at Zanzibar in particular.
	Needless to say, the British Navy continued their mission against the slavers across the Indian Ocean.
	The abolition of slavery became the British project.
	It captured the hearts and minds of the entire country, from the highest lord to the lowest peasant.
	This is certainly how the British saw it.
	For example, this spirit of chivalry, we see it in acts of heroism by land and sea in fights against the slave trade.
	Alfred Tennyson.
	The unwear, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.
	William Leckie.
	All of this was done against the vested financial interests of hundreds of thousands of people.
	Entire nations were against the idea of abolishing slavery and the slave trade.
	The very notion was alien to the human existence until Britain made it happen.
	In the 19th century, if you saw a ship bearing down on you, flying this flag, and you were a slave trader, you knew that this flag stood for liberty.
	This was the flag of a nation that defied human convention for a point of principle and spent its blood, sweat, tears and treasure to enforce it on the world.
	This is the flag of the nation that accepted the absolute moral truth that slavery is wrong.
	No matter what riches can be amassed, no matter what power can be gained, no matter the cost, slavery had to be abolished.
	That was the British Crusade.
	When Britain held the reins of world power, that is what she did with it.
	So Frankie, to be honest with you, when you say, we have streets named after slave owners, we have profited from a vile crime and feel no shame.
	It is British people that don't learn languages or British history.
	Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.
	I have to concur.
	British people apparently do not learn British history because Britain's involvement in the slave trade is one of the most proud moments any nation could have had in their history.
	I want to make one thing crystal clear, Frankie.
	live in a world without slavery because of Britain.

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