Britain’s slavery debt

These are difficult days for those who ascribe to the Hovis advert version of Britain’s bloodstained history.

At the  Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa, the UK government is resisting calls from Caribbean nations, once ruled by the Brits, for slavery reparations.

I’ve written about these issues previously,  for example, here and here.

When it comes to Britain’s imperialist past, well, it hasn’t gone away, you know.

Frankie Boyle once acerbically observed that the Commonwealth itself was like having a WhatsApp group for people who once had been chained up in your basement!

Nailed it.

The fluffy self-serving narrative that is dominant in current British discourse about slavery and Britain’s role in it is that they’re the good guys.

After all, they banned the Atlantic trade in the middle passage in 1807.

Inevitably, the reality of that period was more complex and messy.

Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, argued in his book “Slavery and Capitalism” (1944) that although there were genuine abolitionists in Britain, the state and establishment realised that the trade was no longer in their economic interests.

Even 80 years ago, he wasn’t in the market for the Hovis advert school of British imperialism.

Thomas Harding’s brilliant book White Debt  (2022) states that even after Britain outlawed the trade, the buying and selling of enslaved people continued within the British colonies of Barbados, Jamaica and Demerara.

I wonder how many young Brits know even the basic facts about the Demerara uprising and the tragic, heroic figure of Jack Gladstone who led the rebellion against their enslavers.

The slaves made sure that their bid for freedom was entirely peaceful.

Suffice it to say it was crushed with typical British brutality.

There is a Tartan variant of the fluffy narrative in that Scotland played a minor role in the slave trade and only after 1707.

This groundbreaking analogy, edited by Professor Tom Devine, destroys that comforting yarn.

Chapter three specifically deals with the Scottish slave plantations in the Leeward Islands from 1660 onwards.

17th century Scotland was an enthusiastic imperialist and up to their sporrans in the slave trade.

Then there is a great humanitarian hero of Fair Caledonia, Robert Burns.

He was delighted when he secured a job in a slave plantation in Jamaica in 1786 and booked his passage.

In a letter to a friend, Burns described his new employment as being “a poor Negro driver”.

He was days away from boarding The Nancy in Greenock, bound for Savanna La Mar, Jamaica.

Freedom Come all Ye.

Really?

Professor Devine’s work revealed (Chapter 8 Nicholas Draper) that Scotland had a disproportionate number of recompensed slave owners.

The author of that chapter also noted that Ireland was “wildly underrepresented among slave owners” (P 174).

That’s hardly surprising given we were colonised, something that a few in modern Scotland pretend to be now.

As often with good journalism, forensic historiography should follow the money.

If you paid into HMRC at any time up to 2015, you were helping to clear the debt that Britain took on in 1835 to compensate slave owners for the loss of their “property.”

The £20m at the time represented 40% of the government’s annual income and 5% of the country’s GDP.

For the avoidance of doubt, the enslaved people who were freed under the Slavery Abolition Act did not receive a penny.

Now, their ancestors want this to be addressed.

Britain’s head of state, Charles Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a poster child for consanguinity, muttered a platitude about “painful history”.

Overall, this issue at CHOGM, in part, represents Britain’s inability to come to terms with the period in its history that vastly contributed to it being “great”.

Their place in history as the first country to industrialise cannot be disentangled from the vast wealth it accumulated from the industrial transportation and enslavement of millions of Africans across the Atlantic.

The lower part of the featured image isn’t something that most Brits would recognise.

After all, they’ve always been the good guys.

Right?

40 thoughts on “Britain’s slavery debt”

  1. Ireland’s relationship with slavery and the slave-trade was far from unblemished. In its most blatant manifestation, a number of slaves were still being held in the country up to the mid-eighteenth century and the famous Somerset case. Brought over from the Americas or the Caribbean, they may not have been subjected to the terrible conditions of slaves in their countries of origin but they were still denied the same rights as their white owners—still referred to and seen as property. ‘A Negro Boy and Slave, called Brazill, the property of William Nicholson, Esq., has been missing since Thursday evening last’, ran one notice in a Dublin newspaper in 1756.

    Reply
  2. At first glance the concept of reparations has its attraction. But if restitution is to be meaningful, just and significant, who would pay for it? It would have to be the tax-payer. Descendants of child chimney sweeps; descendants of crippled mill workers and war veterans; descendants of famine survivors; and, in fact, descendants of slaves would all be conscripted to expiate crimes in which they played no part.

    Reply
  3. RE: the debt that was finally paid off in 2012 – the people who were the beneficiaries of these payments(I.e. the slave owners) are forensically documented.. I live in the south of England where vast swathes of land are owned by a tiny cabal of Lords amd Earls, I have visited a couple of their estates recently and their wealth is truly ‘off the radar’. (Think palaces, classic works of art, 50 to 100 classic cars and private helicopters) Much of this wealth can be traced back through those aforementioned accounts so amy reparations discussions should begin with taking those payments back and removing the 1000s year old silver spoons from their future offspring. The ‘debate’ is already being framed as should the current uk tax payer pay up but this would meant that people who never ever benefited would be paying. Indeed many current UK taxpayers were actually decended from slaves so to ask them to pay seems extemely off.

    Reply
    • The Bank of England has the full list of beneficiaries and amounts paid out.
      It wouldn’t take much to workout just how much these families and institutions have benefitted from those payments.
      Surely asking them to both dig deep and publicly denounce their forefathers actions would be a start to ending this one and for all?
      After all Slavery is till prevalent even now in the modern era .
      Perhaps any monies raised could got to ending that rather than enriching people who have not been adversely affected by it what over 2 Centuries later?

      Reply
  4. The Irish enslaved the Welsh, formerly known as Romano-Britons including St Patrick and weakened the Welsh kingdoms so much during the withdrawal of the Romans that the English were able to conquer and carve out the English kingdoms. This disaster has endured for almost 2000 years and ever since the Welsh have been a second class, marginalised community in their own occupied country. Their culture has been destroyed from Glasgow to Land’s End where it once flourished. Nobody has even the awareness of the damage done, that’s how effectively this has all been memory holed. The Irish slave trade had so thoroughly destroyed this nation that the Irish ought to pay reparations for 2000 years of damages.
    At least the English actually ended slavery worldwide and paid a fortune to do it, and it’s sailors sacrificed their lives to enforce anti slavery. The Irish have no such redeeming history.

    Reply
  5. St.Patrick was himself a slave taken from British Shores by Irish Slavers.
    The term Slaves derives from Slavs , who themselves were victims of a global phenomenon that has blighted humanity from the get go.
    Most of the slave trade Britain was involved in was already Nup an running before ships from these shores ever set sail into the great unknown and especially in Africa where the threat of both disease and violence stopped slave traders from venturing into the interior of Africa.
    Most of the slaves whom had already been taken as such from stronger Tribes were sold on the Shorelines.
    This trade has also continued into the modern era where slaves from North Africa could still be bought and sold in the oil rich Middle East up until very recently.
    Britain was the first to put a stop to it much to the disappointment of many uninformed souls who seem to think we both invented the trade and were the worst of it.
    Which by the way we didn’t and aren’t.
    How anyone in the modern era can be held accountable for actions not taken in their name or to the benefit of themselves is frankly beyond my comprehension.
    It seems to me that some would rather use it as a stick to beat the U.K. with rather than accept the fact most large ,powerful Nations and tribes for that matter (the Masai Tribe who are held up toady as a magnificent example of African culture were among the worst culprits of slavery back in the day btw) were guilty of such things at one point or another in their history.
    St.Patrick is one of if not the most venerated people in the whole history of Ireland yet he himself was as stated previously enslaved by the very same peoples who now celebrate him as one of their own.

    That ship has sailed Phil and it’s high time we all moved on and celebrated the fact that despite the massive drawbacks of the past we can now at least celebrate our diversity and culture we all now share as a result of it.

    Well most of us anyway.

    Reply
    • An Estimated 12.5 million slaves were taken in the Transatlantic Slave Trade .
      In 2021 there were an estimated 50 million people living in Slavery Worldwide.
      Surely it would be far more productive if every Nation concentrated on the present than focusing on the long distant past?

      Reply
      • I would be interested to know just how much International Aid the U.K. / Britain has raised and dished out both by means of Government Taxation and secondly by Charitable means by the British Public since the abolishment of the Slave Trade.
        I will hazard a guess it runs into the Tens of billions if not hundreds of billions when inflation is factored in.
        Yes we have a very sordid past which thankfully is well documented however you seldom hear of the Charitable side of the wider British Public when it comes to Famine Relief or Natural Disaster Relief from the generous persons in the street.
        No what certain sections of Society want to do is purely focus on the negative to give a one eyed view of often multifaceted issues.
        If anyone has them to hand that could be an interesting read on the situation.

        Reply
  6. You guys are missing the feckin point. All countries should be held to account for their previous actions. Germany was!
    Most of the responses here are based on the idea that any reparations will come out of your own pocket, you very well be right. BUT wrongs have to be put right, that includes Irish slavery as well.

    To chastise the author who is 100% correct, just because you think it will cost you, is the approach the top table want you to take with any voice that dares to speak out. If you know someone is correct, just say it! Speak truthfully. If the challenge gets diluted then we all suffer.

    In 200 years time, we should hope to have 200 PMG’s challenging what is happening right now. Protect your children’s children, teach and learn from the past, this PMG post and your own sense of right and wrong moving forward.

    I agree in a fair society the beneficiaries of such atrocities should pay. BUT this is not a fair society as it protects the rich and the privileged.

    Reply
  7. I see the idea of reparations as a non starter. It is the taxpayers of today and the future who would be left paying it. I’ve never had a slave, and given given my ancestral lineage, I very much doubt that past generations on my family tree did either.
    If we were to go down that road, where does it end?
    An argument made is that Britain’s wealth was built on the back of slavery, and therefore all of us who have benefited from that wealth have a share of that reparation debt. So it could be argued that benefiting from that wealth includes using the NHS and from the day of our birth, we’re benefiting from slavery. Sending our children to school, would be benefiting from slavery. Where do we draw the line? Though obviously not from Britain, Barack Obama was educated at Harvard. Through connections to multiple donors, Harvard has extensive financial ties to, and profited from, slavery during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, so Obama benefited from Slavery.
    As Phil pointed out, Britain lost interest in being part of the slave trade, largely for economic reasons.
    Slave owners had to use just enough of their profits to provide shelter and food to their slaves, in order to keep them alive and working.
    I ‘post slavery’ Britain, particularly through the industrial revolution, the factory owners had to use just enough of their profits to pay their workers just enough, to provide them with shelter and food, in order to keep them alive and working. It was slavery in all but name, but with much improved logistics. Reparations would have the descendants of these ‘industrial slaves’ pay a debt through their taxes.
    Then there’s the whole other argument about all the other slave traders throughout the world, and let’s not pretend that the slave trade was only a ‘white crime’.
    For me reparations are a non starter, but let’s not dodge the issue of slavery. Slavery and the ‘warts and all’ truth of the British Empire should be a compulsory part of history education. We can’t change the past and we’re not guilty for the ‘sins of our fathers’, but we have duty to learn, improve and not repeat.

    Reply
  8. History is the least of the problem, today there are slaves throughout the world, they are cheaper than ever and estimated to be more of them than ever. Instead of bemoaning a past few of us alive benefitted from shouldn’t we try freeing the current victims of an atrocity that every race has been party to.

    Reply
  9. What a load of Drivel, I don’t see anyone saying the Arabs or the Africans etc should be paying reparations even though they did it on a far bigger scale than the Brits, another clueless cunt

    Reply
  10. So, we aren’t going to bother mentioning that Britain was literally the country that ended world slavery or that the debt from doing so wasn’t paid back until 2012. No, not mentioning that at all?.
    Ignorance truly is alive and kicking and the reporting here proves it. I’ve paid taxes for 42 years years towards that debt as I was born in 1970, considering I’ve never owned a slave I’m certainly not amused at the idea of paying more for an ill informed fad of undeserved white guilt. Get your facts right people, Barbary pirates raided the west coast for slaves decades before anyone from Britain purchased slaves from the already established slavers in Africa. Even the very word comes from the amount of slabs taken by the islamic traders that raided Europe and Africa alike.

    Reply
  11. I wasn’t around in slavery times,no slaves are alive from them times,nobody is suffering from something that happened 100s of years ago,the end,simply the end,only problem is leftys are cringe the end

    Reply
  12. I must take issue with your identification of the British ruler. As it is normal procedure to inherit the father’s surname, he should in fact be Charles Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluckburg.

    Reply
  13. Come on Phil, when you’re talking about ‘Britain’ paying historical reparations, the reality is the poor, underclass & working class would foot the bill because that’s were the money would come from either directly from their wages or by cuts. By all means pay those countries what they are due but they can take it from those who profited, starting with the big castle they all live in.
    Not a penny should be paid from the taxes or services of those who didn’t.

    Reply
  14. The people, and the companies, that were enriched by the compensation recieved for “loss of property (slaves)” should be the ones to pay reparation – companies such as Tate & Lyle, etc. Likewise, the banks that “laundered” the monies made by these companies and individuals. Just because the likes of the Glasgow Linen Bank, etc no longer exist per sé, they have been bought over by other banking institutions.

    Reply
  15. Slightly problematic when you think of consequences for individuals now though. Consider descendants of an gorta mor. You are saying if they live in Glasgow some of their taxes should be expropriated for reparations, whereas if the live in Donegal they shouldn’t. On what basis?

    I think if reparations are due then the wealthy across the planet should pay them (basically ‘to each according to their need, from each according to their means’). The wealthy of Ireland or Sweden should pay as much as the wealthy of England. After all, none of the individuals involved are alive. The shared responsibility we have is as humans.

    Reply
    • So you are saying that if you are wealthy then yiu are responsible for slavery? Haha,nobody today is responsible for slavery that happened hundreds of years ago,nobody today is gona accept responsibility,why should they?? I’ve got greek blood will the Egyptians be coughing up compo for me? How far back does compo go? Dopy!

      Reply
  16. While I’m not suggesting ignorance as any form of permission slip (everyone should read more) the incredibly selective version of ‘history’ that is taught in UK schools (especially in Engerlund, but the tartan version is scarcely any better) and thus the dominant narrative on the subject has a lot to answer for. Changing that from 1066, the Industrial Revolution and Gladstone ‘n’ Disraeli to something more inclusive of the indefensible bits would be a good starting point and a driver of change on this area of national shame. The other issue is of course timing: an alleged Labour government so conflicted over fairly taxing those most able to shoulder the burden that it considers freezing many of its old age pensioners to death a preferable option is unlikely to Do The Right Thing over this issue….

    Reply
  17. Wonderful article, but there are many facets to a diamond. You have to look at the whole picture Phil, the Irish famine, the Highland clearances as well as the slave trade. Bear in mind the first Slaves in the new colonies were Scots/ Irish indentured because of poverty. Yes it is great to take the knee, but look at the reality. The poor are such that the rich roll on, irrespective of skin colour, or any other issue.

    I believe that everyone has their fifteen minutes in the Sun, but to become woke, is to become stupid

    Reply
      • Woke folk love to see themselves as the “awake”, while everyone else is sleeping.
        They don’t get that they have simply taken up a far left position and then dismiss anything that differs from their view point.
        They self censor, and they would gladly censor all alternative views.
        Those who disagree with their view on gender identity are labeled fascists.
        Those with concerns about mass immigration are labeled racists.
        There’s an ‘ist’ or a ‘phobia’ ready to be thrown to silence all opponents.
        Their critical race theory, gender ideology and even this most modern manifestation of feminism, and all the intersections and intersectionalities attached to them, begin to look very like a modern and identity based Marxism.
        Oppressors and oppressed are no longer based on economic class, but rather on identity, with the head of the bourgeoisie now being the white heterosexual male. If that male is of Christian religious belief, then all the better.
        We’ve reached a point of madness that was shown quite well this week, when the ‘enlightened’ and “politically aware” woke folk took to the street based on their assumption of a miscarriage of justice in the shooting Chris Kaba. Their view was based entirely on Mr Kaba being black. How “aware” and “awake” did they look the next day.

        Reply
  18. Hi Phil, I’m a British tax payer and agree some recompense should be in play

    However the taxpayers money that was paid to slave owner companies should be the target.

    Massive companies today who benefited from the slave trade should cough up, not us tax payers who came from working class backgrounds

    Reply
  19. Coming from a family of miners all killed by their employment, basically white slaves of their day. Forgive me if I seem to lack compassion but the families who gorged on slavery should be responsible for repatriation not the normal working class, which we all know this is where it’s going! Paid by HMRC who stole it from us.

    Reply
  20. How anyone in Scotland can deny Scotland’s part in the slave trade and the plantations is beyond me. You only have to look at the north east coast of Barbados to work that one out! But maybe the facts don’t marry up with the ‘we are so outward looking and liberal ‘( in comparison to England particularly) narrative that so many try it insist.

    Reply
    • Ireland was depopulated to the tune of around 50% with many Irish women forced to breed with African slaves to create so called mulatto slaves. The Welsh and west country were subject to horrific raids from the barbary pirates from Africa ( which predates British involvement with the African slave trade apart from as victims), resulting in entire villages being taken and the depopulation of the Bristol channel area.
      So not necessarily sent over but taken by black slavers too. The real history of slavery is not all white man bad as we are often lead to believe.

      Reply
      • Ireland was depopulated by 50% owing to slavery? Really? Of course slavery goes way back, think of the Vikings, but you rather miss the point here. The absolute majority of transatlantic slave trade was instigated and maintained on an industrial scale by white Brits and Americans. It wasn’t mere opportunist raids by pirates, but a deeply ingrained racist superiority complex that stripped the African peoples of their humanity. The proof is indisputable and Britain (and other colonial nations) needs to face up and pay up!

        Reply
        • The transatlantic slave trade was instigated by black Africans enslaving each other. Europeans weren’t capable of enslaving Africans as they couldn’t adapt to the climate and enslave Africans themselves. Europeans never enslaved Africans they bought slaves. They took the opportunity to buy workers who could adapt to the agricultural conditions of the Americas as European indentured servants died en masse in a climate they weren’t suited to.
          “Industrial scale” is utterly meaningless to say. Deeply Ingrained racist superiority complex, again utterly meaningless devoid of any historical meaning whatsoever. You have no history to back that up its just rhetoric. I suspect everything you know on this subject comes from mass media and activists, no historical understanding or credentials at all to speak on this subject.
          Britain, the country that stopped slavery and had to force Africans to stop slavery shouldn’t give one penny and should assert itself after decades of accepting the lies of third worlders.

          Reply

Leave a Reply

error: Content is protected !!

Discover more from Phil Mac Giolla Bháin

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading