tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/slave-trade-15612/articles
Slave Trade – The Conversation
2024-01-08T13:35:06Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214692
2024-01-08T13:35:06Z
2024-01-08T13:35:06Z
From South Asia to Mexico, from slave to spiritual icon, this woman’s life is a snapshot of Spain’s colonization – and the Pacific slave trade history that books often leave out
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567986/original/file-20240105-21-aftxx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C291%2C2583%2C3402&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Catarina was revered in Puebla, Mexico – but devotion to her attracted Catholic authorities' disapproval after her death.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image from the collections of the Biblioteca Nacional de España</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jan. 5, 2024, marked 336 years since the passing of an extraordinary woman you have probably never heard of: Catarina de San Juan.</p>
<p>Her life reads like an epic. Born in South Asia during the early 17th century, she was captured by the Portuguese at age 8 and sold to Spaniards in the Philippines. Spanish merchants then <a href="https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/prodigios_catarina/tomo01.html">traded her across the Pacific to Mexico</a>, where she became a free woman and a spiritual icon, famous in the city of Puebla for her devotion to Catholicism. As <a href="https://as.tufts.edu/history/people/faculty/diego-luis">a scholar of colonial Latin America</a>, I believe she deserves to become a household name for anyone with even a passing interest in Asian American history or the history of slavery.</p>
<p>Catarina was one of the first Asians in the Americas – a focus of <a href="https://facultyprofiles.tufts.edu/diego-luis/publications">my historical research</a>, and <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674271784">the title of my recent book</a> – and arrived through a little-known slave trade that crossed the Pacific Ocean. In colonial Mexico, she lived in the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23055341?seq=1">nideaquínideallá</a>,” the “neither-from-here-nor-from-there”: a valley between acceptance and foreignness, an in-between state familiar to many migrants today.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A faded brown and tan map showing the Americas, Pacific Ocean and East and Southeast Asia." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=287&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=287&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=287&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568051/original/file-20240105-17-np0o2t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A map of ship routes across the Spanish Empire by 16th century cartographer Juan Lopez de Velasco.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1100~102700001:-Demarcacion-y-nauegaciones-de-Yndi?qvq=q:juan%20lopez%20de%20velasco;lc:JCBMAPS~1~1,JCB~3~3,JCBBOOKS~1~1,JCBMAPS~3~3,JCBMAPS~2~2,JCB~1~1&mi=35&trs=56">Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Life of Catarina</h2>
<p>The particulars of Catarina’s journey are quite unfamiliar, even for those who study the history of slavery. </p>
<p>Most people have heard of the <a href="https://www.slavevoyages.org/">transatlantic slave trade</a>, which lasted from the early 16th century to the mid- to late 19th century. It was responsible for the violent displacement of some 12.5 million Africans to the Americas.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/asian-slaves-in-colonial-mexico/1136CF8D42E50A4F5BA6DF10C091F6ED">transpacific slave trade</a>, on the other hand, remains largely unknown. From the late 16th to early 18th centuries, Spaniards forced some <a href="https://libros.colmex.mx/tienda/la-migracion-asiatica-en-el-virreinato-de-la-nueva-espana-un-proceso-de-globalizacion-1565-1700/">8,000-10,000 captives</a> onto rickety galleons, where they would endure a six-month odyssey from the Philippines to Mexico. The enslaved captives came from South, Southeast and East Asia, as well as East Africa. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A faded illustration of a green area by the sea, with a larger tree in the right foreground." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=669&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=669&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567787/original/file-20240103-15-qqsxu6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=669&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A painting of Acapulco port in present-day Mexico, where many ships carrying slaves landed, in 1628.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puerto_de_Acapulco_Boot_1628.png">Adrian Boot/Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After her capture, Catarina – whose name at birth was Mirra – <a href="https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/prodigios_catarina/tomo01.html">was taken to Kochi, India</a>, where she was baptized and received her Christian name. Later, in Manila, a young Spaniard stabbed and beat her within an inch of her life when she refused his advances. In her words, “Only the divine majesty knows what I went through.”</p>
<p>She only ended up on a galleon destined for Mexico because Captain Miguel de Sosa desired the service of a “chinita,” or little Asian girl. Yet he quickly realized that Catarina had uncommon virtues when she showed little regard for money or objects of material value. Sosa freed Catarina in his will.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A white stone church tower against an azure sky." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=957&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567782/original/file-20240103-29-y1kbqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1203&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Catarina’s burial place in Puebla, Mexico.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/fa%C3%A7ade-tower-church-of-la-compania-puebla-mexico-royalty-free-image/1207400074?phrase=catarina+de+san+juan&searchscope=image%2Cfilm&adppopup=true">bpperry/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
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<p>For the next six decades, she led a life of social isolation, abstinence, humility and rejection of material pleasures – what her admirers saw as an exemplary life of holy Catholic suffering. She lived entirely on charitable offerings and, according to <a href="https://repositorio.unam.mx/contenidos/compendio-de-la-vida-y-virtudes-de-la-venerable-catharina-de-san-juan-36?c=4yKEMp&d=false&q=*:*&i=1&v=1&t=search_0&as=0">one Jesuit observer</a>, wore only a “dark, wool dress” with “the crudest, the coarsest” cloak. Her modest lodgings were “filled with filthy critters.” </p>
<p>And she prayed. She prayed for water in drought, for Indigenous people dying of famine and disease, for ships lost at sea, for travelers braving the roads. She prayed for those who needed help the most.</p>
<p>Even as Catarina gained renown, some Spaniards questioned the sincerity of her devotion. Throughout Catarina’s life, detractors described her as a “trickster,” “a witch,” “untamed” and “unknowable,” while Spanish allies viewed her as evidence that all the world could be converted to Catholicism.</p>
<p>The Catholic priest who regularly heard her confessions was a Jesuit named Alonso Ramos. After Catarina died, he authored an enormous <a href="https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/prodigios_catarina/tomo01.html">three-volume biography</a> of her life, the longest text ever published in colonial Mexico. </p>
<p>Ramos turned an unlikely subject – a formerly enslaved South Asian woman – into a superhero of the colonial world. Catarina’s portrait, which appeared in Ramos’ first volume, became <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/25562">a popular relic</a>, and followers in Puebla converted her humble bedroom into an altar where Catholics could pray for her divine favor.</p>
<h2>Historical amnesia</h2>
<p>Why, then, do few people know about Catarina today?</p>
<p>The answer is twofold. First, <a href="https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/prodigios_catarina/tomo01.html">Ramos’ text</a> was considered controversial outside of Puebla because it depicted Catarina with powers reserved only for God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He describes her announcing prophecies, performing miracles, traveling in her dreams and regularly conversing with Jesus, whom she considered her celestial husband. </p>
<p>In short, Ramos had committed blasphemy. The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157239.003.0003">Inquisitions of Spain and Mexico</a> censored and burned his volumes shortly after publication. Inquisitors ended all devotion to Catarina’s image and took down the makeshift altar in her room.</p>
<p>Over time, the memory of the real Catarina morphed into something entirely different. Spaniards sometimes called her a “china,” the word colonists in Mexico used to refer to <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674271784">any Asian subject</a>. Today, though, the phrase “china poblana” – the Asian woman from Puebla – refers to <a href="https://theautry.org/exhibitions/story-china-poblana">a popular, coquettish style of Mexican dress</a>, with a patterned skirt, white blouse and shawl. </p>
<p>Virtually nothing about Catarina’s life has been preserved in the modern “china poblana,” which was invented in the 19th century. In fact, it connotes sexual confidence and national pride, two concepts that Catarina would have likely rejected.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of three women in full, brightly colored skirts standing by a doorway, as a man leans over on the side." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567775/original/file-20240103-25-yu1gq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Poblanas,’ by Carl Nebel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poblanas.jpg">María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Second, the field of Asian American history has been hesitant to peer south of the U.S. border, despite several <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/">noteworthy efforts</a>. Many people in the U.S. remain unaware that many Asian people live in Latin America and the Caribbean – indeed, that they have lived there for centuries longer than in the United States. Asians had been <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/asians-were-visiting-the-west-coast-of-america-in-1587">coming and going from the Americas</a> for over 200 years by the time the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.</p>
<p>Today, significant Asian populations inhabit nearly all Latin American and Caribbean nations, mostly due to later waves of immigration <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199730414-0294">and indentured servitude</a>. Brazil hosts the largest number of Japanese and Japanese descendants outside of Japan at around <a href="https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/latin/brazil/data.html">2 million</a>, and <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469607139/chinese-cubans/">the Chinatown in Havana, Cuba</a>, was once the largest in the Americas. Indo-Caribbean people are the first- or second-largest group on many Caribbean islands, including Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada.</p>
<p>Catarina de San Juan and the first Asians in the Americas challenge the traditional timeline and geography of Asian American history. Their stories also capture what many people who end up in the Americas have faced: the trauma of displacement.</p>
<p>As Catarina coped with the harsh realities of her new life, she once <a href="https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/prodigios_catarina/tomo01.html">told Ramos</a> that she frequently saw her parents in her spiritual visions. Sometimes, they were in purgatory, where Catholics believe their souls are purified before they can enter heaven. However, she most often envisioned them coming “in the company of the ship from the Philippines to the port of Acapulco, from where, on their knees, they came into my presence.” </p>
<p>Her pain and longing for a stolen family, a lost youth and a hazily remembered homeland were those of generations of Asian captives taken to the Americas. I believe that her extraordinary life merits long-overdue recognition.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214692/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Diego Javier Luis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Accounts of Asian American history often stop at the US border, but Asians were living in Latin America for centuries before the Declaration of Independence.
Diego Javier Luis, Assistant Professor of History, Tufts University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213419
2023-10-13T16:31:25Z
2023-10-13T16:31:25Z
Cardinal Newman: pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy
<p>One of the comforting stories the British told themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries was that they were implacably opposed to slavery.</p>
<p>Britons had decided “that the disgrace of slavery should not be suffered to remain part of our national system”, or so Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary at the moment of abolition, maintained. It was a claim willingly accepted by later generations. The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/slavery-abolition-act-1833">1833 Act</a> that abolished slavery in Britain’s Atlantic empire reflected the undivided national will.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/439452/the-interest-by-michael-taylor/9781529110982">recent scholarship</a> casts doubt on that verdict. The West Indian planters, who held hundreds of thousands in bondage, were well-connected and influential. The freeing of their captive workers did not seem to them inevitable. Many abolitionists thought the same, despairing at the entrenched power of the slave masters. </p>
<p>When slavery went, it went because a series of political crises in Britain splintered the pro-slavery Tory coalition that had dominated politics for decades. It ended too because <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984301">resistance by the enslaved</a> in the Caribbean convinced legislators in London that slavery was no longer sustainable. But not all commentators were persuaded that slavery had to go. </p>
<h2>Newman and the Oxford Movement</h2>
<p>One of them was <a href="https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/content/st-john-henry-newman">John Henry Newman</a> (1801-1890), fellow of Oriel College Oxford and the vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford’s university church. </p>
<p>Newman was one of the most significant churchmen of the age. Eventually received into the Roman Catholic church in 1845, he became the most influential English Catholic of the 19th century. He was made a cardinal in 1879, and in 2019 he was canonised. For that reason, Newman’s name is attached to dozens of Roman Catholic schools and colleges in Britain, as well as a university in the West Midlands.</p>
<p>But before his conversion, he was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, a high church group that wanted to renew the institutional authority of Anglicanism by emphasising its rootedness in the early church. Appealing to scripture, the path favoured by Evangelical Anglicans, was dismissed as insufficient. </p>
<p>There were political consequences. Evangelicals of the time tended towards anti-slavery. The clergymen who made up the Oxford Movement did not. Indeed, notes prepared by John Henry Newman for a <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/display/10.1093/actrade/9780199200900.book.1/actrade-9780199200900-book-1">sermon at Oxford in 1835</a> reveal that he was profoundly hostile to the idea of emancipation.</p>
<h2>Preaching against emancipation</h2>
<p>Abolitionist rhetoric about human brotherhood was brushed aside. “It is a very easy thing,” Newman told his congregation, “to talk of loving all men”. But could his congregation, were they to be whisked from their cloistered lives in Oxford to the West Indies, do so in practice? Newman thought not:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is said to be one of the most difficult tasks of our Ministers to persuade white men to receive the Holy Communion with blacks. I do not say such reluctance is a light sin – it is a serious one – yet perhaps we should feel strongly tempted to it if we lived in the countries where they are to be found. I do not doubt we should.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An aversion to communing with black people was, Newman suggested, quite understandable. It would require white people to hurdle an insurmountable racial barrier.</p>
<p>Having established, in his own mind at least, that racial repulsion was instinctual, Newman turned to the matter of slavery. As was usual with clerical defenders of slavery, Newman reached for the epistles of St Paul. Taking <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Letter-of-Paul-to-the-Corinthians">Paul’s</a> first letter to the Corinthians as his text, the vicar of St Mary’s came to this conclusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now we find in these words a doctrine stated, very startlingly and unpalatable to men of this day, but which is most clear and certain and contained in other parts of Scripture – viz that slavery is a condition of life ordained by God…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contemporary abolitionists who drew upon the gospel when criticising slavery did so without warrant. They were guilty of uttering “idle and false words”. Warming to his theme, Newman went on to rail against reformers more generally. Their talk of “liberty, equality, rights, privileges, and the like” was offensive to God.</p>
<h2>Assessing Newman</h2>
<p>Historical figures, it is often said, need to be assessed by the standards of their own time. Yet John Henry Newman’s venomous sermon, coming little more than a year after the end of slavery in the British sugar islands, reminds us that the “standards of the time” were plural. </p>
<p>Many Britons of the 1830s gloried in abolition, but there were many others who were content with slavery and racial subjugation. And there were some, like Newman, who were willing to say so in provocative ways.</p>
<p>Newman’s words from 1835 have been forgotten, but John Henry Newman has not. Students and educators at those institutions that bear his name might want to consider whether it should continue to be so attached.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213419/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Many Catholic schools in Britain retain the name John Henry Newman, despite his opposition to abolishing slavery.
Chris Evans, Professor of History, University of South Wales
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/212469
2023-09-01T15:51:39Z
2023-09-01T15:51:39Z
Tory MP’s historic family links to slavery raise questions about Britain’s position on reparations
<p>“Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery.” So noted the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/22/uk-cannot-ignore-calls-for-slavery-reparations-says-leading-un-judge-patrick-robinson">eminent Jamaican international jurist Judge Patrick Robinson</a>, when launching the 115-page <a href="https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Quantification-of-Reparations-for-Transatlantic-Chattel-Slavery.pdf">Brattle Report</a> in June 2023. </p>
<p>The economic consultancy, The Brattle Group, was asked to draw up a report estimating the scale of reparations that should be paid for the chattel trade between 1510 to 1870, covering 31 countries that engaged in transatlantic slavery. This would include compensation for loss of life and liberty, uncompensated labour, personal injury, mental pain and anguish and gender-based violence. </p>
<p>The Brattle Report estimated that the UK – which was the <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/">biggest slave trading nation up to 1807</a> and did not abolish slave ownership in the empire <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act">until 1834</a> – should pay a reparations bill of £18.5 trillion. To put that into context, the estimated annual GDP for the UK for 2023 is about <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp">£2.5 trillion</a> and the entire worth of the UK – its land, infrastructure and everything in it was estimated by the Office for National Statistics at <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/bulletins/nationalbalancesheet/2021">£10.7 trillion in 2020</a>. </p>
<p>But then centuries of value derived from the trade in human beings produced for Britain an equally unimaginable sum. The British government <a href="https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-collection-of-slavery-compensation-1835-43">borrowed £20 million</a> in 1833 to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40% of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5% of British GDP. According to the Treasury, the loan was only <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/17/government-finished-paying-uks-slavery-debt-2015/">finally paid off in 2015</a>.</p>
<p>The wealth created by the slave trade and the plantations continues to shape British society to this day and, in some cases, remains in the hands of families whose ancestors were involved in buying and selling slaves and running enterprises based on slave labour. One example is the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/hes-the-mp-with-the-downton-abbey-lifestyle-but-the-shadow-of-slavery-hangs-over-the-gilded-life-of-richard-drax">Drax family of the Charborough Estate</a> in Dorset, which is now owned by Conservative MP, Richard Drax.</p>
<h2>Drax family legacy</h2>
<p>For the past three years I <a href="https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/paul-lashmar">have been researching</a> – and have just completed – an unauthorised history of the Drax family. The family appears to be unique in having an unbroken history of owning sugar plantations in the Caribbean from their inception until the present day. </p>
<p>Their ancestor James Drax (c.1609-1662) was one of the first settlers in Barbados in 1627 and is credited with inventing the British sugar industry in the 1630s. Around 1640 he developed the integrated sugar plantation. It was a highly efficient industrial process, but required a coordinated workforce working from before sunrise to sunset. </p>
<p>James Drax was the first – or one of the first – planters in the British empire to move to a workforce of enslaved Africans where the children of slaves were held in perpetuity. His descendant – the Conservative MP for South Dorset, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, (who prefers to be known as Richard Drax) heads the family that owns the vast Charborough Estate and the Drax Hall Plantation in Barbados. </p>
<p>Although he is a public figure, Richard Drax and his family are very private, not least about their wealth which is locked into a number of trusts. As head of the family, the MP lives in the <a href="https://www.thedicamillo.com/house/charborough-park/">17th-century grade 1 listed Charborough House</a> with its 1,500 acres of parkland all tucked away behind the three miles of the “Great Wall of Dorset”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Charborough House in Dorset" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545540/original/file-20230830-17-3otfep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charborough House in Dorset: the Drax family’s country seat.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nirvana/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writing for The Observer and Sunday Mirror in 2020, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/hes-the-mp-with-the-downton-abbey-lifestyle-but-the-shadow-of-slavery-hangs-over-the-gilded-life-of-richard-drax">I and my co-writer revealed</a> that he is the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons. After detailed research, we were able to estimate that the MP and his family owned at least 15,000 acres of farmland, heathland and woodland in Dorset plus a farming estate and grouse moor in Yorkshire. </p>
<p>We calculated that his 125-plus properties and 23.5 square miles of Dorset land are worth at least £150 million. We also revealed that he had personally inherited the Drax Hall plantation in Barbados, which was valued in 2020 as worth £4.7 million. In April 2023 they cropped sugar there, as they had done since the 1630s.</p>
<p>Richard Drax has resisted engaging with the reparation debate. His “slavery was wrong” comments have not sufficed for the ancestors of people enslaved in Barbados. In 2020 when we raised the question of slavery and his ancestors with him, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/wealthy-mp-urged-to-pay-up-for-his-familys-slave-trade-past">he told us</a>: “I am keenly aware of the slave trade in the West Indies, and the role my very distant ancestor played in it is deeply, deeply regrettable, but no one can be held responsible today for what happened many hundreds of years ago. This is a part of the nation’s history, from which we must all learn.”</p>
<p>The distinguished Barbadian historian of slavery, Sir Hilary Beckles (who is also the chair of the <a href="https://caricomreparations.org/">Caribbean Reparations Commission</a> representing 20 countries) <a href="https://caricomreparations.org/caribbean-campaigners-demand-tory-mp-pays-reparations-to-barbados-because-family-plantation-held-slaves-from-1640-to-1836/">told the Sunday Mirror</a>: “It is no answer for Richard Drax to say it has nothing to do with him when he is the owner and the inheritor. They should pay reparations.” </p>
<h2>Mounting pressure for reparations</h2>
<p>In the three years since I first wrote about Richard Drax MP, the call for reparations has gotten much louder. Globally, Drax has come to symbolise those whose families benefited from slavery but rebuff formal apologies and paying reparations.</p>
<p>Pressure has grown on him and in October 2022 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/26/barbados-tory-mp-pay-reparations-family-slave-richard-drax-caribbean-sugar-plantation">he flew to Barbados</a> to meet with the country’s prime minister, Mia Mottley. The Barbados government believes that – as a descendant of a founder plantation owner, a British MP – his wealth and his attitude towards responsibility for reparations symbolises everything that was wrong with the way Britain treated Barbados and the colonies. </p>
<p>In the meeting between Drax and Mia Mottley, he was offered two options, one a package of reparations including all or a substantial part of Drax Hall. If he refused, Mia Mottley said they could take legal action over the issue. Drax himself has declined to comment and his office didn’t return attempts to contact him again this week. Meanwhile, other families such as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/british-slave-owners-family-makes-public-apology-in-grenada">Trevelyans</a> and the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-66606975">Gladstones</a> from the <a href="https://www.heirsofslavery.org/">Heirs of Slavery group</a> have come to represent those who recognise where their family wealth came from and feel the need to apologise and make some kind of reparations payment.</p>
<p>The Brattle report is an important waymark in making the case for reparations, as it is described as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/aug/21/dont-listen-to-the-critics-reparations-for-slavery-will-right-historical-wrongs">most comprehensive</a> financial analysis of transatlantic slavery. It estimates that the 31 enslaving countries procured 801.58 million life years of free labour on which they were able to prosper. </p>
<p>The momentum for reparations grows. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/22/uk-cannot-ignore-calls-for-slavery-reparations-says-leading-un-judge-patrick-robinson">Judge Robinson says</a> that the UK government needs change from its position of refusing to apologise. “I believe that the United Kingdom will not be able to resist this movement towards the payment of reparations: it is required by history and it is required by law.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Lashmar is a member of the Labour Party </span></em></p>
Some UK families whose wealth largely derives from the transatlantic slave trade have agreed to pay reparations.
Paul Lashmar, Reader in Journalism, City, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/212128
2023-08-24T12:32:32Z
2023-08-24T12:32:32Z
Slavery stole Africans’ ideas as well as their bodies: reparations should reflect this
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544349/original/file-20230823-19-h76ser.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=33%2C25%2C5606%2C3534&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jamaican hero: a statue to Sam Sharpe, who led the Baptist War slave rebellion in 1831.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Debbie Ann Powell/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a speech to mark Unesco’s campaign for the <a href="https://www.unesco.org/en/days/slave-trade-remembrance">Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition</a>, UN secretary-general António Guterres <a href="https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-03-27/secretary-generals-remarks-the-general-assembly-event-marking-the-international-day-of-remembrance-of-the-victims-of-slavery-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade">told the United Nations general assembly</a> earlier this year that the inequalities created by 400 years of the transatlantic chattel trade persist to this day. “We can draw a straight line from the centuries of colonial exploitation to the social and economic inequalities of today,” he said.</p>
<p>Guterres’ words were echoed by Judge Patrick Robinson of the international court of justice, who has called for the UK to recognise the need to pay reparations for its part in the slave trade, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/22/uk-cannot-ignore-calls-for-slavery-reparations-says-leading-un-judge-patrick-robinson">telling The Guardian</a> on August 22 that: “Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery.”</p>
<p>Investment into the trafficking of African people in the Caribbean created a lucrative economic system that helped Britain develop into a global economic superpower. The consequences continue to be felt today – not only in vast inequities in the distribution of wealth and resources, but also in the denial and effacement of the people of African descent whose skills and knowledge helped power that industrial and societal transformation. </p>
<p>This year marks the 240th anniversary of arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property. The so-called <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cort">“Cort process”</a>, patented by the financier Henry Cort between 1783 and 1784, has been called one of the most important innovations of the British industrial revolution. Yet <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991">recently published findings</a> show the process was first developed by 76 black metallurgists, many of them enslaved, in an 18th-century foundry in Jamaica. </p>
<p>The foundry was forcibly shut down for presenting too much of a threat to Britain’s economic and political domination. We know some of these black metallurgists’ names: Devonshire, Mingo, Mingo’s son, Friday, Captain Jack, Matt, George, Jemmy, Jackson, Will, Bob, Guy, Kofi and Kwasi.</p>
<h2>Stolen heritage</h2>
<p>African enslavement may be considered one of the quintessential depictions of global theft and destruction in human history. In 2018, <a href="https://www.about-africa.de/images/sonstiges/2018/sarr_savoy_en.pdf">Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s report</a> on the restitution of cultural heritage pointed out that 90% of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural heritage is held outside the continent. From the kidnapping of Africans from their homelands, the eradication of native populations, to the forced loss of African culture, history and identity, the damage that chattel enslavement has done continues to permeate development and economic discourse the world over. </p>
<p>But as the <a href="https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/">global reparations movement</a> gains traction it opens a new discourse about the debt owed for that which was stolen. It also highlights the need to create a robust educational system aimed at highlighting the realities of slavery and colonialism. The history of the black metallurgists is just one example of the contributions of people of African descent to the wealth of European and US societies today.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Temperate House at Kew Gardens in London" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544351/original/file-20230823-23-pubp4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Large-scale iron production, such as Temperate House at Kew Gardens in London, was made possible by innovations developed by ironworkers in Jamaica.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/temperate-house-1859-designed-by-architect-249074416">Kiev.Victor/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For much of recent history, institutions in the global north have dominated the narrative of where and who drives innovation. But history – and history taught in schools – must also recognise and name enslaved Africans as true innovators of their times. In <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/22/desantis-slavery-curriculum/">Florida</a>, the governor and Republican presidential hopeful, Ron DeSantis, has <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-florida-standards-teach-black-people-benefited-slavery-taught-usef-rcna95418">introduced new educational standards</a> which teach that some enslaved people benefited from slavery. History must challenge this constant narrative of black bodies merely being machines.</p>
<h2>Truth and reparation</h2>
<p>In the search for truth and reparation, truth of brutalities inflicted alone is not enough. There must also be truth about the pioneers and innovators of colonised and enslaved societies – such as the 76 black metallurgists – whose ideas changed the trajectory of civilisation and who laid the building blocks for growth, change and development. </p>
<p>The simultaneous theft and denial of black innovation has served a purpose for the global north. The Caricom Reparations Commission, notes that one of the <a href="https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/">main policies of the European colonisers</a> was that there should be “not a nail to be made in the colonies”. A fundamental part of the global north’s accumulation has been to create captive markets and maintain those markets post-independence. Colonies and post-independence states alike have been actively deprived of the developmental apparatus to create a thriving society. </p>
<p>Resource extraction during this period was not merely centred on sugar, tobacco and cotton. It also drew on intellect and innovation which was stolen from the colonies and used to help build the prosperous nations of the global north. </p>
<p>Reparation is not only about money. It is also about recognition. Alongside the names of freedom fighters such as <a href="https://jis.gov.jm/information/heroes/samuel-sharpe/">Sam Sharpe</a> and <a href="https://jis.gov.jm/information/heroes/nanny-of-the-maroons/">Queen Nanny</a>, children must learn the names of black innovators. Part of truth and reconciliation must be this re-centring of black identity as part of a decolonised education system across former colonial and colonising states. </p>
<p>It must be a curriculum which includes the names and identities of enslaved African people whose skill and knowledge both challenged and transformed the global industrial and economic system. Through this, descendants will gain an understanding of the importance of their own history and ancestral cultures and all it contributed.</p>
<p>Recognition of the theft of black intellectual property provides a starting point for quantifying the harms that were done and continue to resonate to this day. This is necessary for any process of truth and reconciliation. </p>
<p>Quantification and monetary reparation, while necessary, are not in themselves enough. They must be combined with institutional recognition through an education system that acknowledges the role of enslaved African people in both challenging and driving forward the economies, scientific innovations and cultures of European enslavers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212128/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Britain’s industrial revolution was built on slavery: both black labour and intellectual property.
Jenny Bulstrode, Lecturer in History of Science and Technology, UCL
Sheray Warmington, Honorary Research Associate, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205801
2023-08-03T12:24:31Z
2023-08-03T12:24:31Z
Dismantling the myth that ancient slavery ‘wasn’t that bad’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540252/original/file-20230731-27-oenyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C6%2C2101%2C1403&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A relief depicting a row of captives, carved into the Sun Temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/relief-depicting-a-row-of-captives-sun-temple-abu-royalty-free-image/630961225?phrase=ancient+slave&adppopup=true">Richard Maschmeyer/ Design Pics via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As someone who researches <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9b5HSS4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world</a>, especially in the Bible, I often hear remarks like, “Slavery was totally different back then, right?” “Well, it couldn’t have been that bad.” “Couldn’t slaves buy their freedom?”</p>
<p>Most people in the United States or Europe in the 21st century are more knowledgeable about the transatlantic slave trade, and live in societies <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/monstrous-intimacies">deeply shaped by it</a>. People can see the effects of modern enslavement everywhere from <a href="https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12512.30723">mass incarceration</a> and <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/the-color-of-law/">housing segregation</a> to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/686631">voting habits</a>.</p>
<p>The effects of ancient slavery, on the other hand, aren’t as tangible today – and most Americans have only a vague idea of what it looked like. Some people might think of biblical stories, such as Joseph’s jealous brothers <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2037%3A18-36&version=NLT">selling him into slavery</a>. Others might picture movies like “Spartacus,” or the myth that enslaved people <a href="https://www.britannica.com/video/226777/did-enslaved-people-build-the-pyramids#">built the Egyptian pyramids</a>.</p>
<p>Because these kinds of slavery took place so long ago and weren’t based on modern racism, some people have the impression that <a href="https://answersingenesis.org/bible-history/the-bible-and-slavery/">they weren’t as harsh or violent</a>. That impression makes room for public figures like Christian theologian and analytic philosopher William Lane Craig to argue that <a href="https://youtu.be/hL-zJzE5clA?t=2989">ancient slavery was actually beneficial</a> for enslaved people.</p>
<p>Modern factors <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224177/slaverys-capitalism/">like capitalism</a> and <a href="https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism">racist pseudoscience</a> did shape the transatlantic slave trade in uniquely harrowing and enduring ways. Enslaved labor, for example, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-original-laissez-faire-economists-loved-slavery">shaped economists’ theories</a> about the “free market” and global trade.</p>
<p>But to understand slavery from that era – or to combat slavery today – we also need to understand the longer history of involuntary labor. As <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9b5HSS4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">a scholar of ancient slavery and early Christian history</a>, I often encounter three myths that stand in the way of understanding ancient slavery and how systems of enslavement have evolved over time.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A statue shows a man and woman clutching hands, with a child, whose head has fallen off the relief, standing between them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538185/original/file-20230719-23-djqajf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Roman funerary relief of the Decii, a family of formerly enslaved people from the 2nd century. Husband and wife clasp their hands while their son, holding a dove, stands between them. The inscription names them as A. Decius Spinther, Decia Spendusa and A Decius Felicio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/funerary-relief-of-the-decii-a-family-of-freed-slaves-news-photo/525482317?adppopup=true">Werner Forman/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Myth #1: There is one kind of ‘biblical slavery’</h2>
<p>The collection of texts that ended up in the Bible represent centuries of different writers from across the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, often in very different circumstances, making it hard to generalize about how slavery worked in “biblical” societies. Most importantly, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171921/how-the-bible-became-holy/">the Hebrew Bible</a> – what Christians call “the Old Testament” – emerged primarily in the ancient Near East, while the New Testament emerged in the early Roman Empire.</p>
<p>Forms of enslavement and involuntary labor in the ancient Near East, for example – areas such as Egypt, Syria and Iran – were not always chattel slavery, in which enslaved people were considered property. Rather, some people were temporarily enslaved <a href="https://www.asor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Richardson-ANE-Today-October-2021.pdf">to pay off their debts</a>. </p>
<p>However, this was not the case for all people enslaved in the ancient Near East, and certainly not <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/classical-studies-general/slavery-roman-world?format=PB&isbn=9780521535014">under the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire</a>, where millions were trafficked and forced to labor in domestic, urban and agricultural settings. </p>
<p>Because of the range of periods and cultures involved in the production of biblical literature, there is no such thing as a single “biblical slavery.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting shows a group of men in robe-like outfits with wavy hair pointing to a smaller blond child among them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538182/original/file-20230719-29-vcvvoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph sold by his brothers, 1636-1641. Found in the collection of the Musei Capitolini, Rome.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/joseph-sold-by-his-brothers-1636-1641-found-in-the-news-photo/464428495?adppopup=true">Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nor is there a single “biblical perspective” on slavery. The most anyone can say is that no biblical texts or writers explicitly condemn the institution of enslavement or the practice of chattel slavery. More robust challenges to slavery by Christians started to emerge in the fourth century C.E., in the writings of figures like St. <a href="https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2019/01/24/a-fuller-extract-from-gregory-of-nyssa-on-the-evils-of-slavery/">Gregory of Nyssa</a>, a theologian who lived in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey.</p>
<h2>Myth #2: Ancient slavery was not as cruel</h2>
<p>Like Myth #1, this myth often comes from conflating some Near Eastern and Egyptian practices of involuntary labor, such as debt slavery, with Greek and Roman chattel slavery. By focusing on other forms of involuntary labor in specific ancient cultures, it is easy to overlook the widespread practice of chattel slavery and its harshness.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Part of a stone relief shows two people shaking hands while another crouches beneath them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538184/original/file-20230719-17-drknta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Roman relief portraying an enslaved person being freed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/roman-civilization-relief-portraying-a-slave-being-freed-news-photo/122222025?adppopup=true">DEA/A. Dagli Orti/De Agostini via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, across the ancient Mediterranean, there is evidence of a variety of horrific practices: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/03075133221130094">branding</a>, whipping, bodily disfiguration, <a href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1084&context=mjgl">sexual assault</a>, torture during legal trials, incarceration, crucifixion and more. In fact, <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-dialogues-d-histoire-ancienne-2015-1-page-149.htm">a Latin inscription from Puteoli</a>, an ancient city near Naples, Italy, recounts what enslavers could pay undertakers to whip or crucify enslaved people.</p>
<p>Christians were not exempt from participating in this cruelty. Archaeologists have found collars from Italy and North Africa that enslavers <a href="https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.120.3.0447">placed upon their enslaved people</a>, offering a price for their return if they fled. Some of these collars bear Christian symbols like the chi-rho (☧), which combines the first two letters of Jesus’ name in Greek. One collar mentions that the enslaved person needs to be returned to their enslaver, “<a href="https://urbsandpolis.com/greco-roman-slavery/">Felix the archdeacon</a>.”</p>
<p>It’s difficult to apply contemporary moral standards to earlier eras, not least societies thousands of years ago. But even in an ancient world in which slavery <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/uniquely-bad-but-not-uniquely-american">was ever present</a>, it is clear not everyone bought into the ideology of the elite enslavers. There are records of multiple slave rebellions in Greece and Italy – most famously, that of the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12161-5">escaped gladiator Spartacus</a>.</p>
<h2>Myth #3: Ancient slavery wasn’t discriminatory</h2>
<p>Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean wasn’t based on race or skin color in the same way as the transatlantic slave trade, but this doesn’t mean ancient systems of enslavement weren’t discriminatory. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A relief shows rows of men lugging heavy items as they plod up a hill." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538186/original/file-20230719-22-wx31ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=992&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Enslaved people in a stone quarry, detail from an Assyrian relief in the British Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/slaves-in-a-stone-quarry-detail-from-a-relief-assyrian-news-photo/475592661?adppopup=true">DeAgostini/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much of the history of Greek and Roman slavery involves enslaving people <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/300734">from other groups</a>: Athenians enslaving non-Athenians, Spartans enslaving non-Spartans, Romans enslaving non-Romans. Often captured or defeated through warfare, such enslaved people were either forcibly migrated to a new area or were kept on their ancestral land and compelled to do farmwork or be domestic workers for their conquerors. Roman law required a slave’s “natio,” or place of origin, to be <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/perspectives-global-african-history/roman-slavery-and-question-race/">announced during auctions</a>.</p>
<p>Ancient Mediterranean enslavers prioritized the purchase of people from different parts of the world on account of stereotypes about their various characteristics. Varro, a scholar who wrote about <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/varro/de_re_rustica/1*.html">the management of agriculture</a>, argued that an enslaver shouldn’t have too many enslaved people who were from the same nation or who could speak the same language, because they might organize and rebel. </p>
<p>Ancient slavery still depended on categorizing some groups of people as “others,” treating them as though they were wholly different from those who enslaved them. </p>
<p>The picture of slavery that most Americans are familiar with was deeply shaped by its time, particularly modern racism and capitalism. But other forms of slavery throughout human history were no less “real.” Understanding them and their causes may help challenge slavery today and in the future – especially at a time when some politicians are again claiming transatlantic slavery actually <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/22/desantis-slavery-curriculum/">benefited enslaved people</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chance Bonar works at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and is affiliated with their ongoing Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies at Tufts University project.</span></em></p>
There was no one type of slavery in ‘biblical’ or ‘ancient’ societies, given how varied they were. But much of what historians know about slavery during those eras is horrific.
Chance Bonar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Tufts University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207382
2023-06-20T13:42:22Z
2023-06-20T13:42:22Z
African leaders in Sierra Leone played a key role in ending the transatlantic slave trade
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532152/original/file-20230615-15-iuj0xy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C25%2C2836%2C2149&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone and haven for thousands of free slaves.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/berwick-street-freetown-the-capital-of-sierra-leone-and-news-photo/2659536?adppopup=true">Original Artwork: Hatch Collection. Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone on the west African coast, was named for the freed slaves who were returned to Africa by British members of the movement to end slavery. Founded in 1787 by a group of 400 black Britons from London, the colony ultimately became a refuge for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108562423">nearly 100,000 people resettled</a> by the British Anti-Slavery Naval Squadron. </p>
<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/african-leaders-in-sierra-leone-played-a-key-role-in-ending-the-transatlantic-slave-trade-207382&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p>As a historian focusing on the impact of abolitionism, I have studied <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674240988">this history</a> and the founding of modern Sierra Leone. </p>
<p>There is a misconception that Britain was the first to abolish the slave trade. <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/antislavery_01.shtml">It wasn’t the first</a>, but its decision to abolish the trade was backed up by the power of its navy. Sierra Leone’s role in the story shows, however, to enforce that abolition, the British navy had to rely on the support of African states and polities that had already turned against the slave trade.</p>
<p>Africans played an overlooked <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/lourenco-da-silva-mendonca-and-the-black-atlantic-abolitionist-movement-in-the-seventeenth-century/B030B16D932D0C6A971FAC1BF9A19F5C">role in ending</a> the transatlantic slave trade. Sierra Leone’s rich history is testament to that.</p>
<h2>The founding of Sierra Leone</h2>
<p>The Atlantic Slave Trade began around the 1520s, but the area around Sierra Leone was not a major contributor to the trade before the middle of the 1700s. From 1763 onwards, the number of enslaved people shipped annually from the Sierra Leone coast by British, Portuguese and French traders rarely fell below <a href="https://www.slavevoyages.org/">1,000 and was often closer to 4,000</a>. Even then, the <a href="https://www.slavevoyages.org/">number of captives was roughly half the number being transported from the Gold Coast (Ghana)</a>, a quarter of the number being transported from the Bight of Benin, and a tenth of the number transported from the Angolan coast. </p>
<p>And yet from 1808, it was Sierra Leone – rather than one of the other sites of slave trading – that became the site of British anti-slavery operations. This was because by then, Sierra Leone was the site of an established and growing colony made up of members of the black British diaspora, many formerly enslaved. And the success of that colony was possible in part because of the interest and engagement of the Temne, the Susu, and other African people based in and around the Sierra Leone peninsula. </p>
<p><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217445/freedoms-debtors/">In 1787</a>, the first group of black Britons arrived on the peninsula as part of a project in self-government and with the support of the London-based abolitionist leaders Granville Sharp and Olaudah Equiano. The first settlement faced hardships and lacked support among the Temne, whose land they were renting. </p>
<iframe title="" aria-label="Locator maps" id="datawrapper-chart-oThZT" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/oThZT/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="650" data-external="1" width="100%"></iframe>
<h2>The settlement grows</h2>
<p>In 1791, another group arrived in the colony and sought out a new treaty of settlement. This group chose to immigrate to Sierra Leone from inhospitable Nova Scotia (Canada), where they had been settled by the British government as <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/86852/libertys-exiles-by-maya-jasanoff/">“black loyalists”</a> after fleeing from slavery during the American Revolution (1776-1783). A new organisation, the Sierra Leone Company, took over the management of the colony from London. Their records show that by the early 1790s, the <a href="https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1017/9781108182010">Temne</a> saw the arrival of these colonists as an opportunity. </p>
<p>King Naimbana, for instance, who negotiated the treaty between the Sierra Leone Company and the Temne, sent his son to London for education. And in their negotiations, company officials noted that the people they were engaging with were keen for opportunities to trade for imported goods without reverting to selling other people.</p>
<h2>African role in ending slavery</h2>
<p>As I found in my research, it was African demand that was shaping the success of the colony and its mission to shift the coast’s commerce away from the slave trade. Records held at the <a href="https://huntington.org/">Huntington Library in California</a> show that local buyers paid a higher price for the “SLC” mark – a price paid in goods and currency, rather than in enslaved captives. One British representative wrote a letter in 1793 to the Sierra Leone Company to complain that “it has become practice with slave traders to bring out guns for trade marked SLC for which they get a rapid sale and a double price in the Rio Nunez” to the north of the colony. He also worried that this was happening with “SLC” <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674240988">cloths</a>. </p>
<p>Although he was unsure of their enthusiasm for the abolition of the slave trade, the British official commented that “their mouths were full of proposals to trade with us and plant cotton and coffee”. And a Susu leader’s deputy launched a verbal attack against the slave traders, telling them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is you slave traders who cause all our palavers. It is you who set the people in this country one against another. And what do you bring us for this? We have cloth of our own if you were gone tomorrow we should not be naked. If you were gone we should want but little guns and powder. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This support of the Susu and Temne around Sierra Leone for the colony, its trade, and its African diaspora population meant that the colony seemed like a natural fit for the British when they were looking for a way of enforcing their Slave Trade Act in 1807 to end the Atlantic slave trade. The British based an anti-slave trade naval patrol in the colony, as well as a court for processing captured slave ships. </p>
<p>The Sierra Leone Company was happy to hand over control to the British government, but it was the people on the ground whose successful trading relationships had built a growing city with markets, accommodation, infrastructure and, most importantly, a sense of security for the thousands of resettled enslaved people who would soon see its population soar. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A street with buildings and cars." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532155/original/file-20230615-17-t5rpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A street in Freetown, Sierra Leon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-of-a-street-in-freetown-sierra-leon-news-photo/179668674?adppopup=true">Original Artwork: Hatch Collection. Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>There is a misconception that Britain was the first to abolish the slave trade and that it brought enlightened anti-slavery ideas to Africa. This misconception was used to justify the spread of colonial rule in the 19th century. But the history of Sierra Leone shows that, in order to enforce their abolition decrees, the British had to rely on African states and polities that had already turned against the slave trade.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207382/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bronwen Everill received funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the Huntington Library for this research. </span></em></p>
Africans should get more credit for the abolition of the slave trade.
Bronwen Everill, Director, Centre for African Studies, University of Cambridge
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205254
2023-05-09T20:16:24Z
2023-05-09T20:16:24Z
Dismay over King Charles’s coronation raises questions about Canada’s ties to the monarchy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525158/original/file-20230509-21-1iokjg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5159%2C3413&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">King Charles and Queen Camilla stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their coronation in London on May 6, 2023. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Leon Neal/Pool Photo via AP)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/dismay-over-king-charles-s-coronation-raises-questions-about-canada-s-ties-to-the-monarchy" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>The coronation of King Charles was a cringe-inducing display of white European hereditary privilege and ostentation that angered many, both in the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/uk-republicans-call-for-saturdays-coronation-to-be-the-last">United Kingdom</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/uk-charles-coronation-royals-commonwealth-caribbean-africa-e450b996bc21b179cd3725789853676e">the Commonwealth</a>.</p>
<p>That anger, or in some cases simple apathy or collective eye-rolling, should not be ignored because the monarchy and the Crown are not merely symbols, they’re a massive expense. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1655826857999192064"}"></div></p>
<p>The cost of the coronation to the British taxpayer has been estimated at <a href="https://time.com/6275383/king-charles-iii-coronation-cost-taxpayers/">£100 million</a> (almost $170 million in Canadian dollars) — extremely costly in a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64450882">post-Brexit period of economic uncertainty and decline for the U.K.</a>.</p>
<p>Some of the vast private wealth and land holdings of the Royal Family are also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/cost-of-the-crown">connected directly to England’s role in colonization and the slave trade</a>. </p>
<p>Despite all this, the monarch remains the head of state for many Commonwealth countries, including Canada. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An elderly man in a large crown adorned with jewels and purple velvet waves from an ornate golden horse-drawn carriage. An elderly woman in a similar crown sits beside him." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525163/original/file-20230509-15-e6h1l2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King Charles waves from a golden carriage following his coronation in London on May 6, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The U.S. style of republicanism</h2>
<p>While the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/20/america-isnt-just-a-failing-state-it-is-a-failed-experiment">American experiment in republicanism isn’t looking especially good</a> at the moment amid the shambles left by Donald Trump’s presidency, the country’s founders were correct in recognizing that democratic legitimacy and monarchical power cannot be easily reconciled.</p>
<p>In fact, their biggest mistake and that of subsequent generations may simply have been to permit the presidency to retain elements of absolute or unfettered power in the form of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/14/politics/what-is-executive-privilege-what-matters/index.html">executive privilege</a>. </p>
<p>From George W. Bush’s disastrous war on terror to the Trump administration’s outright repudiation of democratic norms, <a href="https://hls.harvard.edu/today/presidential-power-surges/">recent presidents have not hesitated to behave like kings</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/manhattan-grand-jury-votes-to-indict-donald-trump-showing-he-like-all-other-presidents-is-not-an-imperial-king-196451">Manhattan grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump, showing he, like all other presidents, is not an imperial king</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In Canada, we can benefit from both the lessons of the United States and the U.K. to avoid idealizing a republic with a powerful president and at the same time acknowledging that a traditional monarchy, even a purely symbolic or constitutional monarchy, is no alternative. </p>
<p>As I have argued before, each Commonwealth nation would have different legislative and constitutional processes to follow to sever ties with the British monarchy. Canada’s in particular would be complex and difficult, but not necessarily impossible.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/will-canada-cut-ties-to-the-monarchy-under-king-charles-its-possible-190894">Will Canada cut ties to the monarchy under King Charles? It's possible</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It would require unanimous consent of all provincial legislatures and the federal Parliament. In practice, this would probably not be possible without referendums in each province. Because of this, <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/ask-an-expert-what-would-it-take-to-leave-the-monarchy/">some leading constitutional lawyers in Canada regard the question as a non-starter</a>. </p>
<p>But if Canadians aren’t careful, they may one day find that events in the U.K. make the decision for us.</p>
<p>Here’s how. </p>
<h2>Different political systems</h2>
<p>Suppose <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/young-british-people-want-ditch-monarchy-poll-suggests-2021-05-20/">current British demographic trends and polling data</a> pan out and a decade or two from now a younger, more diverse British population loses patience with the monarchy. </p>
<p>Like Canada, the U.K. has a constitution and the monarchy is essential to it. But unlike Canada, the U.K.’s constitution is largely unwritten. Changing the British Constitution can at least theoretically be done by an ordinary act of Parliament and without the complexity of co-ordinating 10 sovereign legislatures. </p>
<p>Another difference? <a href="https://www.centreonconstitutionalchange.ac.uk/news-and-opinion/back-unitary-state">The U.K. is a unitary</a> and not a federal state. This means British parliament, unlike Canada’s, can unilaterally amend its constitution to address the status of the monarchy if it wishes. </p>
<p>Similarly in the U.K., any conventions around public consultation would also be arguably less complex and more straightforward than in Canada because of the British system of government. This could lead to a bizarre situation in which the British monarch ceases to be the British head of state but remains the Canadian one. </p>
<p>To my knowledge, this would be a completely uncharted territory and a constitutional crisis of the highest magnitude. </p>
<p>Rather than continuing to sit nervously on the sidelines observing America’s presidential system lurch from crisis to crisis, or celebrating the coronation of Britain’s new king as our own, Canada should learn from the errors of both the republican model and monarchical model and do something different. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="People sit in an ornate ballroom drinking tea with two TV screens showing the coronation at the front of the room." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525160/original/file-20230509-23-idwc3m.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People gather to watch the coronation of King Charles in Edmonton on May 6, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Looking ahead</h2>
<p>We might start by recognizing forms of political association, governance and policymaking that are less European and owe more to Indigenous models. </p>
<p>Mary Simon, Canada’s governor general and the King’s representative in Canada — as well as first Indigenous person to occupy that colonial office — is correct when she says <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/governor-general-canada-monarchy-future-1.6831365">many Indigenous people look to the treaty relationship with the Crown, which predates Confederation itself, as part of their strategy of decolonization</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1654820719178534914"}"></div></p>
<p>But it’s tough to reconcile a European hereditary monarchy with a Canada in which Indigenous people are attempting to take control over their own destiny.</p>
<p>Similarly, for many Canadians who immigrated to Canada from parts of the former British Empire in the Caribbean, Africa and India, finding the old colonial monarchy waiting for them here is no sign of dynamism.</p>
<p>It will be up to the current generation of Canadians to decide if now is the time to begin taking this question more seriously or whether to leave it to the United Kingdom to decide for us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205254/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeffrey B. Meyers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Canadians should learn the lessons of the U.S. and the U.K. to avoid idealizing a republic with a powerful president and at the same time acknowledge that a constitutional monarchy is no alternative.
Jeffrey B. Meyers, Instructor, Legal Studies and Criminology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/199194
2023-04-27T13:01:39Z
2023-04-27T13:01:39Z
Slavery’s historical link to marriage is still at play in some African societies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508608/original/file-20230207-18-9ckb4k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women in parts of the world are victims of slavery</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Governments and religious institutions regulate marriage. Such regulations are heavily laden with specific moral ideas and cultural taboos. There are heated debates around what counts as “proper” marriage: should polygamy or monogamy be preferred? What should be the minimal age for marriage? </p>
<p>Despite these debates, all contemporary societies see marriage as a sacrosanct institution that deserves legal protection. Not so slavery. </p>
<p>Today slavery is abolished in all countries. But 250 years ago various forms of slavery would have been legal on all continents. </p>
<p>During the period of legal slavery, marriage and slavery were closely interconnected and sometimes overlapped. Slave owners could force their slaves to marry, remain unmarried, or separate from their spouses. They could also marry them. </p>
<p>The forms of power that allowed slaveholders to coerce enslaved persons into unwanted marriages (or out of wanted ones) haven’t disappeared. </p>
<p>First, slavery has not ended. African women and children are caught in illegal networks controlled by sex traffickers who cater for a persistent demand in vulnerable (and therefore sexually abusable) persons. This, today, is outlawed and prosecutable as either slavery or forced marriage. But in the past such a demand was largely met through the provision of enslaved persons who could be used for sexual and conjugal purposes. </p>
<p>This points to <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Trafficking+in+Slavery%E2%80%99s+Wake">continuities</a> in the types of services required, as well as the traffic geographies that connect vulnerable people from the South to demand in the North and Near East, as well as from poorer peripheries to urban centres within different regions in the South. </p>
<p>Second, during <a href="https://csiw-ectg.org/survivors-hearing-for-reparations-for-conflict-related-sexual-and-gender-based-violence-kinshasa-principles/">recent</a> African wars, militias kidnapped women and forced them into marriage, and sexual or conjugal slavery. Here, too, there are clear continuities with historical forms of wartime captivity. African women – survivors and activists – have been on the forefront of global movements speaking out against these abuses. </p>
<p>Thirdly, <a href="https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/descent-based-slavery/">African abolitionists</a> today fight against groups who illegally enslave people and defend slavery as a legitimate institution, based on the alleged slave descent of its victims . These practices are peculiarly resilient in connection to the acquisition of enslaved wives or concubines.<br>
I have been studying slavery in African and global history for over two decades. As part of this research, I have considered the relation between slavery and marriage.</p>
<p>In a recent <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2063231">research paper</a> co-authored with professor of politics Joel Quirk, we introduced a collection of articles on slave ‘marriages’ in Africa from 1830 to today.</p>
<p>While slavery has lost the ideological battle almost everywhere, women nevertheless continue to be objectified and subordinated under the protective cloak of “marriage”. What forms of “marriage” are nothing but slavery in disguise? In such cases, does the terminology of “marriage” merely serve the interest of perpetrators? </p>
<p>We can learn from the history of African women’s resistance against slavery, a history that has not ended. The voices and actions of women who were enslaved in the past, or who experienced enslavement today, reveal how oppression works and what made a difference to those exposed to it. </p>
<p>This history is not only an important part of the past that should not be forgotten. It can also be useful to activists and decision makers today.</p>
<h2>Historical slave marriages</h2>
<p>It is still common for people to think of historical slavery as coinciding exclusively with the history of Africans transported to America and the Caribbean as dehumanised labour for the profit of Euro-American racist capitalism. But this was only one of multiple historical forms of slavery. </p>
<p>Slavery also occurred within Africa and between different groups of Africans. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/plantation-slavery-in-the-sokoto-caliphate/3BAA8C45E8E5A017BD67473B85DF80F3">Research </a>by African and international historians leaves no doubt that slavery was a <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-slavery/slavery-in-africa-18041936/F01667F6DC2CDF8A51D6F9E0D5505E6E">legitimate institution</a> in most African societies in the Nineteenth Century. In Africa in the 1800s, ‘marriages’ between enslaved people and freeborn people were relatively common. Usually a ‘slave wife’ benefited from some protections compared to other categories of female slaves. But slave wives were nevertheless subordinate to free wives, first wives and higher-ranking wives. </p>
<p>Whether the role of the ‘slave wife’ or the ‘conjugal slave’ was perceived as relatively desirable, or whether it was instead experienced as a daily torture imposing dreaded burdens on its unfortunate bearers, was contextual and individual. But such hierarchies were not uncommon. As historian Ettore Morelli <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2063232">has shown </a> for Sesotho- and Setswana-speaking societies of the Highveld in today’s Lesotho, they gave rise to complex social dynamics of resistance and accommodation. </p>
<p>In most African societies there were many ways of being a slave and many ways of being a wife. There were hierarchies within slavery and hierarchies within marriage. <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-466;jsessionid=614732E6961AD8AD9096A836E01F8206">Researchers</a> have only just begun to explore this area.</p>
<p>It must also be remembered that both marriage and slavery in Africa in the 1800s existed within patriarchal societies. In such societies positions of political dominance and public prestige are primarily held by men, and in which men have rights in women that women do not have either in their male kin or in themselves – even though the features of patriarchy varied from case to case. Everyday <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/everyday-gender-inequalities-that-underpin-wartime-atrocities/">gender inequalities </a>common in patriarchal contexts influence historical and contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking.</p>
<h2>Modern-day slave marriages</h2>
<p>Modern-day or contemporary trafficking in women and girls meets a demand for women whose sexuality, fertility and labour can still be imagined as fully controllable. Trafficking is <a href="https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/406-trafficking-in-human-beings-especially-women-and-children-in-africa-second-edition.html">recognised</a> as a major problem in most African sub-regions and countries.</p>
<p>In addition, in Africa’s recent conflicts large numbers of women and girls have been abducted by militias whose members seized females as booty, as in the case of the Lord Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Their commanders redistributed female abductees among their officers. Forced wives were expected to become pregnant. Their children would join societies ruled by warlords who sought to establish new autonomous political and social units. </p>
<p>Researchers <a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/expertiseguide/sociology-social-policy/dr-eleanor-seymour.aspx">Eleanor Seymour</a>, <a href="https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/persons/eunice-apio">Eunice Apio</a>, and <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/professor-benedetta-rossi">Benedetta Rossi</a><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2063237?tab=permissions&scroll=top"> explored </a> how, if at all, these phenomena were in continuity with forms of female captivity common in the region’s warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. </p>
<p>Another <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/28/child-sex-trafficking-wahaya-girls-slavery-niger">form</a> of trafficking that has proven resilient in contemporary Africa is the sale of young concubines (also known as ‘fifth wives’) to Muslim men who feel entitled to purchase girls of alleged ‘slave’ status to avoid committing the sin of fornication. These practices, in Niger for example, have been <a href="https://www.antislavery.org/reports/wahaya-domestic-and-sexual-slavery-in-niger/">combated</a> by African anti-slavery non-governmental organisations whose members are Muslims who argue that there can be no Islamic justification for these forms of conjugal slavery today, if there ever was. </p>
<p>Historic slavery lives on today in various forms and is exacerbated by contemporary slavery. Research on this history can reveal the perspectives and strategies of those enslaved and inform policy aimed at reducing their oppression.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199194/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benedetta Rossi receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 885418. </span></em></p>
The voices and actions of women who were enslaved reveal how oppression works and what made a difference to those exposed to it
Benedetta Rossi, Professor of History, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/198855
2023-01-31T21:15:51Z
2023-01-31T21:15:51Z
Tyre Nichols: U.S. police violence stems from a long history of fighting ‘internal enemies’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507419/original/file-20230131-15237-8bj1wz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6000%2C3997&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 21-year-old woman demonstrates outside the White House over the death of Tyre Nichols, who died after being beaten by Memphis police officers on Jan. 7, 2023. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many of the details surrounding the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/us/tyre-nichols-arrest-videos.html">recent fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols</a> in Memphis, Tenn., are still unknown or disputed. The rest may seem confusing.</p>
<p>Yet in many ways, all you need to know is how the encounter started: With Nichols expressing confusion as to why he had been stopped, and one officer replying that he would <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/us/tyre-nichols-beating-video-takeaways/index.html">“knock your ass the fuck out.”</a></p>
<p>In approaching Nichols as someone hostile — an enemy on a battlefield, rather than a member of the public — the police in this case brought nearly 400 years of American history to what was allegedly a routine traffic stop. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/martial-law.htm">first English authorities in the Americas sometimes imposed martial law over the early colonists</a>, while the <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/religion-colonial-america-trends-regulations-beliefs">Puritans of New England added a range of Biblical laws to everyday life.</a> By the mid-1600s, however, most North American colonists enjoyed the unequal protections of English law, which gradually became more equal for their descendants.</p>
<h2>Roots in Barbados</h2>
<p>A different pattern emerged on Barbados, <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5942/">settled by the English in 1626 and by far the wealthiest of the colonies</a> after its shift to sugar production in the 1640s. To plant, cut and boil the sugar canes, <a href="https://www.aaihs.org/on-barbados-the-first-black-slave-society/">they imported more than 10,000 West African slaves that decade.</a></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-the-monarchy-has-benefited-from-colonialism-and-slavery-179911">Five ways the monarchy has benefited from colonialism and slavery</a>
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<p>For the first time, an English overseas community held a large population of presumably “brutish” and “pagan” peoples as permanent captives. </p>
<p>The English assumed that the African slaves could never become part of the lawful population of Barbados. And so, in 1655, the island’s governor decreed that all Black defendants were to be tried in special courts of <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/jhil/21/1/article-p41_3.xml">“oyer and terminer</a> ("to hear and determine”),“ which were normally used only against the most extreme criminals, like witches or traitors.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A Black man with a bushy grey beard holds up an anti-monarchy sign outside a white stone building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507418/original/file-20230131-14-7m6kkf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People protest in Barbados to demand an apology and slavery reparations from Prince William and his wife, Kate, during their visit to the former British colony in March 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Collin Reid)</span></span>
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<p>The idea was <a href="https://blog.umd.edu/slaverylawandpower/barbados-slave-code/">formalized in a set of Barbados laws in 1661</a>. Whereas every son and daughter "of the English nation” would henceforth enjoy due process of law, every Black slave was subject to new slave courts (akin to oyer and terminer) and slave patrols (groups of armed and mounted white people). </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.70.3.0429">These laws spread</a> word-for-word to the English colony of Jamaica in 1665, and from there to South Carolina in the 1690s and Virginia in 1705. </p>
<p>Racial slavery waxed and waned in North America over the next century and a half, <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/slavery-united-states">shrinking during the revolutionary years of the 1770s and 1780s</a> and then <a href="https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy">exploding with the rise of cotton in the early 1800s.</a></p>
<p>South of Pennsylvania, the core institutions of <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/slaves-and-the-courts-from-1740-to-1860/about-this-collection/">slave courts</a> and <a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/slave-patrols/">slave patrols</a> remained and indeed expanded in the early United States. </p>
<p>White authorities were very clear as to the rationale behind these courts and patrols: Black people were neither citizens (like white men) nor members of households (like white women and children). Rather, they were an <a href="https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/the-internal-enemy">“internal enemy,”</a> a hostile and alien element within the lawful community. </p>
<h2>Slavery’s violence endured</h2>
<p>Conservatives often point out that American slavery ended 158 years ago. That’s true. It’s also true that the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz214">northern countryside of the 19th century was famous</a> for not needing much of a police presence, because almost everyone in that democratic stronghold felt protected by and responsible to the law. </p>
<p>Yet it’s equally true that slavery was a central feature of American life for more than 200 years. Some of its most violent practices endured long after the Civil War ended as <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reconstruction-white-southern-responses-black-emancipation/">white militias — reconstituted slave patrols</a> — repressed freed peoples’ rights to vote, go to school and hold property throughout the late 1800s and well into the 1900s.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A Black woman is fingerprinted by a police officer in a black-and-white photo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507427/original/file-20230131-16-kzl91k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police in Montgomery, Ala., in 1956, two months after refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and more than 90 years after the end of the U.S. Civil War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Gene Herrick)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In other words, during an era of European imperialism across Africa and Asia, the U.S. continued to hold a subordinate group captive <em>within</em> its borders. It was a kind of internal empire that also expanded its reach over North America in a series of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Plains-Wars">“Indian wars” in the 1870s and 1880s.</a></p>
<p>“Next to other western democracies,” <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520305557/exceptional-america">notes the legal scholar Mugambi Jouet</a>, “America has historically had a far bigger proportion of racial and ethnic minorities.” Few of those minorities have fit easily within the constitutionally recognized community of <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/preamble">“the people.”</a> </p>
<p>The significance of this simple fact cannot be overstated. American democratic principles of equality before the law came earlier to the U.S. than to Europe or Canada. Nonetheless, those principles grew alongside the raw violence of slavery and colonialism, requiring citizens — or the armed groups charged with protecting them — to hold captive the alienated victims of slavery and colonialism who also lived inside the nation.</p>
<p>The result was a pattern of law enforcement that repeatedly adapted to the dizzying pace of change in America. </p>
<p>Even as modern police departments emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, presumed criminals such as labour activists or “uppity” Blacks were regarded as existential threats to the lawful population. These sentiments fuelled <a href="https://www.military.com/military-life/6-times-military-was-used-suppress-civilian-uprisings-us.html">violence by the U.S. National Guard</a>, by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pinkerton-National-Detective-Agency">hired thugs known as Pinkertons</a> and <a href="https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america">by lynch mobs</a>.</p>
<h2>Broken windows, bloody landscapes</h2>
<p>The most recent echo of the pattern is the so-called <a href="https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-policing/research-evidence-review/broken-windows-policing/">“broken windows” philosophy of policing that emerged</a> in the 1980s and 1990s. </p>
<p>The basic idea here is that fear of violent crime is itself cause for police intervention, requiring pro-active investigation of suspicious places, such as buildings with broken windows or of suspicious persons, often Black men.</p>
<p>In 2013, <a href="https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-floyd-v-city-of-n-y">a federal judge ruled</a> that New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy, one of the most aggressive outgrowths of the broken windows philosophy, <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-iv">violated the Fourth</a> <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xiv">and 14th</a> amendments to the U.S. Constitution. </p>
<p>But in the face of violent crime, both real and imagined, many communities continue to turn to new variations on the old theme, treating whole swaths of the population as internal enemies to be approached with guns drawn — <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-30/tyre-nichols-memphis-black-officers-internalized-racism">including, apparently, police officers who are themselves Black.</a></p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Protesters stand together, one with her arm raised holding a sign that says American Policing equals State-Sanctioned Terrorism." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507429/original/file-20230131-12-s9wdrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Demonstrators gather during a protest on Jan. 28, 2023, in Atlanta, over the death of Tyre Nichols, who died after being beaten by Memphis, Tenn., police.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Alex Slitz)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Memphis, for example, the police launched the SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods) unit in 2021 <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tyre-nichols-former-memphis-police-officer-scorpion-unit/">to combat a surge in murders by flooding the streets with quasi-undercover</a> agents in black hoodies who used traffic stops as opportunities to find drugs or guns.</p>
<p>It’s important to understand the deep and broad appeal of this approach in an apparently fearful country where there are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/there-are-more-guns-than-people-in-the-united-states-according-to-a-new-study-of-global-firearm-ownership/">more guns than people</a> and where mass killings are shockingly routine. </p>
<p>It’s equally important to trace the approach itself to specific historical moments, so that clear alternatives can become imaginable — perhaps even possible.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jason Opal receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is affiliated with Global Action on Gun Violence. </span></em></p>
In the face of violent crime, both real and imagined, too many U.S. police forces adhere to racist philosophies about rooting out ‘internal enemies’ as they did hundreds of years ago.
Jason Opal, Professor of History, McGill University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197450
2023-01-12T13:55:49Z
2023-01-12T13:55:49Z
John Chilembwe: a new statue celebrates Malawi Pan-Africanist the world forgot
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503790/original/file-20230110-15-sdnf2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">"Antelope", a sculpture by Samson Kambalu, at Trafalgar Square in London with Malawian Baptist preacher and Pan-Africanist John Chilembwe in the foreground. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://samsonkambalu.com/">Samson Kambalu</a> is a Malawian conceptual artist, writer and academic, whose sculpture <a href="https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/whats-fourth-plinth-now">Antelope</a> was installed on the <a href="https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/whats-fourth-plinth-now">Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square</a> in London in September 2022. The Fourth Plinth was originally designed for a large scale equestrian statue of a British monarch but is now reserved for a contemporary sculpture, chosen every two years. This is the most significant public sculpture award in the UK. Antelope is a bronze sculpture depicting two figures: <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2015/12/the-legend-of-john-chilembwe">John Chilembwe</a>, a Baptist preacher and Pan-Africanist who in 1915 led the first uprising against the British occupation and colonial rule of Malawi (then Nyasaland), and his friend, a British missionary named John Chorley. Its sheer scale and subject matter provide a powerful counterpoint to the imperial iconography of Trafalgar Square. Historian <a href="https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/white-malice/">Susan Williams</a> discusses the work with Kambalu.</em> </p>
<h2>How did you arrive at the choice of Chilembwe?</h2>
<p>Chilembwe’s photograph from 1914 chose me. When I moved to Oxford to pick up a professorship at Ruskin School of Art, the first thing I did was to visit <a href="https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/libraries/weston">Weston Library</a>, where British colonial bureaucrats deposited documentation of their lives in the colonies. The Malawi-related archives produced the mysterious photograph of Reverend John Chilembwe, of Providence Industrial Mission, wearing a white hat, standing next to a white man, John Chorley, of Zambezi Industrial Mission. </p>
<p>I had wondered why Reverend Chilembwe drew attention to his hat. He is wearing it sideways for effect. It turns out that <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Hero_of_the_Nation.html?id=ndtyAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">Africans were forbidden to wear hats in the presence of white people</a> during colonial times, and Chilembwe had created this photograph at the opening of his church as an act of defiance, with support from his friend. Africans were also forbidden to run a mission. Chilembwe would be killed months later, in an uprising against colonial injustices. </p>
<p>When the London Mayor’s office got in touch asking me to propose for the Fourth Plinth, I had the photograph as wallpaper on my phone. I immediately decided that I would propose a work based on the photograph. For me, it is his killing by colonial police months later that dictated the final look of the sculpture. Chilembwe looms over his white friend like a ghost. </p>
<h2>Why is it called Antelope?</h2>
<p>Chilembwe’s name means “antelope”. It alludes not only to the animal, but also to the Chewa principal mask, Kasiya Maliro, a womb disguised as an antelope. For the Chewa people of Malawi, it’s a symbol of radical generosity. Chilembwe’s photograph very much recalls aspects of <a href="https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/33777/1/11010550.pdf">Nyau masking</a>, a Chewa secret society marked by prodigious gift giving through play, the Gule Wamkulu. Often transgressive, their purpose is to speak truth to power. Chilembwe hangs on to his African heritage even as he steps forward as a modern Malawian.</p>
<p>Malawi society, where I’m from, is heavily inspired by masking, and Nyau masking is all about critical thinking. When the masks come out from their secretive workshops (or dambwes) in the ancestral graveyards, received knowledge is questioned in unorthodox performances and prodigious gifts, opening up new ways of looking at the world. </p>
<p>Antelope shares Trafalgar Square with other statues which celebrate Britain’s imperial and military conquests, such as Nelson’s Column. The iconography of Antelope might be anti-imperialist, but it is also very much a piece of British history. </p>
<h2>What remains of Chilembwe’s memory?</h2>
<p>Chilembwe features on Malawi’s banknotes and he is remembered in a public holiday every year on 15 January – Chilembwe Day. But as I grew up in Malawi, the then President for Life, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, rendered Chilembwe as a peripheral figure in the fight for Malawi’s independence. </p>
<p>A revisiting of Chilembwe during the research for this sculpture revealed to me a man who was much more critical to the birth of Malawi as a nation. He was the first Malawian to resist colonial rule beyond tribal lines. </p>
<h2>Why does this work of art matter today?</h2>
<p>The statue will remain on the Fourth Plinth for two years. After that I think it would look good at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. Chilembwe was sponsored by many black churches in America, and taking this sculpture to America after its stay on Trafalgar Square would be Chilembwe returning the gift of liberty, freedom, to the American people. I’d like a copy too in Malawi, and another copy in Britain, and in Europe. </p>
<p>Chilembwe, who trained as a Baptist minister in the US before returning to Nyasaland in 1901, is believed to have influenced Pan-Africanists such as Marcus Garvey. But whereas they are widely known, Chilembwe has remained an obscure figure outside Malawi. I think Antelope will change this. </p>
<p>I hope we can now begin to detail the African colonial experience beyond generalisations of African or black.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197450/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
John Chilembwe features on Malawi’s banknotes and is remembered in a public holiday every year. But he is little-known elsewhere.
Susan Williams, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/189992
2022-09-07T11:44:41Z
2022-09-07T11:44:41Z
Why new British PM Liz Truss needs to pay more attention to Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482728/original/file-20220905-2279-5b6pwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">New Tory leader and Brith Prime Minister Liz Truss.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EFE-EPA/Neil Hall</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>New <a href="https://theconversation.com/liz-truss-who-is-the-uks-new-prime-minister-and-why-has-she-replaced-boris-johnson-189713">British prime minister Liz Truss</a> has never said much in public about Africa. </p>
<p>But, in my view, her administration must pay more attention to its relationship with Africa. African countries are increasingly important partners both in geostrategic and material terms. Neglecting them will weaken Britain itself and diminish its global role. </p>
<p>Britain’s relations with Africa have been deep and long-standing. The slave trade and colonial period have left conflicted legacies, but in the 60 years since African countries gained independence, British governments have generally sought to maintain close links with those where English is spoken. Human, cultural and commercial links have remained strong. </p>
<p><a href="https://ecfr.eu/publication/shared-fortunes-why-britain-the-european-union-and-africa-need-each-other/">Since 2010</a>, however, Africa has fallen steadily down the priority list. Theresa May paid a brief, dancing visit in <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/2018/08/theresa-mays-focus-uk-africa-ties-long-overdue">2018</a>, but Boris Johnson’s only visit as prime minister was to the Commonwealth summit in Kigali this June. It only underlined <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-commonwealth-summit-in-kigali-wont-be-the-relaunch-some-were-hoping-for-185154">Britain’s weakening influence</a> on the organisation as Britain failed to secure their its preferred candidate as secretary general.</p>
<h2>Why Africa matters</h2>
<p>With the world’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/20/by-2050-a-quarter-of-the-worlds-people-will-be-african-this-will-shape-our-future">fastest growing population</a>, Africa is increasingly vital for the global response to climate change. It has a major carbon sink in the <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/congo-basin">Congo rainforest</a> and is a source of the <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/21865/africa-must-assume-its-place-in-the-global-battery-race/">minerals</a> needed to power a low carbon future. </p>
<p>Global food supplies will also come under increased pressure unless an agricultural revolution enables Africa to feed itself. And in a world of geopolitical competition, the support of Africa’s 54 votes in the United Nations will be crucial if an effective multilateral system is to be preserved. </p>
<p>Since 2000, Africa has shown itself as a continent of extraordinary economic dynamism, but it still has to overcome major challenges if it is to realise its potential. It is very much in Britain’s interests to help it do so. </p>
<p>The COVID pandemic and Ukraine war have had a <a href="https://www.uneca.org/stories/global-impact-of-war-in-ukraine-on-food%2C-energy-and-finance-systems">disproportionate impact on Africa</a>, compounding the difficulties created by climate change, internal instability and international inequalities.</p>
<p>This matters to Britain for a number of reasons. There are up to three million people of African heritage in the UK. Most are citizens who have lived in the UK all their lives, but many also have strong family and business <a href="https://ecfr.eu/publication/shared-fortunes-why-britain-the-european-union-and-africa-need-each-other/">links to Africa</a>. </p>
<p>British companies are still <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/02/22/sign-of-times-how-united-kingdom-s-integrated-review-affects-relations-with-africa-pub-86484">major investors</a> on the continent, and more African companies are quoted on the <a href="https://www.lseg.com/resources/companies-inspire-africa/companies-inspire-africa-2019/london-stock-exchange-group-africa">London Stock Exchange</a> than on any other stock market outside the continent. </p>
<p>People continue to flow back and forth in large numbers. So while the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism remain points of contention, cultural, educational, commercial and financial links between Britain and Africa unavoidably tie the two together. </p>
<p>These facts will not change. But British government policy will have an impact on the positive (or negative) potential of the relationship.</p>
<h2>Brexit and the changing world</h2>
<p>Since the Brexit vote in 2016, British governments have paid scant attention to Africa despite the declared intention to diversify Britain’s international partnerships. The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/the-integrated-review-2021">review of foreign and security policy</a> in 2021 made sensible proposals, focusing on the major economies. But its credibility was undermined by the swift and brutal cutting of aid programmes from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP <a href="https://www.devex.com/news/brutal-suspension-to-uk-aid-to-last-at-least-until-september-103693">in 2020</a>, which did as much damage to Britain’s reputation as to the fight against poverty.</p>
<p>The government’s new <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-governments-strategy-for-international-development">Strategy for International Development</a>, published in May 2022, had Liz Truss’s fingerprints all over it. She was secretary of state for foreign, Commonwealth and development affairs at the time. It did little to repair the damage. It narrowed the focus of aid away from poverty reduction and improved governance to supporting women and girls, action on climate and health challenges, and humanitarian relief. All are worthy in themselves, but with an emphasis on what Britain could bring to Africa, rather than supporting Africa’s own priorities.</p>
<p>Truss initiated a re-brand of the UK’s respected development investment fund CDC, as “<a href="https://www.bii.co.uk/en/">British International Investment</a>” which will remain a major investor in Africa, particularly in renewable energy and infrastructure. The government plans to continue its annual <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/uk-africa-investment-summit-2020">UK-Africa investment summits</a> inaugurated in 2020 in London, just before COVID hit.</p>
<p>But if this marks a systematic shift from aid to investment, this has been neither communicated to – nor understood by – Britain’s African partners. Neither as international trade secretary nor as foreign secretary has Truss visited Africa. She has made only <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/elizabeth-truss-champions-lionesses-of-africa">one speech on Africa</a> in recent years.</p>
<p>Nor is there any hint that the government recognises the changed international context. The war in Ukraine has highlighted that international support is essential to stop the conflict. But much of Africa is choosing to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-war-in-ukraine-africa-risks-paying-a-heavy-price-for-neutrality-182608">sit on the fence</a>, rather than join those defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity. </p>
<p>The war’s global impact is increasing political as well as economic strains in Africa. Incumbent governments, democratic as well as autocratic, are under pressure from protests about rising food prices and falling job opportunities. There is a risk, already seen in <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/in-depth/guinea-coup-the-fall-of-alpha-conde/">Guinea</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-60112043">Burkina Faso</a> and <a href="https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/coup-in-tunisia-is-democracy-lost/">Tunisia</a>, that democratic politics is perceived to have failed to have deliver the promised benefits, and that authoritarian alternatives might as well be given a chance.</p>
<p>That plays exactly into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hands. From <a href="https://africacenter.org/experts/joseph-siegle/russia-strategic-goals-africa/">Russia’s</a> point of view, the more chaos in Africa the better, as Russia’s priority is purely to support client governments, not make people prosperous, free or happy.</p>
<h2>Looking forward</h2>
<p>The United States has recognised this risk. Its new <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/U.S.-Strategy-Toward-Sub-Saharan-Africa-FINAL.pdf">Africa strategy</a> marks two important shifts. One is that the US is listening to African priorities, not imposing its own – a version of the European Union’s longer-standing <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/memo_15_4808">“partnership of equals”</a> with the African Union and its members. And it will back countries that support openness and democracy. </p>
<p>Alongside this, the US will help repair the economic damage wrought by the pandemic, support key infrastructure and help African countries adapt to climate change. In this, too, it is pursuing a policy in tune with the EU’s collective priorities for its partnership with Africa.</p>
<p>Some officials and <a href="https://ecfr.eu/publication/shared-fortunes-why-britain-the-european-union-and-africa-need-each-other/">experts</a> are keen for Britain’s new government to share this approach. They understand that neglecting Africa is costing Britain badly needed international support at the United Nations, in the Commonwealth and elsewhere. They’d also like to see an explicit and public strategy that pushes Africa back up the priority list, together with more active political engagement.</p>
<p>But as long as British foreign policy is based on an illusion, a denial of the reality that Brexit has weakened the country economically and diplomatically, such a rational policy is unlikely to gain much traction in No 10.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189992/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Westcott is affiliated with the Royal African Society. </span></em></p>
It’s in Britain’s interests to help the African continent reach its potential.
Nicholas Westcott, Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/187385
2022-07-31T06:45:43Z
2022-07-31T06:45:43Z
James Hutton Brew: Gold Coast abolitionist who exposed Britain’s anti-slavery hypocrisy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475416/original/file-20220721-1264-1ibcp5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Cape Coast castle is a lasting legacy of the slave trade</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adam Cohn/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The literature and research on the abolition of slavery in places like Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) has tended to have a Eurocentric focus. Most has focused on colonial anti-slavery legislation and the abolitionist activities of Europeans. The contributions made by local Africans have been almost entirely ignored. When mentioned at all, Africans have been seen as resisting colonial efforts to abolish domestic slavery. </p>
<p>This focus is biased. Studying local Africans’ contributions to abolition provides a fuller understanding of its history.</p>
<p>In a recently published <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905">paper</a>, I analysed 19th-century newspapers to shed light on how Africans responded to colonial abolition of domestic slavery in Gold Coast. In particular, I looked at the role played by James Hutton Brew. </p>
<p>Brew was one of the local African intellectuals behind the Fante Confederacy in Cape Coast. The Fante Confederacy movement was one of the first attempts to institute self-governance in Gold Coast. The campaign involved traditional rulers of Fante communities working alongside educated natives in late 1860s and early 1870s.</p>
<p>Brew wrote the <a href="https://www.modernghana.com/news/123177/1/constitution-of-the-new-fante-confederacy.html">constitution of the Fante Confederacy</a> in 1871 and it remains a document of historical significance. He was also a pioneer in West African journalism. He founded the first print newspapers in Gold Coast, The Gold Coast Times (in 1874) and The Western Echo (in 1885). His newspapers nurtured <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254266730_Literary_activism_in_colonial_Ghana_A_newspaper-novel_by_A_Native">many later activists</a> in Gold Coast, most notably <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/hayford-joseph-ephraim-casely-1866-1930/">J.E. Casely Hayford</a>. </p>
<p>As editor of The Gold Coast Times in 1874, the year in which Gold Coast became a <a href="http://countrystudies.us/ghana/8.htm">Crown colony</a> and the British <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1874-06-29/debates/8bac0607-cc42-4f2b-b295-691183cff621/SlaveryOnTheGoldCoast">sought to abolish domestic slavery there</a>, Brew’s editorial writings showed that Africans were more concerned about the abolition of slavery in their communities than was the colonial government.</p>
<p>Brew and other African abolitionists also advocated practical solutions such as the distribution of land to former slaves. For their part, the British sought mainly to appease anti-slavery groups in Europe by creating a law to evince their commitment without enforcing it, or actually making an effort to free slaves. </p>
<p>Studying the contributions made by Africans to the abolition of domestic slavery helps to provide a more accurate and comprehensive history. This is important because the account of events given by the colonial regime, which forms the basis of conventional history, is part of a political project to justify colonisation. </p>
<h2>British emancipation in Gold Coast, 1874</h2>
<p>When Gold Coast became a Crown colony in <a href="http://countrystudies.us/ghana/8.htm">1874</a>, the British decided to abolish domestic slavery. However, they showed little commitment to the cause. The then British <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11952">Secretary of State for the Colonies</a> and the Colonial Governor of Gold Coast, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/strahan-sir-george-cumine-4651">George Strahan</a>, formally outlawed slave dealing and slave holding. But they failed to implement the law. And while they legally prohibited slave holding in Gold Coast, they expected slaves to continue serving their masters.</p>
<p>The colonial secretary and the governor predicted that slaves would not immediately leave their masters because of their established associations and fear of poverty. The governor anticipated that the few slaves who did leave would face difficulties in securing their livelihoods and would thus ultimately return to their masters. He hoped that witnessing this hardship would discourage other slaves from seeking their freedom. </p>
<p>Informing traditional rulers of the British decision to outlaw slavery, the governor told them that their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905">slaves could continue to work</a> for them as before and that the colonial government did not wish to separate slaves from their masters.</p>
<p>Despite passing a law prohibiting slavery, the British colonial government did not want slaves to leave their masters. The freedom of slaves might incur a cost that the government was not ready to pay. Local slave owners could reasonably request compensation for the loss of their slaves. Slave holding was a form of property right in Gold Coast and the British had a <a href="https://dbpedia.org/page/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837">tradition of compensating slave owners</a> after abolishing slavery in other regions.</p>
<h2>Brew’s response</h2>
<p>Unlike the colonial administration, some local Africans, such as James Hutton Brew, discussed domestic slavery in depth, in line with a different vision of abolition in Gold Coast. </p>
<p>When the British colonial governor started discussing emancipation, Brew made his position known. In a note in the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905?src=">Gold Coast Times on 20 October 1874</a>, he called on the governor to find </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a solution we trust will admit no misunderstanding and which will not leave scope for the existence of slavery in any shape, degree or form. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In advocating total emancipation, Brew saw himself as following in the footsteps of the celebrated abolitionists of Britain’s anti-slavery movement. These included <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wilberforce">William Wilberforce</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Clarkson">Thomas Clarkson</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sir-Thomas-Fowell-Buxton-1st-Baronet">Thomas Fowell Buxton</a>. </p>
<p>Brew believed that it would be unfair to abolish slavery and then place the freed slaves at the mercy of their masters in the absence of substitute livelihoods. He feared that “slaves who have thus obtained their freedom will be pariahs of society”, unable to find homes or places to rest. He wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They will be driven from village to village, from plantation to plantation, until they find their emancipation an incubus on them, and some of them as they travel inland will find themselves {back in slavery}.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brew urged the colonial government to “purchase land or acquire some territory by treaty with the kings and chiefs on which it could keep, maintain and support the slaves emancipated by it” (The Gold Coast Times, 30 November 1874, p. 53). </p>
<p>He saw distributing land to the freed slaves as a logical way to prevent them from remaining at the mercy of their former masters. He also called on the British to pay compensation to local slave owners, as it had done for white slave owners when slavery had been abolished <a href="https://dbpedia.org/page/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837">earlier that century</a>. </p>
<p>When the British proceeded with the emancipation law without making any provision for the freed slaves, Brew accused the colonial authority of not being truly concerned about them. According to Brew, the British wanted to claim to have abolished domestic slavery in the Gold Coast without following through.</p>
<p>Brew would later advise traditional rulers to write petitions to the queen, complaining about how the emancipation exercise had been conducted and requesting compensation. The colonial governor reacted by portraying men like Brew as “educated slave owners” looking to preserve their position by continuing slavery. </p>
<h2>After Brew</h2>
<p>After Brew, there were other clashes between African abolitionists and the British colonial government in Gold Coast. In 1889, for example, a trader in Accra named <a href="https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/slavery-and-its-legacy-in-ghana-and-the-diaspora/ch7-an-african-abolitionist-on-the-gold-coast-the-case-of-francis-p-fearon">Francis Fearon</a> wrote letters to anti-slavery campaigners in Britain revealing that the then colonial governor of Gold Coast, W.B. Griffith, was promoting domestic slavery. By this time, slavery had been legally abolished. </p>
<p>But the British colonial regime in Gold Coast refused to implement the law properly and sometimes even promoted domestic slavery for administrative convenience. Fearon and his network of African abolitionists fought against this.</p>
<p>My paper goes some way to addressing the fact that the role of people like Brew and other African abolitionists has not been properly acknowledged.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187385/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The research on which this article is based received funding from European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 885418)</span></em></p>
Studying local Africans’ contributions to the abolition of slavery provides a fuller understanding of its history.
Michael E Odijie, Research associate, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/183954
2022-05-30T14:16:57Z
2022-05-30T14:16:57Z
Haiti has suffered hugely over centuries but its revolution was stunningly innovative
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/465992/original/file-20220530-12-q0hrht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C15%2C2645%2C1562&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>Since the New York Times published its recent series of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html">bombshell articles</a> about the crippling reparations that France imposed on Haiti after it won independence in 1804, much has been written about how this 150 million franc “indemnity” had virtually doomed the fledgling country before it had a chance to establish itself. The New York Times pieces outlined the huge long-term impact of these enforced payments and demonstrate that they cost the Haitian economy billions of dollars in lost economic growth, affecting the island well into the 21st century. </p>
<p>Historians of Haiti have remarked that the New York Times’ core claims are <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/23/new-york-times-historian-haiti-authoritative-source-00034511">hardly groundbreaking</a>. The long-term effects of the debt on the Haitian economy have long been acknowledged, researched and taught. Nevertheless the newspaper’s detailed account, with its additional evidence and fresh calculations, has allowed the story to achieve the kind of public visibility most professional historians can only dream of. This is undoubtedly positive. </p>
<p>But this account, for all its moral force and political relevance, also reinforces a longstanding public perception of Haitian history as a story of unremitting failure. Of course this is justified in many ways. To this day, Haiti remains one of the <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/haiti/overview">poorest countries</a> in the world, for which France (along with the United States and others) bears undeniable responsibility. But Haitian independence deserves to be remembered for more than its long, tragic aftermath. It was, in fact, a stunningly innovative event which dramatically changed the course of world history. </p>
<h2>Freedom fighters</h2>
<p>Before the Haitian revolution, Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was then known) was France’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Saint-Domingue">largest and richest</a> colony. Its population primarily consisted of enslaved black people, who lived and worked under a small elite of white plantation owners. When the French revolution broke out in 1789, it triggered a series of <a href="https://historyincharts.com/timeline-of-the-haitian-revolution/">revolts and conflicts</a> on the island. These involved white colonists, black enslaved people, free black and mixed-race people, as well as the French, British and Spanish states. </p>
<p>By 1804, the black and mixed-race insurgents had joined forces and claimed victory. White colonists were driven out or killed. On January 1 1804 a former slave, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, <a href="https://today.duke.edu/showcase/haitideclaration/declarationstext.html">proclaimed the independence</a> of the island in the name of the Haitian people. </p>
<p>It was a complex, lengthy, shockingly violent process. For a long time, it was treated as a bloody footnote in Atlantic history, and left out of the <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691161280/the-age-of-the-democratic-revolution">triumphant accounts</a> that narrated “the age of democratic revolutions”. But it is now increasingly being viewed by historians as a major turning point in world history. There are several reasons for this.</p>
<h2>Emancipation in the New World</h2>
<p>The first, and most immediately evident reason, relates to the history of colonial slavery. The Haitian revolution was a multifaceted conflict – but from 1791 its driving force was the great antislavery uprising spearheaded by the charismatic leader <a href="https://www.biography.com/political-figure/toussaint-louverture">Toussaint Louverture</a>. To this day it remains the only truly successful slave revolt in history.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="BUst of Haitian revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture in Montreal, Canada." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/465997/original/file-20220530-22-a2tuj1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Military genius: Haitian general Toussaint Louverture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Haitian example on the history of emancipation in the New World. It raised the old spectre of slave rebellion and shocked slave owners across the Americas, but it also informed the British emancipation debate. In the 1810s the support Haiti provided to <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/bolivar-haiti/">Simón Bolívar’s liberation movement</a> played a major part in ending slavery in northern South America. Haitian emancipation also encouraged uprisings and rebellions in the US, Cuba and Barbados. It continued to inspire black people across the New World until the final abolition of slavery by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/brazil-struggle-ethnic-racial-identity">Brazil in 1888</a>. </p>
<p>The Haitian revolutionaries also durably transformed the international landscape. Emerging from an 18th-century world ruled by monarchies and colonial empires, Haiti became the first black republic in the world. It was only the second state to claim independence from a European empire, after the US. </p>
<p>Notably, it was the first to be ruled by formerly enslaved people. Independent Haiti was, in many ways, ahead of its time – it would take another century and a half for another significant decolonisation movement to emerge and finally topple the great European empires, in the second half of the 20th century.</p>
<h2>Universal human rights</h2>
<p>Amid all the tumult and upheavals of revolution, the Haitian people’s claim to independence was also philosophically groundbreaking. The <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2014/01/haitian-declaration-of-independence-meaning-audience/">Declaration of Independence of 1804</a> ended the Haitian revolution with a powerful assertion of national sovereignty: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth … we must live independent or die.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By justifying independence in terms of the universal rights of mankind, Haitian leaders were deploying the same novel philosophical principles that underpinned the American and French revolutions. But, unlike the American and French republics, the new Haitian nation was to be rooted in its radical commitment to universal emancipation. </p>
<p>For all the above reasons, the Haitian revolution deserves to be remembered on its own terms – not only as the origin of a historical injustice, but also as one of the great revolutions of the Enlightenment, and a forerunner of modern decolonisation movements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Plassart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Haitian revolution was the first by a former slave colony and was to inspire other emancipation movements across the New World.
Anna Plassart, Senior Lecturer in History, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/183167
2022-05-18T14:17:55Z
2022-05-18T14:17:55Z
How taking a closer look at your family tree can help you get to grips with climate change
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463924/original/file-20220518-15-kz0ys8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4352%2C2877&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tracing our ancestors' connections to colonialism and industrialisation can help us personally connect with the climate crisis.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/female-hands-holding-old-photo-her-1787418920">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Engaging people when it comes to climate change can be challenging. Climate conversations are often technical and dry, making it hard to see how it connects to our own lives. As a <a href="https://wiserd.ac.uk/people/flossie-kingsbury/">historical researcher</a> I’ve been figuring out how we can make this connection clearer, and believe that taking a look at our family histories might hold the answer. </p>
<p>While climate change might seem abstract or distant, our own history is inherently personal. Tracing a family tree can show how historical events, including those that influenced <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556">climate change</a>, altered life courses. Through pilot research with my own family tree, I’ve found that family history can be a useful tool for understanding how the root processes that kickstarted climate change created the world we now inhabit.</p>
<p>Put simply, climate change is the result of two processes: <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-the-industrial-revolution-really-tells-us-about-the-future-of-automation-and-work-82051">industrialisation</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/colonialism-why-leading-climate-scientists-have-finally-acknowledged-its-link-with-climate-change-181642">colonialism</a>. Industrialisation is when a society’s primary mode of production shifts from manual agricultural labour to machine-aided manufacturing. Colonialism is when one nation occupies and exerts control over another, usually involving violence and exploitation. </p>
<p>Both processes are underpinned and sustained by a <a href="https://extraction.sites.ucsc.edu/">culture of extraction</a>: the mindset, still present in western societies today, that all resources (natural, like trees, and cultural, like traditions) exist to be capitalised on in some way. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A series of textile machines with women working at them" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463931/original/file-20220518-13-oiplcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The industrial revolution was a major contributor to climate change.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/women-working-textile-machines-beaming-inspecting-244389922">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In British history, this is reflected in the intertwined growth of the industrial revolution and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/three-imperial-policies-that-still-influence-life-in-britain-today-181629">British empire</a>. Both were fed by extracting coal to fuel factories, railways and steamships; extracting the raw materials required to produce goods; and exploiting land and labour from subjugated nations and the British working class.</p>
<h2>Family branches</h2>
<p>Let’s look at some examples from my own family. Samuel Polyblank (born around 1816), one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, was a shipwright from <a href="https://theconversation.com/barbara-windsor-youre-more-likely-to-hear-a-cockney-accent-in-essex-than-east-london-now-152033">London’s East End</a>. The ships he worked on helped to feed demand for international trade, taking goods to and from the colonies. They may even have been used by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders">East India Company</a>, the world’s first global corporate superpower, and a key player in colonial rule and exploitation in Asia. </p>
<p>Through his work, Samuel Polyblank found himself caught up in, and working to support, a system <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/to-fix-climate-crisis-we-must-acknowledge-our-imperial-past/">whose impacts</a> – including widespread deforestation, pollution, soil sterilisation and <a href="https://theconversation.com/biodiversity-collapse-the-wild-relatives-of-livestock-and-crops-are-disappearing-116759">biodiversity collapse</a> – continue to be felt today.</p>
<p>Another example is Daniel Winchester (born around 1791). One of my great-great-great-great-grandfathers, he was an <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/iron-founder/m0114hcj_?hl=en">iron founder</a> from <a href="https://theconversation.com/edward-colston-statue-toppled-how-bristol-came-to-see-the-slave-trader-as-a-hero-and-philanthropist-140271">Bristol</a>. Bristol is famous for its numerous connections to the <a href="https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/stories/bristol-transatlantic-slave-trade/">slave trade</a> and to the British empire’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/west-india-regiment/articles/an-introduction-to-the-caribbean-empire-and-slavery">Caribbean plantations</a>. And what those plantations relied upon very heavily were imported supplies for fossil fuel-driven processing plants and factories – which were frequently made of iron. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463925/original/file-20220518-16-krs6kt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edward Colston, a Bristolian who profited from the slave trade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/21804434@N02/7698693922">Mira66/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I don’t know for certain if Daniel Winchester’s work ended up in British plantations: but since at the time there were iron foundries in Bristol that made things which did, it’s not unlikely. And I know that Daniel made enough money to buy his own home and leave it to his son, a rare occurrence at a time when only a tiny proportion of Britain’s homes were occupied by their actual owners.</p>
<p>Although the Winchesters were not truly wealthy, still working manual occupations and relying on child labour to supplement their income, they were able to start passing down <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/31/inheritance-britain-wealthy-study-surnames-social-mobility">intergenerational wealth</a>: a hallmark of privilege that was only available to a small minority. It seems reasonable that the reason they were able to do this is because they capitalised, knowingly or not, on industrial demand that came from slavery.</p>
<p>This is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but if we want to understand the roots of climate change, it’s exactly what we should consider. It’s improbable that either Daniel Winchester or Samuel Polyblank set out to promote slavery and colonial violence any more than they set out to promote climate change. The world they lived in meant it was possible to participate in this extractive, exploitative system without confronting it, in the same way we struggle to understand our individual influence on climate today. </p>
<h2>How to engage</h2>
<p>One challenge of personally engaging with the <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2021/sc14445.doc.htm">climate crisis</a> is learning that your ancestors were complicit in things that you would rather be distanced from. But this isn’t about blaming our ancestors, who may well have been exploited themselves. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="People holding a sign reading 'Climate Justice'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463947/original/file-20220518-19-a9oezw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protesting is one way to participate in the climate movement.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/marrakesh-morocco-november-9-international-youth-512818693">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Instead, understanding these connections can help encourage us to prioritise <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-a-justice-issue-these-6-charts-show-why-170072">climate justice</a> and eco-friendly behaviours in our own lives, from cutting down on meat and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-sun-is-setting-on-unsustainable-long-haul-short-stay-tourism-regional-travel-bubbles-are-the-future-140926">unsustainable travel</a> to writing to your <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/contact-your-mp/">elected officials</a> about environmental issues in your community. So how might you think about your own family tree’s links to climate change? Here are my top questions to consider:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Think about where the things your ancestors used or bought came from, and where things they may have been involved with making were sent. How do these connect them to the industries and trade networks born of colonialism?</p></li>
<li><p>If they were wealthy, what was the source of that wealth? If they weren’t, what benefactors funded any hospitals or workhouses they may have used: and would those have existed without industry and colonialism?</p></li>
<li><p>What did they pass down? Think about not just objects but also any wealth or property, as well as skills and cultural practices. How might these legacies be transformed into climate-friendly resources, for example through donating to environmental groups?</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183167/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Flossie Kingsbury does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Understanding how our ancestors may have benefited from industrialisation and colonialism could help us become more climate-friendly citizens.
Flossie Kingsbury, Postdoctoral Research Associate in History, Aberystwyth University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/179112
2022-03-22T16:56:50Z
2022-03-22T16:56:50Z
Red gold: the rise and fall of West Africa’s palm oil empire
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451547/original/file-20220311-26-mxnv4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A tub of palm oil in Nimba County, Liberia</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Edwin Remsberg/GettyImages</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/red-gold-the-rise-and-fall-of-west-africas-palm-oil-empire-179112&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p>For thousands of years, the oil palm - indigenous to West Africa – has had an intimate relationship with people. An explosive expansion of oil palm groves throughout western and central Africa in the wake of <a href="https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2002.tb00003.x">a dry period around 2,500 years ago</a> enabled human migration and agricultural development; in turn, humans facilitated oil palm propagation through seed dispersal and slash-and-burn agriculture.</p>
<p>Archaeological evidence shows that palm fruit and their oil already formed an integral part of West African diets <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618210004726">5,000 years ago</a>.</p>
<p>With the exception of “royal” oil palm plantations, established in the 18th century for palm wine in the Kingdom of <a href="https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/pre-colonial-history/the-history-of-the-kingdom-of-dahomey/">Dahomey</a>, all of West Africa’s oil palms grew in wild and semi-wild groves.</p>
<p>Women and children collected loose fruits from the ground, while men harvested fruit bunches by climbing up to the top of the palms. The fruit was then processed into palm oil by women, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303022475_Humans_and_oil_palm_Elaeis_guineensis_Jacq_exploitation_in_Orile-Owu_Southwest_Nigeria_ca_1450-1640_AD_Archaeo-botanical_evidence">through a time-consuming and labour-intensive process</a> involving repetitively boiling and filtering the fresh fruits with water. Similar methods are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJo0L4Em4bY">still widely used</a> throughout West Africa. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451810/original/file-20220314-100476-u8jtrr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women prepare palm oil in Cote d'Ivoire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by SIA KAMBOU/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While pure red palm oil was derived from the palm fruit’s fleshy outer mesocarp, women also, often with the help of children, cracked the palm kernels to make brown, clear palm kernel oil.</p>
<p>Palm oil was, and remains, a key ingredient in West African cuisine, including the simple dish of boiled yam, palm oil and <a href="https://scitechafrica.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/how-potash-kanwa-were-the-common-cooking-salts-in-nigeria-until-colonial-era/">Kanwa salt</a>, and <a href="https://www.africanfoods.co.uk/banga-soup.html">Banga soup</a>.</p>
<p>Throughout West Africa, palm oil was also used in <a href="https://www.byrdie.com/african-black-soap-2442627">soap making</a>; today Yoruba black Dudu-Osun soap is a trademark Nigerian brand. In the Benin Kingdom, palm oil was used in street lamps and as a building material in the king’s palace walls. It also found hundreds of different ritualistic and medicinal uses, in particular as a skin ointment and a common antidote to poisons. In addition, the sap of oil palms was tapped for palm wine, and palm fronds provided material for roof thatching and brooms.</p>
<h2>Early 19th-century boom</h2>
<p>Palm oil has been known in Europe since the 15th century. It was Liverpool and Bristol slave traders who, in the early 19th century, began larger-scale imports. They were familiar with its multiple uses in West Africa and had already been buying it regularly as food for slaves being shipped to the Americas. </p>
<p>With the <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/abolition.htm">abolition of the slave trade</a> to the Americas in 1807, British West Africa traders turned to European markets and natural resources as commodities, in particular palm oil. At the time, the main sources of fats and oils in northern Europe were animal-based – such as lard or fish oils -– products for which it could be a challenge to secure regular supplies. There was a ready market for palm oil.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451809/original/file-20220314-21-ok27tm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Igbo men in the Oil Rivers area of present-day Nigeria bring calabashes full of palm oil to sell to a European buyer, c. 1900.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image © Jonathan Adagogo Green / The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY NC SA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Palm oil was used as an industrial lubricant, in tin-plate production, street-lighting, and as the fatty semi-solid for candle making and soap production. Breakthroughs in chemistry, in the 1820s facilitated a change to large-scale, industrial soap production. </p>
<p>Ever larger quantities of palm oil – increasing from <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sOJT4suWIHkC&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&dq=lynn+martin+palm+oil&ots=J3_JrPHJ2p&sig=Z4WeYoryn-B_rHa_eGO2uwMPJ-A#v=onepage&q=lynn%20martin%20palm%20oil&f=false">157 metric tonnes per year in the late 1790s to 32,480 tonnes by the early 1850s</a> – were brought to the UK by small-scale West African traders. </p>
<p>The trade was not for the faint-hearted. Once a year, traders would spend up to six weeks travelling in small schooners to one of the many trading stations on the West African coast. There were several dozen trading stations in the Oil Rivers area of today’s Niger Delta -– the heartland of the West African palm oil trade.</p>
<p>European traders lived and traded entirely on abandoned sailing ships. This was partly to try and avoid deadly diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, but also because local authorities didn’t let them build on land. Inland trade was controlled tightly by local brokers and village chiefs. </p>
<p>European traders gave these brokers European goods such as cooking utensils, salt and cloth. Then the traders waited on board their ships for them to return, sometimes for months at a time. Many of the African brokers were themselves former slave traders. The slave trade in the Niger Delta did not immediately stop with abolition but continued alongside the palm trade <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/abs/compatibility-of-the-slave-and-palm-oil-trades-in-the-bight-of-biafra/6B193629047B284B5DBF1DED84E0D723">until the 1840s</a>. Palm brokers and European traders continued to use the same network and system developed for the slave trade.</p>
<p>While waiting, the European traders’ coopers would assemble large casks to hold palm oil. </p>
<p>It was largely West Africa’s existing wild and semi-wild groves that furnished European demand. In the hinterland of the Oil Rivers and many other areas, there was an abundance of wild oil palm that could be harvested. Some planting did take place; the Krobo in southeastern Ghana, where fewer oil palms were growing naturally, began <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/219338">systematic cultivation</a> in response to European demand.</p>
<p>In Dahomey, too, more plantations were set up. Some parts of southeastern Nigeria focused so much on the production of palm oil that they became completely reliant on yam imports from further north. However, there was no large-scale, radical transformation in land management, ownership or ecology.</p>
<h2>The rise in oil palm brokers</h2>
<p>West African producers successfully responded to growing European palm oil demand through the modification and expansion of existing small-scale production methods. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Ekeh2/publication/271198175_History_of_The_Urhobo_People_of_Niger_Delta/links/5ca37a86299bf1b86d5fb394/History-of-The-Urhobo-People-of-Niger-Delta.pdf#page=488">Young men</a> did the dangerous work of harvesting fresh fruit bunches. In palm oil processing another, far less labour-intensive method, developed. Fresh fruit was left to ferment and then stamped on in large pits dug in the ground, or sometimes in old canoes. The resulting oil was much dirtier and inedible. It also fetched lower prices, but the new technique enabled much larger-scale production than before. </p>
<p>There was plenty of work in transporting palm oil, carrying calabashes filled with oil along forest paths to the nearest river and working on canoes. This brought some cash income for young men, but it was generally older, already wealthier men, and in particular chiefs, who were able to profit most from “red gold”, through the labour of their wives and slaves and from control of trade. </p>
<p>It was through brokerage that most wealth and power could be gained, and local power structures were deeply enmeshed with trade in palm oil. A particularly powerful broker at this time was <a href="https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/44e838ff-fe08-34d3-9a29-0fd82697a7d9">William Dappa Pepple</a>, the <em>amanyanabo</em> (king) of Bonny (in today’s southeastern Nigeria) from 1837 to 1854.</p>
<h2>Colonial takeover</h2>
<p>In the late 19th century, chemists discovered that hydrogenation could be used to process vegetable oils into margarine. Margarine played an increasingly important role in supplying fats for the diet of Europe’s growing urban working class. While the volume of imports of West African palm oil into the UK levelled off between the 1850s and 1890s, large-scale production of this new edible product stimulated renewed demand for palm oil in the early 20th century. </p>
<p>Between 1854 and 1874, France and Britain had <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/Colonization">already started</a> to create formal European colonies in Senegal, in Lagos, and in the Gold Coast. British West Africa eventually included Sierra Leone, the Gambia,the Gold Coast, and Nigeria (with the British Cameroons).</p>
<p>In the 1930s, British West Africa <a href="https://www.commodityhistories.org/sites/default/files/working-papers/WP05.pdf">exported around 500,000 tonnes of palm produce annually</a>. Palm produce continued to play a significant role in West African rural economies, but local control of the trade eroded under colonial administration; the opportunities for wealth and power palm oil had offered local people <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/abs/from-wealthy-entrepreneurs-to-petty-traders-the-decline-of-african-middlemen-in-eastern-nigeria-19001950/AF389C8BB7B87CEB1E1475D404D3AFFA">were no longer available</a>. </p>
<p>Moreover, as the colonial powers continued expanding their reach elsewhere in the tropics, a game-changing development was slowly beginning: the rise of the oil palm plantation. </p>
<p>Within a few short decades, expanses of Southeast Asian forest had been cleared, creating a fast track to industrial-scale monoculture plantations, thus ending West Africa’s position as the global hub of palm oil production.</p>
<p><em>A version of this piece was originally <a href="https://chinadialogue.net/en/food/red-gold-a-history-of-palm-oil-in-west-africa/#:%7E:text=Oil%20palm%E2%80%93human%20relations%20in%20West%20Africa%3A%20a%20long%20history&text=Archaeological%20evidence%20shows%20that%20palm,in%20cleared%20and%20burned%20areas.">published</a> on China Dialogue</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179112/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pauline von Hellermann receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust (I currently hold a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship)</span></em></p>
Palm oil is one of the 21st century’s most contentious agricultural commodities, but its relationship with humans goes back thousands of years.
Pauline von Hellermann, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/172602
2021-12-15T19:08:22Z
2021-12-15T19:08:22Z
Hibbert’s flowers and Hitler’s beetle – what do we do when species are named after history’s monsters?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437438/original/file-20211214-13-y3duma.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=118%2C0%2C3843%2C2232&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hibbertia_procumbens_(6691568261).jpg">John Tann/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“What’s in a name?”, <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/70/3822.html">asked Juliet of Romeo</a>. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”</p>
<p>But, as with the Montagues and Capulets, names mean a lot, and can cause a great deal of heartache.</p>
<p>My colleagues and I are <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-not-the-science-of-tax-and-five-other-things-you-should-know-about-taxonomy-78926">taxonomists</a>, which means we name living things. While we’ve never named a rose, we do discover and name new Australian species of plants and animals – and there are a lot of them!</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/about-500-000-australian-species-are-undiscovered-and-scientists-are-on-a-25-year-mission-to-finish-the-job-161793">About 500,000 Australian species are undiscovered – and scientists are on a 25-year mission to finish the job</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>For each new species we discover, we create and publish a Latin scientific name, following a set of international rules and conventions. The name has two parts: the first part is the genus name (such as <em>Eucalyptus</em>), which describes the group of species to which the new species belongs, and the second part is a species name (such as <em>globulus</em>, thereby making the name <em>Eucalyptus globulus</em>) particular to the new species itself. New species are either added to an existing genus, or occasionally, if they’re sufficiently novel, are given their own new genus.</p>
<p>Some scientific names are widely known – arguably none more so than our own, <em>Homo sapiens</em>. And gardeners or nature enthusiasts will be familiar with genus names such as <em>Acacia</em>, <em>Callistemon</em> or <em>Banksia</em>.</p>
<p>This all sounds pretty uncontroversial. But as with Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, history and tradition sometimes present problems.</p>
<h2>What’s in a name?</h2>
<p>Take the genus <em><a href="http://www.flora.sa.gov.au/cgi-bin/speciesfacts_display.cgi?form=speciesfacts&name=Hibbertia">Hibbertia</a></em>, the Australian guineaflowers. This is one of the largest genera of plants in Australia, and the one we study. </p>
<p>There are many new and yet-unnamed species of <em>Hibbertia</em>, which means new species names are regularly added to this genus.</p>
<p>Many scientific names are derived from a feature of the species or genus being named, such as <em>Eucalyptus</em>, from the Greek for “well-covered” (a reference to the operculum or bud-cap that covers unopened eucalypt flowers). </p>
<p>Others <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-funny-to-name-species-after-celebrities-but-theres-a-serious-side-too-95513">honour significant people</a>, either living or dead. <em>Hibbertia</em> is named after a wealthy 19th-century English patron of botany, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hibbert">George Hibbert</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="George Hibbert by Thomas Lawrence" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437440/original/file-20211214-15-1u4xyy3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Hibbert: big fan of flowers and slavery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Hibbert_by_Thomas_Lawrence,_1811.JPG">Thomas Lawrence/Stephen C. Dickson/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And here’s where things stop being straightforward, because Hibbert’s wealth came almost entirely from the transatlantic slave trade. He profited from taking slaves from Africa to the New World, selling some and using others on his family’s extensive plantations, then transporting slave-produced sugar and cotton back to England.</p>
<p>Hibbert was also a prominent member of the British parliament and a <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/16791">staunch opponent of abolition</a>. He and his ilk argued that slavery was economically necessary for England, and even that slaves were better off on the plantations than in their homelands. </p>
<p>Even at the time, his views were considered abhorrent by many critics. But despite this, he was handsomely recompensed for his “losses” when Britain finally abolished slavery in 1807.</p>
<p>So, should Hibbert be honoured with the name of a genus of plants, to which new species are still being added today – effectively meaning he is honoured afresh with each new publication?</p>
<p>We don’t believe so. Just like statues, buildings, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/was-first-governor-james-stirling-had-links-to-slavery-as-well-as-directing-a-massacre-should-he-be-honoured-162078">street or suburb names</a>, we think a reckoning is due for scientific species names that honour people who held views or acted in ways that are deeply dishonourable, highly problematic or truly egregious by modern standards.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Anophthalmus hitleri" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437442/original/file-20211214-13-1yaho8u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This beetle doesn’t deserve to be named after the most reviled figure of the 20th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anophthalmus_hitleri_HabitusDors.jpg">Michael Munich/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just as Western Australia’s King Leopold Range <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-03/wa-king-leopold-ranges-renamed-wunaamin-miliwundi-ranges/12416254">was recently renamed</a> to remove the link to the atrocious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium">Leopold II of Belgium</a>, we would like <em>Hibbertia</em> to bear a more appropriate and less troubling name.</p>
<p>The same goes for the Great Barrier Reef coral <em><a href="http://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/elegance-coral/">Catalaphyllia jardinei</a></em>, named after Frank Jardine, a brutal dispossessor of Aboriginal people in North Queensland. And, perhaps most astoundingly, the rare Slovenian cave beetle <em><a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/773804">Anophthalmus hitleri</a></em>, which was named in 1933 in honour of Adolf Hitler. </p>
<p>This name is unfortunate for several reasons: despite being a small, somewhat nondescript, blind beetle, in recent years it has been reportedly <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/fans-exterminate-hitler-beetle-6232054.html">pushed to the brink of extinction</a> by Nazi memorabilia enthusiasts. Specimens are even being stolen from museum collections for sale into this lucrative market.</p>
<h2>Aye, there’s the rub</h2>
<p>Unfortunately, the official rules don’t allow us to rename <em>Hibbertia</em> or any other species that has a troubling or inappropriate name.</p>
<p>To solve this, we propose a change to the international rules for naming species. Our <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tax.12620">proposal</a>, if adopted, would establish an international expert committee to decide what do about scientific names that honour inappropriate people or are based on culturally offensive words. </p>
<p>An example of the latter is the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tax.12622">many names of plants</a> based on the Latin <em>caffra</em>, the origin of which is a word so offensive to Black Africans that its use is <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/k-word-south-africa-and-proposed-new-penalties-against-hate-speech">banned in South Africa</a>.</p>
<p>Some may argue the scholarly naming of species should remain aloof from social change, and that Hibbert’s views on slavery are irrelevant to the classification of Australian flowers. We counter that, just like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston">toppling statues in Bristol Harbour</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/18/goodbye-cecil-rhodes-house-renamed-to-lose-link-to-british-empire-builder-in-africa">removing Cecil Rhodes’ name from public buildings</a>, renaming things is important and necessary if we are to right history’s wrongs.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/was-first-governor-james-stirling-had-links-to-slavery-as-well-as-directing-a-massacre-should-he-be-honoured-162078">WA's first governor James Stirling had links to slavery, as well as directing a massacre. Should he be honoured?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>We believe that science, including taxonomy, must be socially responsible and responsive. Science is embedded in culture rather than housed in ivory towers, and scientists should work for the common good rather than blindly follow tradition. Deeply problematic names pervade science just as they pervade our streets, cities and landscapes.</p>
<p><em>Hibbertia</em> may be just a name, but we believe a different name for this lovely genus of Australian flowers would smell much sweeter.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article was co-authored by Tim Hammer, a postdoctoral research fellow at the State Herbarium of South Australia.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Thiele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
One of Australia’s largest groups of flower species is named after a wealthy British slave-trader. And Nazi memorabilia collectors have almost sent “Hitler’s beetle” extinct. It’s time for a change.
Kevin Thiele, Adjunct Assoc. Professor, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/169785
2021-10-26T14:22:42Z
2021-10-26T14:22:42Z
Nigerian museums must tell stories of slavery with more complexity and nuance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427828/original/file-20211021-25-1ifhwxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Gidan Makama national museum in Kano, Nigeria.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aminu Abubakar/AFP/Getty</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In many parts of the world, museums are considering how to present history through different lenses, rather than just representing colonial and imperialistic views of certain events, countries or whole continents.</p>
<p>The current museum presentations of exhibits and information about slavery – especially the transatlantic slave trade – are a stark example of colonisation that’s been spun through a white, eurocentric lens. Hence, it’s become a key part of the decolonisation debate. </p>
<p>Museums all over the world have struggled to move beyond presenting more than emotionally removed snapshots of the slave trade. Most of these halls are continuing a long tradition of disconnecting themselves and the public from personal and local stories of slavery. This makes them disconnected from community and public memories. </p>
<p>African museums are also guilty of this practice. The transatlantic slave trade was a 400-year period during which African people were stolen from their homes and shipped to colonial nations. It was complex and multi-faceted. But when presented by museums today, it is communicated as a singular and temporarily isolated event. African museums frame the transatlantic slave trade narratives from an economic perspective. Their narratives are built around economic drivers and the economic effects of slavery on African countries, and the countries that benefited from the trade.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21619441.2021.1963034">recent study</a>, I examined how slavery is presented in two Nigerian museums. One is Calabar’s Slave History <a href="http://slaveryandremembrance.org/partners/partner/?id=P0027">Museum</a>, which is government-funded; the other is the privately run Seriki Faremi Williams Abass <a href="https://seriki-williams-abass-slave-museum.business.site">Museum</a>. In both museums, the dominant narrative about slavery is that the Europeans arrived; the slave trade developed; and then it was abolished.</p>
<p>Little attention is paid to the practice of slavery in the region before Europeans arrived in the 1440s. There’s little mention of how the practice persisted, even after the British outlawed the slave trade in its empire. There’s no mention of concerns about <a href="https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/resources/downloads/">modern slavery</a> in Nigeria.</p>
<p>This is an isolationist approach to a large, complex set of stories. When I spoke with local communities descended from victims of slavery, members strongly criticised government funded museums’ approach. They kicked against the museums’ failure to convey the complete, complex, and conflicting localised human story of the slave trade. They also wanted museums to reflect that slavery continues to have an impact on local communities today. Especially on the culture and identity of individuals and ethnic groups.</p>
<h2>Official avoidance of history</h2>
<p>Elsewhere in Nigeria, transatlantic slavery and the slave trade are largely absent from national or state museums, including the <a href="https://momaa.org/directory/nigerian-national-museum/">Nigerian National Museum</a> in Lagos.</p>
<p>This official avoidance of the history of slavery and its accompanying acts of oppression and injustice could be linked to the colonial legacies of many of these museums. It may also be connected to wider political rhetoric that unsuccessfully urges Nigerians to forget such dark chapters. Of course, such avoidance is not limited to Nigeria – it’s a global trend of deliberate erasure. It has deep roots in imperialist and eurocentric agendas.</p>
<p>After independence in 1960, Nigeria’s heritage and past were used to enlighten and educate the public in national “official” histories. The aim was <a href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/og/article/view/141270">nation-building</a>. Six decades later, it has culminated in the exclusion of the transatlantic slave trade from wider narratives of independence, colonial geography, and ethnic histories in Nigerian museums.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A yellow bungalow, with a lawn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427834/original/file-20211021-17-o98oax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Slavery Museum at Badagry, Nigeria.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MyLoupe/Universal Images Group/Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Colonial heritage narratives about Nigeria have not been amended throughout the years. These incorrect narratives linger, despite evidence that slavery and enslavement form the core of the country’s personal, local and cultural memories. </p>
<p>Official efforts have failed to consider community narratives and memories, thereby removing Nigerians from the centre of their own history and heritage. The result is that these museums are often perceived as locally irrelevant: there is a disconnect between the official narrative and the descendent community’s <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333776834_Heritage_and_Community_Archaeology_in_South-Western_Nigeria">versions</a> of the past. </p>
<p>One of the museums in my study, the Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum in Badagry, was developed as a direct result of the gaps in official museums’ offerings.</p>
<h2>Local collaboration is key</h2>
<p>It is critical that museum professionals in Nigeria – and the rest of the world – begin to open up dialogue with diverse local communities. Museums must be immersed in people-centric local narratives. They have to also build <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21619441.2021.1963034">trust</a> with the communities in which they operate. </p>
<p>This collaboration will allow for the co-production of culturally relevant, personalised and empathetic narratives. Via this collaboration, the story of slavery and slave trade can be sensitively and accurately presented. It will also enable museums to highlight the unique cultural impact of slavery on specific localities, especially at the points of origin and final destination. </p>
<p>This approach could encourage the public and museums to question over-simplified stories of the past. It’s also a valuable way to support empathy with the past. This could enable the public to face uncomfortable and potentially personal truths about the slave trade and enslavement that move beyond victimisation and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00083968.2013.771422">stereotypes</a>. </p>
<p>By considering transatlantic slavery and slave trade through this lens, museums have the potential to connect people to the past, so communities might learn, reflect and heal.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169785/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Faye Sayer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Nigerian museums continue to present colonised versions of history. This harms local communities.
Faye Sayer, Researcher in Community Archaeology and Public History, Manchester Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/166363
2021-09-01T14:42:51Z
2021-09-01T14:42:51Z
Small seashells tell a big story of slavery and transoceanic trade 500 years ago
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418451/original/file-20210830-19-19k2jae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Money cowries (Monetaria moneta) retrieved from the São Bento.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mudzunga Munzhedzi (2019). KwaZulu-Natal Museum</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the archaeology storerooms of the <a href="https://www.nmsa.org.za/">KwaZulu-Natal Museum</a> in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, lie two boxes filled with seashells.</p>
<p>The shells form a bright and shiny mass that makes a satisfying, almost metallic sound when you run your fingers through them. The entire sample weighs 18.7 kg and comprises approximately 16,500 individual shells.</p>
<p>They are money cowries, from <em>Monetaria moneta</em>, a species of sea snail native to the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean. </p>
<p>Money cowries are natural objects – each shell is a trace of an animal’s life. They were also, as their common name suggests, <a href="https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/the-origins/cowry-shells-a-form-of-currency">circulated widely</a> as a kind of currency. </p>
<p>The KwaZulu-Natal Museum specimens were found among the remains of a sunken ship lying at the mouth of the Mzikaba river in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.</p>
<p>The remains were long thought to be of the <a href="https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/148344.html">Grosvenor</a>, wrecked in 1782. But in the early 1980s they were <a href="https://www.sahumanities.org/index.php/sah/article/view/43">identified</a> as the wreck of the São Bento, a 16th century Portuguese vessel. The São Bento sailed from Portugal to India in 1553, where it loaded a new cargo to take on its journey homeward. It departed from the port of Cochin in February 1554 with goods destined for trade into Europe and West Africa.</p>
<p>The ship encountered rough and stormy conditions and was probably too heavily laden – greed and risk played a significant role in the Portuguese trading venture. By April the São Bento was struggling around the south-eastern corner of Africa. It drifted onto a reef-and-island cluster adjacent to the shoreline and broke up in the rough surf.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418230/original/file-20210827-17822-wsut8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Mzikaba estuary, showing Mzikaba island, beyond which is the reef where the cannons were found. KwaZulu-Natal Museum photographic archive. Photographer unrecorded (1986).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">KwaZulu-Natal Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It would be centuries before the wreck was investigated; in the late 1960s, divers formed an amateur salvage and research group to explore what remained. Numerous items were accessioned into the KwaZulu-Natal Museum’s archaeology collection, including beach finds such as ceramic sherds and carnelian beads, and bronze cannons recovered from beyond the reef. </p>
<p>The cache of money cowries was found during conservation work in the deepest recesses of the barrel of one of the cannons. The shells were packed tightly into the barrel, as if stashed there in secret. They probably represent a small (possibly pilfered) fraction of a much larger shipment that would have been swept away by the current after the accident.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418232/original/file-20210827-15869-warw6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The large muzzle-loading cannon from the São Bento that the cowries were lodged in for over four centuries (far left). KwaZulu-Natal Museum archaeology collection. Photograph: Justine Wintjes (2020).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">KwaZulu-Natal Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their presence, as I have outlined <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23277408.2020.1826849">in my research</a>, tells a richly layered, unavoidably dark story about the West African slave trade. Through the story of the cowries, at least some small part of this history may become more tangible.</p>
<h2>“Human-cowrie conversion”</h2>
<p>Money cowries were used for thousands of years as currency across the Indo-Pacific world, but introduced into Atlantic commercial networks relatively late. The Maldives was a major source, with its <a href="http://mrc.gov.mv/en/publications/show/commercial-exploitation-reef-resources-examples-of-sustainable-and-non-sustainable-utilization-from-">large-scale, sustainable money cowrie industry</a>. </p>
<p>In the 1550s cowries were still a relatively new commodity for Europeans, and they were destined primarily for trade with West Africa. The Atlantic market picked up swiftly and billions of money cowries from the Indian Ocean were shipped to the Bight of Benin on the West African coast between the 16th and 19th centuries. </p>
<p>Cowries were exchanged directly for slaves throughout all centuries of the sea-borne trade of slaves out of West Africa. Nigerian archaeologist, anthropologist and historian Akinwumi Ogundiran <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3097620">describes</a> this trade in terms of a “human-cowry conversion”. </p>
<p>Exact numbers are impossible to calculate, but at a possible rate of around 6 kg of cowries (5000–6000 shells) for one slave, the São Bento cache could have been used to purchase three slaves.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-long-view-sheds-fresh-light-on-the-history-of-the-yoruba-people-in-west-africa-162776">A long view sheds fresh light on the history of the Yoruba people in West Africa</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The São Bento cowries had another intimate association with slaves: according to the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=NpYcAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA218">report</a> by survivor and chronicler Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo, slaves made up around two-thirds of the ship’s 470 passengers. This mention is intriguing because little is known of the transport of slaves around the southern tip of Africa in the 16th century. The Indian Ocean slave trade is far older than the Atlantic system, but it is a neglected area of history. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/exploring-the-indian-ocean-as-a-rich-archive-of-history-above-and-below-the-water-line-133817">Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Early Portuguese shipwrecks with oriental cargoes like the São Bento could contribute to our understanding of this deeper history of slavery, and the relationship between the two ocean worlds.</p>
<h2>Entanglement</h2>
<p>More research might determine where the São Bento slaves came from, and even what it meant to be a slave in this context. Whatever the specific situation for the São Bento slaves, the sinking of the ship might have opened other options up for them. Ultimately only 23 people were rescued by a Portuguese ivory-trading vessel at the end of a gruelling 800 km walk from the wreck site to Delagoa Bay on the southeast coast of Mozambique. Just three of them were slaves.</p>
<p>Despite its sinking, then, the entanglement between slaves and cowries was so fundamental that the São Bento still effected a kind of human-cowrie conversion: three surviving slaves shipped out of Delagoa Bay half a year after the accident for three slaves’ worth of salvaged cowries bequeathed to a museum over four centuries later.</p>
<p>There’s another kind of entanglement at play, too. Cowries were not just currency: they began to serve as a raw material in West Africa for making art. Among the Yoruba, <a href="https://www.artsbma.org/collection/shrine-ile-ori-or-house-of-the-head/">Ori shrines</a> which facilitate the realisation of self-hood came to be constructed from large numbers of cowries. Even in this re-purposed context, the confluence with Ori bound cowries to a person’s destiny.</p>
<h2>A vast legacy</h2>
<p>Now as museum objects in South Africa, the brightness of the São Bento cowries in their boxes seems at odds with the heaviness they carry from their historical association with human slavery. This unsettling lightness is amplified by the sinister elusiveness of the specifics of this story, reminiscent of histories of slavery more generally. Irrecoverable, hidden, unspoken, and yet such a vast legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166363/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justine Wintjes works at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, where the São Bento cowries are housed and some are on display. The research this article is based on arose from the workshop 'Ilha de Moçambique: Thinking Oceanically / Pensando a Partir do Oceano' hosted by Oceanic Humanities for the Global South and Kaleidoscopio in 2019. </span></em></p>
Money cowries were used for thousands of years as currency across the Indo-Pacific world but introduced into Atlantic commercial networks relatively late.
Justine Wintjes, Curator, KwaZulu-Natal Museum
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/162776
2021-06-27T08:44:48Z
2021-06-27T08:44:48Z
A long view sheds fresh light on the history of the Yoruba people in West Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407624/original/file-20210622-15-19458vb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A group of drummers playing traditional Yoruba drums.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-old-drum-beats-a-path-from-the-ancients-to-erykah-badu-news-photo/144148269?adppopup=true">Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRy92OJCtcY">Yoruba</a> are among the most storied groups in Africa. Their ancestral homeland <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/africa/nigeria/articles/an-introduction-to-nigerias-yoruba-people/">cuts</a> across present-day southwest Nigeria, Benin Republic and Togo in West Africa. They <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/africa/nigeria/articles/an-introduction-to-nigerias-yoruba-people/">number</a> between 35 and 40 million. Their dynamic culture, philosophy, arts, language, sociology and history have attracted <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Yoruba-Nine-Centuries-African-Thought/dp/0810917947">numerous studies</a>. </p>
<p>What has been missing in this rich literature is a deep history that benefits from a diverse range of disciplines and sources. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Writing-African-History-Rochester-Diaspora/dp/1580462561">Scholars</a> have long recognised the value of combining different methods and sources, beyond documentary and oral traditions, to study pre-colonial African history. </p>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">The Yoruba: A New History</a> to fill this gap. The book is a product of the studies I have carried out in different parts of Yoruba region over the past 30 years as an <a href="https://pages.uncc.edu/akinwumi-ogundiran/">archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian</a>. </p>
<p>By providing insights from different disciplines I have been able to uncover new themes in Yoruba history.</p>
<p>I provide a 2,000 year account of cultural changes and continuities, how local and global processes have affected social transformations, the meanings people made out of their experiences, and how these affected actions, and what the consequences were. </p>
<p>I weave multifaceted stories about ups and downs, successes and failures, coping with risks and opportunities and solving existential crises. These have ranged from climate change to shifting global political economies, and the impact on the ideas of gender, class, and power, among others.</p>
<h2>The history</h2>
<p>In the first half of the book, I account for how the Yoruba community evolved on the western side of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria <a href="https://www.nhbs.com/the-cambridge-world-history-volume-2-a-world-with-agriculture-12000-bce-500-ce-book">about 4000 years ago</a> and the dramatic changes that stimulated their <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">rapid geographical expansion between 300 BC and AD 300</a>. </p>
<p>The climate change that commenced in the last quarter of the first millennium BC, <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-way-the-wind-blows/9780231112086">known as the Big Dry</a>, sparked this expansion process. Extreme droughts pushed families and social groups to look for new water corridors and resources. The early centuries of this ecological crisis were also a period of new technological innovations, especially the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022222325095">adoption of iron metallurgy</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="The book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408135/original/file-20210624-17-17a0ptn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Yoruba: A New History.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Akinwumi Ogundiran</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the time the Big Dry ended and optimum wet conditions returned in the 3rd AD, the Yoruba had expanded from the Niger-Benue Confluence <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">as far as the Atlantic coast</a>. The second half of the first millennium AD was a period of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">rapid socio-political innovations</a>. The idea of divine kingship alongside a unique system of urbanism evolved in multiple places and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">became the basis of social order</a>. </p>
<p>Between the 12th and 14th centuries, Ile-Ife was the centre of the Yoruba world. It was an emporium and holy city. Its economy was based on a novel technology of glass manufacture mainly devoted to making beads, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">the primary currency of power, authority and wealth in the region.</a></p>
<p>Ile-Ife remains the only place in sub-Saharan Africa known as an industrial centre for <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021934717701915">primary glass production</a>. </p>
<p>Ile-Ife used its technological and economic advantages to restructure the ideology of divine kingship. It also used this advantage to standardise the Yoruba religious system (Orisa pantheon) and make itself (literally) the beginning and end of time. It brought vast territories, as far as the River Niger and the Atlantic coast, under its political control and cultural influence. These <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">included even non-Yoruba-speaking peoples</a>. </p>
<p>For these and other reasons, I concluded that Ile-Ife built the first empire in the Yoruba world during the 13th and 14th centuries.</p>
<h2>Collapse and rebirth</h2>
<p>The Ife Empire came to an end by 1420 due to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">several colliding factors</a>. These included long spells of drought that kicked off around 1380 across West and East Africa (the equivalent of the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history">Little Ice Age</a> in the northern hemisphere), political disturbances in Western Sudan (for example, the collapse of the Mali Empire), and internal crisis within the Ife Empire. </p>
<p>Conflict, war, disease, famine, and dynastic changes <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">rocked</a> most of the Yoruba world and other parts of West Africa. </p>
<p>It was not until the late 16th century that the region began to recover, thanks to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">regional cooperation notably championed by Oyo</a>. By then, the political landscape had been permanently changed. Some of the minor kingdoms of the Classical period were now in control (for example, Oyo), and several new states emerged from the rubbles of the old ones. </p>
<p>This was also the beginning of the integration of the Yoruba into a newly emerging global political economy that focused on the Americas and the European maritime might. </p>
<p>The book explores how the commercial revolution of this early modern period, especially the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40282457">Atlantic slave trade</a>, shaped Yoruba political landscape, culture, and society starting from the early seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. </p>
<p>During this time, the Yoruba economy <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">became far more monetised than before</a>. There was an overall increase in productivity due to economic specialisation. The cowrie currency that powered this economy was imported while the external trade of the region was driven by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv177thv2">a dependency on imported addictive commodity – tobacco</a>. Both <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/abs/jan-hogendorn-and-marion-johnson-the-shell-money-of-the-slave-trade-cambridge-cambridge-university-press-1986/4A5EC59DD8F214A81F5655182D06149A">cowries and tobacco exports</a> were exchanged for human cargo in the Bight of Benin, where <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253217165/the-yoruba-diaspora-in-the-atlantic-world/">almost a million Yoruba</a> entered the Middle Passage, mostly between 1775 and 1840. </p>
<p>The second half of the book focuses on the effects of this new experience on social valuation, the theory of rights, privileges, and power, as well as gender and class relations. </p>
<p>I bring it to a close with the collapse of the <a href="https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/1r66j125t">Oyo Empire</a>, the second empire in Yoruba history, and its aftermath in the mid-nineteenth century. </p>
<h2>Reflection</h2>
<p>In the concluding chapter, I reflected on what this 2000-year history means for the present. </p>
<p>The book tells the story about the unique gifts that the Yoruba people gave to the world in social organisation, resilience, technology, arts, philosophy, religion, and ethics. </p>
<p>From time to time, many scholars, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4351601/Crises_of_Culture_and_Consciousness_in_the_Postcolony_What_is_the_future_for_Nigeria">including me</a>, have lamented how African historical experience rarely informs public policies in contemporary Africa, mainly because <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789463005159">policymakers have a poor understanding</a> of that history. </p>
<p>An awareness of the challenges faced by ancestral Yoruba and how they solved those problems for more than 2000 years is as important as understanding why they came short in some instances. </p>
<p>In searching for solutions that address contemporary challenges, it would help to pay more attention to African history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162776/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Akinwumi Ogundiran receives funding from the National Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Dumbarton Oaks, and Yip Fellowship (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge). </span></em></p>
By providing insights from different disciplines, a new book uncovers new themes in the history of Yoruba people of West Africa
Akinwumi Ogundiran, Chancellor’s Professor, and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology & History, University of North Carolina – Charlotte
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/159974
2021-05-26T18:11:38Z
2021-05-26T18:11:38Z
Racism & the Americanization of Canadian history: Why we shouldn’t look at ourselves through a U.S. lens
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401928/original/file-20210520-13-8eqv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C9%2C6240%2C4138&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters march and hold up posters along the streets of Hamilton to support anti racism and Black Lives Matter.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 250px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/racism-and-the-americanization-of-canadian-history" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>On April 20, a jury in Minnesota found <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/us/derek-chauvin-trial-george-floyd-deliberations/index.html">Derek Chauvin</a> guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd. Following the verdict, Canadian media <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-verdict-reaction-1.5994959">was filled with</a> extensive coverage and endless <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-derek-chauvin-trial-george-floyd-police-1.5995218">analyses of the story</a>.</p>
<p>Many Canadians watched the racism unfold in the United States with a sense of moral superiority and relief that “<a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7109213/canadian-myth-nice-racism/">this kind of thing does not happen in Canada</a>.” The Canadian response to racism south of the border can be described as an Americanization of Canadian history. The media’s lack of coverage of racism in Canada, in its historically accurate context, is a cause for concern.</p>
<h2>Different histories of racism</h2>
<p>Canada’s history of racism is different than the United States. </p>
<p>In 1619, the first slave ship docked on North American shores, bringing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/15/400-years-since-slavery-timeline">20 enslaved Africans</a>. This was the start of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620">transatlantic slave trade</a> that saw at least 300,000 Africans brought to and sold at U.S. ports. Historians estimate that in Canada, between 1671 and 1834, <a href="https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/slavery/">there were 4,200 slaves – about two-thirds were Indigenous and one-third were Black</a>. </p>
<p>Outlawing the slave trade and restrictions on non-European immigration later slowed down the growth of the Black population both in the U.S. and in Canada.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Abraham Lincoln's signature on the 13th Amendment" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/401925/original/file-20210520-21-1vxtt4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The signature of former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln on a rare, restored copy of the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, in Chicago.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Immigration <a href="https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/immigration-regulations-order-in-council-pc-1962-86-1962">regulations introduced in 1962</a> in Canada eliminated preferences for immigrants of European origin for a points-based system, prioritizing skilled labour. As a result, the immigrant population <a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2011000/chap/imm/imm-eng.htm">became more diverse in Canada</a>. Similarly, in the U.S., the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Immigration Act of 1990 have helped to <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states-2020">increase the number of immigrants in the country</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/">Immigrants today account for 13.7 per cent of the U.S. population</a> compared to <a href="https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/subjects-start/immigration_and_ethnocultural_diversity">22 per cent in Canada</a>.</p>
<p>The history of slavery and immigration provides an important context to contemporary conversations on racism. But an increase in immigration does not automatically lead to more or less racism.</p>
<p>In a country like Canada, it’s important for us to acknowledge our differences in history from the U.S., account for racism within a particular historical context and reflect on what racism actually looks like here.</p>
<p>Difference can provide a space for understanding the implication of race in defining the various experiences of racialized groups, instead of a universalized representation of race and racism.</p>
<h2>Racism towards Indigenous people</h2>
<p>Canada has a long history of racism towards Indigenous people - from <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/historical-background/colonization">the colonization of their land</a> and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/117718011200800102">enslavement</a> <a href="https://www.firstpeopleslaw.com/public-education/blog/treaty-implementation-the-crowns-ongoing-failure">to the violation of treaties</a> and policies that led to <a href="https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/">residential schools</a> and <a href="https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/sixties_scoop/">the ‘60s Scoop</a>. </p>
<p>Abuse and racism suffered by First Nations, Inuit and Métis people at the hands of the government continue to take a toll on Indigenous lives. Many remote communities face challenges accessing basic necessities like clean drinking water.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tip-of-the-iceberg-the-true-state-of-drinking-water-advisories-in-first-nations-156190">Tip of the iceberg: The true state of drinking water advisories in First Nations</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Indigenous people in Canada also experience the highest levels of poverty: <a href="https://www.povertyinstitute.ca/poverty-canada">25 per cent of Indigenous people live in poverty while 40 per cent of Indigenous children live in poverty</a>.</p>
<p>Accessing health care has also been a challenge for many First Nations people. Several months ago, <a href="https://time.com/5898422/joyce-echaquan-indigenous-protests-canada/">Joyce Echaquan</a> died in a hospital in Joliette, Que. Not only did she not receive the help she needed, but hospital staff told her that she would be better off dead. Meaningful action to fight the systemic racism Indigenous people are experiencing is yet to come.</p>
<p>In the U.S., genocidal policies aimed at Indigenous people changed when legislators passed a number of laws, most importantly <a href="https://harvardpolitics.com/a-progressive-facade-comparing-the-u-s-and-canadas-treatment-of-indigenous-peoples/">the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975</a>, which resulted in the U.S. government’s recognition of Indigenous statehood.</p>
<p>In recent years, some policies, especially those implemented by former president Donald Trump’s administration, have been <a href="https://www.iwgia.org/en/usa.html">diminishing tribal land rights, sovereignty and resources</a>. The Keystone XL Pipeline project, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trump-administration-approves-keystone-pipeline-on-u-s-land">approved by the Trump administration</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-bidens-cancellation-of-the-keystone-pipeline-is-a-landmark-in-the-climate-fight">cancelled by U.S. President Joe Biden</a>, was met with strong <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-groups-keystonexl-2017-approval-1.4042381">resistance from Indigenous people in Canada</a> and the U.S. The project <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/6959164/trudeau-keystone-xl-pipeline-biden-reaction/">had the backing of Canadian government</a>. </p>
<h2>The American influence</h2>
<p>The U.S. influences Canadian lives in many ways - <a href="https://financialpost.com/midas-letter/economic-patriotism-and-the-americanization-of-canada">from the economy to culture</a>. Canadians often mindlessly consume U.S. media and politics without thinking twice about how those issues manifest themselves in Canada and what the differences are in the history of race and racism between the two countries. </p>
<p>The Americanization of Canadian culture is not new. In 1926, in an essay titled <a href="https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1926/3/15/is-canada-being-americanized"><em>Is Canada Being Americanized?</em></a>, journalist and philosopher C.H. Bretherton offered reflections on Canada’s movement toward American models of social and economic life. However, Americanization of Canadian history is a rather new phenomenon.</p>
<p>About a decade ago, <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadians-dont-know-their-history-study-shows/article18148571/#:%7E:text=This%20article%20was%20published%20more%20than%2010%20years%20ago.&text=Fewer%20than%20half%20of%20young,study%20to%20be%20released%20today.">a national survey of 18- to 24-year-olds</a> found that only 46 per cent of respondents knew Sir John A. Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada, let alone the racist policies he implemented in the country. <a href="https://www.historicacanada.ca/polls">Polls conducted more recently by Historica Canada show</a> a similar lack of knowledge of Canada’s history. </p>
<p>The blame falls not only on our education system, but also on our news and media that continue to lead with American stories and fail to report on what is historically important and relevant in Canada. In the last 100 years, immigration reforms have made Canada more diverse, but the systemic racism faced by Indigenous peoples and immigrants fails to make a mark on the Canadian conscience. </p>
<p>The same day a jury reached a verdict in the Chauvin trial, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-quebec-court-ruling-1.5993431">a superior court in Québec decided to uphold Bill 21</a>. The law prohibits public sector workers who are in positions of authority (including teachers, police officers and judges) from wearing religious symbols (such as hijabs, niqabs, kippas, yarmulkes, crucifixes or turbans) at work. The judge made an exception for individuals working in English-language schools. That story, however, was buried under the coverage of the Chauvin verdict. </p>
<p>While news outlets are flooded with stories on anti-Black racism, many stemming from the other side of the border, there’s still no uproar in Canada about legitimizing racism by targeting non-white communities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159974/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Azra Rashid has previously received funding from SSHRC, FQRSC, and the Canada Council for the Arts. </span></em></p>
The Canadian response to racism south of the border can be described as an Americanization of Canadian history.
Azra Rashid, Visiting Research Fellow, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/150588
2020-12-01T13:22:51Z
2020-12-01T13:22:51Z
Reckoning with slavery: What a revolt’s archives tell us about who owns the past
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372008/original/file-20201130-15-8ssyk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C1%2C742%2C418&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Statue of the Berbice slave revolt leader Kofi in Georgetown, Guyana.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1763_Monument,_Georgetown,_Guyana._2014.jpg">David Stanley - Flickr/WikiMedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The consequences of 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade are still felt today. Untangling the power structures and systemic racism that came with slavery is ongoing, with <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/09/30/kettling-protesters-bronx/systemic-police-brutality-and-its-costs-united-states">police brutality</a>, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/virginia-indiana-joining-taking-confederate-monuments/story?id=71066712">memorials to slave owners</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/15/us/slavery-reparations-explanation-trnd/index.html">reparations</a> forming part of the discussion.</p>
<p>But as the United Nations marks Dec. 2 as the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/slavery-abolition-day">International Day for the Abolition of Slavery</a>, a practice it notes “is not merely a historic relic,” modern society also has to reckon with another question: Who has access to the records about slavery’s past?</p>
<p>I was struck by this question recently as I gave a Zoom talk in Guyana on my new book <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/blood-on-river">Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast</a> about <a href="http://www.guyana.org/features/guyanastory/chapter30.html">a slave rebellion in Berbice</a>, now Guyana, that took place in 1763-1764. </p>
<p>During the revolt, former slaves organized a government and controlled most of the colony for almost a year. The Dutch either fled altogether or holed up on a well-fortified sugar plantation near the coast. A regiment of European soldiers sent from neighboring Suriname mutinied and joined the rebels they had come to defeat. But obligated by treaties, indigenous peoples such as Carib and Arawak fought on the side of the Dutch. The revolt ended when the rebels, out of food and arms, were overpowered by enemies who had received an infusion of men and supplies from the Dutch Republic.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372009/original/file-20201130-19-1exvutt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1742 map of Berbice River with plantations.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/NG-477">Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The uprising, unusual among Atlantic slave rebellions for its length, size and near success, is barely known outside Guyana. But even African-descended Guyanese, it turns out, know less than they would like. Almost 13,000 people, intrigued by new information about a foundational chapter in their history, had tuned in to watch my presentation on Facebook and Zoom. </p>
<h2>A rare cache</h2>
<p>First colonized in 1627 to trade with Amerindians, Berbice passed into the hands of an investment company 100 years later that exploited the colony, which was growing coffee, cacao and sugar.</p>
<p><iframe id="usGbP" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/usGbP/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Berbice became British Guyana in the early 19th century and gained independence as the English-speaking <a href="https://www.un.int/guyana/guyana/country-facts">Cooperative Republic of Guyana</a> in 1966. Modern-day Guyanese view the slave rebellion as the <a href="https://www.stabroeknews.com/2014/02/24/opinion/letters/berbice-revolt-beginning-quest-independence/">origin of their republican inclinations</a>. </p>
<p>Yet, all of the records related to the rebellion – in fact, most of the country’s historical records – are in archives in <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4302">London</a> and <a href="https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/archief/1.05.05">The Hague</a>.</p>
<p>The sources for the uprising are extensive. There are the usual colonial records, such as the colonial governor’s daily journal, letters from officials and merchants and military reports. They are tainted by self-interest, Euro-centrism and racism. </p>
<p>More rare in the history of Atlantic slavery are letters sent by <a href="https://face2faceafrica.com/article/meet-cuffy-the-west-african-slave-who-led-a-1763-revolt-that-made-him-a-guyanese-hero">rebel leader Kofi</a> to his Dutch counterpart. An African from the Gold Coast who had been forcibly taken to Berbice as a child, Kofi sought to end the military conflict through diplomacy.</p>
<p>And then there are the extraordinary testimonies of 900 suspected rebels and bystanders. They were taken as part of the Dutch kangaroo court to <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/blood-on-river">investigate guilt in the rebellion and condemn people</a> to the rack, the pyre and the gallows.</p>
<p>These records, too, are problematic. The people on the stand feared for their lives. A Dutch clerk translated their answers from Creole into Dutch, summarized them, and put them in the third person. Using them requires, like most historical records, great care. </p>
<p>Still, the testimonies represent the voices of African-Guyanese ancestors. But the manuscripts have lain in the <a href="https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/en">Dutch National Archives</a> since the 19th century. They are in standard Dutch rather than the Creole language of Dutch Berbice likely more prevalent among the enslaved population at the time, and their existence was heretofore unknown in Guyana. </p>
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<h2>Dodging rebellion</h2>
<p>The copious records reveal not only the political course of the rebellion but how people felt about it. Many young men joined enthusiastically. Older people and Creoles (people born in the colony) had more to lose in terms of family and meager possessions and were more reluctant. </p>
<p>To remain on the sidelines, they lived quietly on their plantations, dodging anyone, whether Europeans, rebels or Amerindians, or by hiding in the savanna or rainforest until the coast was clear. They were motivated by a desire not only to survive but also to remain masterless and ungoverned.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372055/original/file-20201130-17-glr3y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Page from investigation into Berbice revolt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/en">National Archives of the Netherlands</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his letters to the Dutch, Kofi proposed dividing the colony in two. It seems likely that he intended to keep several sugar plantations in production, perhaps with forced labor, in order to participate in the world market. Some 30 years later, Haitian revolutionary <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h326.html">Toussaint L’Ouverture</a>, too, would force self-emancipated Haitians to work in the cane fields for similar reasons. Many ordinary Guyanese were not up for this.</p>
<p>Many revolt narratives would have us believe that people are eager to rebel, sharing a common vision of freedom. This is not always the case. <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807849996/breaking-loose-together/">It was not in the American Revolution, nor was it in Berbice</a>.</p>
<h2>An act of emancipation</h2>
<p>At my Zoom lecture on Nov. 24, listeners asked many questions. But they were particularly interested in the court testimonies. </p>
<p>Why, some asked in the chat, were these records still housed in the National Archives in The Hague? Shouldn’t they have been gifted back, or better yet, transcribed and translated? That way, African-Guyanase would be able to interpret the records for themselves and tell their own stories.</p>
<p>As it happens, the Dutch National Archives recently put <a href="https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/nieuws/nieuwe-presentatie-van-onze-archieven-vind-meer-scans">all of Berbice’s records online</a> – but that does not solve the language problem. I was able to put my Guyanese host in touch with a staff member at the National Archives who seemed receptive to the idea of publishing a translation of the investigations in English.</p>
<p>Reckoning with slavery requires having access to the records of the past. After all, writing one’s own history, too, is an act of emancipation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150588/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marjoleine Kars receives funding from National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, The Huntington Library and Gardens, the European University Institute, the John Carter Brown Library, UMBC.</span></em></p>
The slave revolt in Berbice, modern-day Guyana, was unusual for its length and near success. So why are so few of the revolt’s documents in the Caribbean nation’s archives?
Marjoleine Kars, Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/144826
2020-08-21T13:26:26Z
2020-08-21T13:26:26Z
How the shadow of slavery still hangs over global finance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354074/original/file-20200821-20-x1u7fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/city-london-one-leading-centres-global-94112977">Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npv6v">infamous Zong trial</a> began in 1783, it laid bare the toxic relationship between finance and slavery. It was an unusual and distressing insurance claim – concerning a massacre of 133 captives, thrown overboard the Zong slave ship. </p>
<p>The slave trade pioneered a new kind of finance, secured on the bodies of the powerless. Today, the arcane products of high finance, targeting the poor and troubled as profit opportunities for the already-rich, still bear that deep unfairness.</p>
<p>The Gregsons, claimants in the Zong trial, were merchant princes of 18th century Liverpool, a city that had quickly grown to be one of the world’s leading commercial capitals. The grandiose Liverpool Exchange building, opened in 1754, boasted of the city’s commercial success and the source of its money, its friezes decorated with carvings of African heads. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="2442" data-image="" data-title="How to build a stock exchange 17: Black markets, white markets" data-size="42333174" data-source="Philip Roscoe" data-source-url="https://how-to-build-a-stock-exchange.blubrry.net/" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2034/htbase-episode-17-190620.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
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<div class="audio-player-caption">
How to build a stock exchange 17: Black markets, white markets.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://how-to-build-a-stock-exchange.blubrry.net/">Philip Roscoe</a><span class="download"><span>40.4 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2034/htbase-episode-17-190620.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<p>But Liverpool’s wealth also stemmed <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/983/Specters-of-the-AtlanticFinance-Capital-Slavery">from its innovations in finance</a>. The great slave merchants were also bankers and insurers, pioneers in what we today call <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112402">financialisation</a> – they transformed human lives into profit-bearing opportunities. </p>
<p>From the point of view of merchants, the Atlantic trade was slow, unreliable and risky. Ships were threatened by disease, by poor weather, and by the constant threat of insurrection. To speed up the flow of money, merchants began to issue credit notes that could travel swiftly and safely across the ocean. </p>
<p>Slaves would be purchased in Britain’s African colonies and transported to the Americas where they were sold at auction. The merchant’s agent would take the money received and rather than investing it in commodities like sugar or cotton to be sent back to Liverpool, they would send a bill of exchange – a credit note for the sum plus interest – across the Atlantic. </p>
<p>The bill of exchange could be cashed at a discount at one of the many banking houses in the city, or replaced by another, again at a discount, to be dispatched to Africa in payment for more human chattels. Credit flowed swiftly, cleanly and profitably. </p>
<h2>Obscenely novel</h2>
<p>This evolution of private credit did not originate in Liverpool. It had underpinned the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674771451">Florentine banking dynasties</a> of the 15th century and <a href="https://theconversation.com/neoliberalism-has-tricked-us-into-believing-a-fairytale-about-where-money-comes-from-113783">gave rise to money as we know it now</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="British abolitionist poster of a standard slave ship in the 18th century." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354070/original/file-20200821-18-1xoqum4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A complex financial system evolved around the trade in enslaved Africans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/british-abolitionist-broadside-poster-demonstrates-crowding-237236926">Everett Collection / Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The obscene novelty of the slavers’ banking system was that this financial value was secured on human bodies. The same practices continued on the plantations, where the bodies of slaves were used as collateral on loans allowing the expansion of estates and the acquisition of yet more productive bodies. The slaves were exploited twice: their freedom and labour stolen from them, their captured “economic value” leveraged by cutting edge financial instruments. </p>
<p>The Liverpool merchants also pioneered the use of insurance as a means of guaranteeing the financial value of the their commodities. The slavers had long recognised that the only way to survive the occasional total losses that expeditions incurred was to gather together in syndicates and share the risk. </p>
<p>So when the captain of the Zong realised he was unlikely to land his cargo of sickening and malnourished slaves, he ordered 133 souls to be thrown overboard. The perverse legal logic was that if part of the cargo had to be jettisoned to save the ship, it would be covered by the insurance. </p>
<p>These bodies-as-financial-commodities had only speculative value. Insurance made it real and bankable. This was true in 18th century Liverpool and it remains so in 21st century Wall Street. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Painting by JMW Turner showing abstract ship at sunset with bodies in water." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354068/original/file-20200821-20-d3cu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Slave Ship by JMW Turner depicts the Zong massacre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre#/media/File:Slave-ship.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Financialisation today</h2>
<p>Financialisation has since taken many forms, but basic elements remain the same. It is based on uneven power relations that capture future individual obligations and make them saleable. The contracts underlying the 2008 credit crisis, for example, turned future mortgage payments into tradeable financial securities with actual present value. </p>
<p>For those issuing the bonds, the profit was risk free. The risk was borne by <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084476/">predominantly poor Americans</a>, whose adverse credit ratings and lack of financial skills made them easy prey for the issuers of mortgages so constructed as to lock them into economic bondage. These people were disproportionately black, Latino or migrant. </p>
<p>Insurance played a part here, solidifying the speculative value of investments to the benefit of traders. And when the bubble finally burst governments stepped in to maintain this system, the US Federal Reserve supporting giant insurer AIG <a href="https://www.thebalance.com/aig-bailout-cost-timeline-bonuses-causes-effects-3305693">to the tune of US$182 billion</a> (£139 billion) while many people lost their homes. </p>
<p>The credit crisis bailout is eerily reminiscent of another. By the time of abolition slave ownership was so embedded in British society that the government was forced to compensate individual owners for the loss of their capital – it required an enormous loan that taxpayers only <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/17/government-finished-paying-uks-slavery-debt-2015/">finished paying off in 2015</a>. </p>
<p>I’m not saying that bankers today are like slave traders. But I am saying that contemporary finance is still riddled with regimes of dominance and exploitation at work. </p>
<p>Take contemporary <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304422X12000150#!">philanthrocapitalism</a>, where finance seeks to do good while also benefiting investors. Novel financial instruments position social problems as an opportunity for profit. The bodies of prisoners, for example, become implicated in <a href="https://theconversation.com/social-impact-bonds-explained-95504">schemes to prevent recidivism</a> with personal character reform the trigger for investment payouts. </p>
<p>Schemes such as this make social problems the responsibility of individuals and ignore the structural relations of austerity that lie behind them. Finance wins twice, praised for solving the very same problems that it has benefited from creating. </p>
<p>Beware financiers bearing gifts. <a href="http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/article/view/2739">Student loans</a>, mortgage bonds, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026117744415">social impact bonds</a>, even <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718503001131">biodiversity investing</a> – all earning rents from the captured future activities of relatively powerless individuals – bear the shadow of the Atlantic trade.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144826/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Roscoe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Slave traders transformed human lives into profit-bearing opportunities – just like modern finance.
Philip Roscoe, Reader in Management, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/142012
2020-07-20T15:19:32Z
2020-07-20T15:19:32Z
Why international players have a duty to help the search for peace in Cameroon
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348131/original/file-20200717-33-qt81zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cameroon's soldiers patrol near a tank in the Cameroonian town of Fotokol</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephane Yas/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Life in anglophone <a href="https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/cameroon">Cameroon</a> has been severely disrupted since violence broke out in 2016. Peaceful <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon/130-cameroon-worsening-anglophone-crisis-calls-strong-measures">protests</a> by lawyers, teachers and civilians against the marginalisation of anglophone institutions by the majority francophone state were met with <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/12/cameroon-excessive-force-that-led-to-deaths-of-protesters-must-be-urgently-investigated/">force</a>. Since then, a <a href="https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/human-rights-abuses-in-the-cameroon-anglophone-crisis-recommendations-for-action/">brutal conflict</a> has grown and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/14-children-22-dead-cameroon-massacre-200217051927689.html">thousands</a> have been killed.</p>
<p>Despite recurrent <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/centres-institutes/centre-criminology/blog/2020/07/black-lives-matter-our-complicity-state-violence">reports</a> of mass killings and images of families in shared graves, the international response has been <a href="https://www.nrc.no/news/2019/june/cameroon-tops-list-of-most-neglected-crises/">conspicuously limited</a>. Beyond the efforts of a handful of humanitarian organisations and journalists, the conflict and loss of lives in Cameroon have been largely overlooked.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/cameroon">Cameroon Conflict Research Group</a> at the University of Oxford sought to understand the conflict in Cameroon from the perspectives of those most directly affected by it – individuals on the ground. By listening to people trapped in the battlefields, <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">our research</a> reveals new insights into the conflict and potential pathways to peace.</p>
<p>Our research participants drew special attention to the responsibility of international stakeholders to respond to the conflict. Indeed, on examination, several foreign states and actors are implicated in the current violence. Additionally, our participants reported stark differences in levels of force used by state and non-state actors; this lies in contrast to much coverage to date, which emphasises a sameness here. As we examine more fully in <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">our report</a>, these differences are genuine and we bear a moral duty not to gloss them over.</p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p><a href="https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/cameroon/history">Cameroon</a> is a Central African country with a diverse mix of languages and dialects, cultures and religions. </p>
<p>Formerly colonised by Germany, and subsequently divided by the British and French colonial powers, <a href="https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/cameroon/history">Cameroon gained independence in 1960/1961</a>. The west of the country is predominantly anglophone, with English-speaking civic institutions, including a common law legal system. The rest of the country is francophone majority, with civil law courts and French-speaking institutions.</p>
<p>Despite a mostly peaceful subsequent history, in 2016 violence broke out over the marginalisation of anglophones. Our first research <a href="http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Cameroon-Anglophone-Crisis-Report-online.pdf">report</a> documented the human rights abuses taking place. </p>
<p>We found that the current abuses appear to be a continuation of state violence against the minority anglophone people, first inflicted by the colonial forces, and then later by the independent state of Cameroon. The current conflict can therefore be seen as an escalation of pre-existing tensions.</p>
<p>In order to learn more about the conflict from the perspective of those living through it, we designed an <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">empirical study</a>, which involved interviewing 32 people in the anglophone regions of Cameroon, from January 2020 to March 2020. Participants included men and women, between the ages of 24 and 88, from village and urban backgrounds. They were contacted through a range of different gatekeepers.</p>
<p>The interviews were primarily conducted over an encrypted communications application, in either Pidgin or English, and involved broad and open-ended questions so that themes could emerge directly from the collective experiences.</p>
<h2>The responsibility of the international community</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">Interviewees</a> repeatedly called on the international community to intervene and end the violence. In the words of Nina (pseudonyms used throughout):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The international community must not abandon us – human rights here will be wiped out. It’s urgent, and it’s getting worse. I noticed from the day this crisis started, it has only been on an increase; the suffering, the pain, has only been on an increase.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ozias points to the British historical involvement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Why is Britain silent when they caused all this? Why is Britain silent? And the United Nations, what about their Charter? What about the United Nations Charter?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Michel’s view,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“the worst part of it is that France is an enabler. France is behind it. I cannot mince words. Because anywhere we want to go, France is intervening.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He feels, moreover, that his people’s voices are not being heard by anyone now:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We have talked a lot, and the UN is not responding. How shall – to whom shall – we talk now?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Calls for international intervention indicate a perception that this is far from an internal dispute. Indeed, in <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">our report</a>, we discover that international governments, institutions and private agents are intricately connected to the functioning of the Cameroon state. </p>
<p>For example, the Cameroon armed security forces have received significant amounts of funding, equipment and training from <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/08/the-us-and-french-backed-reign-of-terror-in-cameroon">France</a>, the <a href="https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IN10662.html">US</a>, <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2020/06/23/making-a-killing-israeli-mercenaries-in-cameroon/">Israel</a> and to a lesser extent <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/end-of-a-secret-german-military-mission-in-cameroon/a-49610889">Germany</a> and <a href="http://www.defenceweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52447:china-cameroon-signs-military-assistance-agreement&catid=56:diplomacy-a-peace&Itemid=111">China</a>.</p>
<p>Moreover, there is substantial international control of Cameroon’s resources: for example, operations by <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/centres-institutes/centre-criminology/blog/2020/07/black-lives-matter-our-complicity-state-violence">British</a> companies such as <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/international-visits-pay-off-for-british-business">New Age</a>, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/international-visits-pay-off-for-british-business">BowLeven</a>, and <a href="https://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/AN_1580900777245377100/victoria-oil-and-bowleven-note-gas-sales-agreement-at-etinde-cameroon.aspx">Victoria Oil & Gas</a>; the Anglo-French company, <a href="https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Cameroon-West-Africas-Latest-Oil-Battleground.html">Perenco</a>; the Chinese <a href="https://www.euro-petrole.com/addax-petroleum-completes-acquisition-of-an-80-shareholding-interest-in-pecten-cameroon-company-lcc-pcc-n-i-10507">Addax Petroleum Cameroon Company</a> (invested through state-owned means); and US funders such as <a href="https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-203.html">Sculptor Capital/Och Ziff</a> have substantial ownership of oil and gas interests. </p>
<p>International companies such as these export raw material, yet the benefits are not enjoyed by local people, very few of whom are <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744795.001.0001/acprof-9780198744795-chapter-13">involved</a> in the exploitation of the country’s natural endowments.</p>
<p>Appeals for international action therefore draw attention to the pre-existing involvement of a range of international actors who have a corresponding duty to respond.</p>
<h2>The power of the state</h2>
<p>International <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2018-11-14/debates/C5244242-0FB5-4253-BBFC-7D201755C26A/CameroonEnglish-SpeakingMinority">actors</a> frequently frame the conflict as principally involving “wrongs committed on both sides” – that is, the francophone state of Cameroon and the <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/13/cameroons-separatist-movement-is-going-international-ambazonia-military-forces-amf-anglophone-crisis/">anglophone Ambazonian</a> oppositional forces, popularly called Amba. </p>
<p>Although all militant parties stand credibly accused of committing <a href="http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Cameroon-Anglophone-Crisis-Report-online.pdf">crimes</a> against humanity, which are undoubtedly wrong and disturbing, our research participants often saw them as unequal.</p>
<p>As Pa Elias explains,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The secessionists or the restorationists, they may target a single person who is an enabler for the government. They may set one house ablaze, but they don’t go burning villages. The army does that. They [the Amba boys] don’t have the capacity to do that.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beyond holding far less military power and force, our <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">research participants</a> also point to the defensive nature of the Ambazonian movement. Many explain how the Ambazonians appear in response to the sound of gunshots.</p>
<p>Ozias sums up a point made by others:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The Amba boys are just there to help. When they hear the sound of guns, and people are running away, and they realise that soldiers are looting people’s property, it’s at that time that they try to come to defend.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many of our research participants, and especially the most socioeconomically disadvantaged, described the Amba as defenders. This is captured by Blasius’s observation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If not for them (the Amba fighters), we would not be alive. If they were not there, many people would have died. Even though there’s a lot of people who have died, if they were not there, many more would have died.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed, an examination of the conflict shows that it was the state that first used <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/12/cameroon-excessive-force-that-led-to-deaths-of-protesters-must-be-urgently-investigated/">violence</a> in response to peaceful protests. Only gradually, as the state violence escalated, did the <a href="https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/special-report/2018/06/12/cameroon-s-anglophone-war-part-1-rifle-only-way-out">Amba</a> forces develop military strength, which does still pale in comparison. Our report further details the disparity between the approaches, scale and effect of violence between state forces and independence fighters. </p>
<p>Considering this wide disparity, those international actors who support the Cameroon state financially and militarily (including Britain, France and the US) ought now to be considering just how complicit they are in the state’s violence on its anglophone population.</p>
<h2>Hopes for peace</h2>
<p>Our research <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">participants</a> universally wish for peace, whether that is sought through independence, federalism, or some other negotiation.</p>
<p>Recent talks of a <a href="https://cameroonpeacejustice.ca/cc/">ceasefire</a> bring this shared hope into view. However, for this to materialise, the Cameroon state needs to commit to laying down its arms. If the state’s gunshots cease, then the Amba will no longer have a compelling claim to acting in defence.</p>
<p>For the ceasefire to work, the <a href="https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/ssrn-id3576732-1.pdf">numerous</a> international actors involved with the Cameroon state must actively support an end to state violence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142012/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roxana Willis receives funding from the British Academy and University College, Oxford. Roxana Willis is the Principal Investigator of the Cameroon Conflict Research Group, which receives funding from the UK Global Challenges Research Fund, the John Fell Fund, and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Co-researchers on this work include Barrister Mbinkar Caroline and Joseph McAulay. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Angove does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Cameroon’s anglophone crisis is not simply a dispute between two feuding groups: a range of international actors have been architects of the current situation.
James Angove, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Roxana Willis, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Criminology and a JRF in Law, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/140271
2020-06-08T15:34:22Z
2020-06-08T15:34:22Z
Edward Colston statue toppled: how Bristol came to see the slave trader as a hero and philanthropist
<p>Opponents to the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-52962356">felling of the statue of Edward Colston</a> argue that it was vandalism and represents an attempt to erase history. But the statue has its own peculiar story – and it is far removed from the Colston who lived from 1636-1721. </p>
<p>The statue was erected in 1895, more than 170 years after his death. Colston’s reputation was cemented and writ large over the 19th century of Bristol in south-west England because influential men in the city wanted to create a paternalist local idol.</p>
<p>Colston was a slave trader whose work as an official in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Royal-African-Company">Royal African Company</a> directly involved him in the enslavement of 84,000 Africans – 19,000 of whom died in the “middle passage” across the Atlantic. But the Victorian elite ignored this. For them, he was simply a philanthropist and a paternalist – a respectable figure.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1269949806463668224"}"></div></p>
<p>The late-Victorian period saw a mass of statues going up across Europe in part of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called an “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/invention-of-tradition/introduction-inventing-traditions/05B9EDFC0304BE3F5D704BB66B286710">invention of tradition</a>”. Figures were sought who embodied certain virtues. In Bristol, the Colston statue was part of a late-Victorian attempt to re-imagine the civic space around “great men” and “benign paternalism”. </p>
<p>A column entitled the “Talk of Bristol” in the Bristol Mercury remarked in 1895 on the continual moving of the statues within the harbourside. The statue of Edmund Burke, erected the previous year, had already been moved as the central avenue was being redesigned. St Augustine’s Bridge had just been built, and its designers wanted to give more prominence to Colston. </p>
<p>This transformation was closely tied to regional pride. Colston – a true Bristol son, born and bred in the city, and who made it his base for philanthropic works – was seen as particularly worthy of more prominent recognition.</p>
<p>The erection of the statue, and the adulation of Colston in this era, was all part of an ongoing attempt to obscure the role of Bristol in the transatlantic slave trade. As <a href="https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/madge-dresser">Madge Dresser</a>, a Bristol University historian, has written, there is, or was, no trace of “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Vx_mDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=madge+dresser+colston+his+trafficking+in+human+cargo&source=bl&ots=54c9rM6jUI&sig=ACfU3U0SaC-AImhQXd0zqXaKeGAZG75_xA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEm7z1nvLpAhUlUBUIHba4CsUQ6AEwAXoECDIQAQ#v=onepage&q=madge%20dresser%20colston%20his%20trafficking%20in%20human%20cargo&f=false">his trafficking in human cargo</a>” on the statue. </p>
<p>Colston appears as a merchant linked to the sea. The statue alludes to the dolphin who supposedly saved one of his ships by plugging a leak. The plaque on the statue insists that it was “erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/340313/original/file-20200608-176580-19w0u1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The statue of Edward Colston was erected in Bristol’s Colston Avernue in 1895.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://archives.bristol.gov.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=43207%2f26%2f1%2f12&pos=4">Bristol Archives</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Western Daily Press used the occasion of the unveiling, November 13 1895, to exhort its readers to philanthropy. This was Colston’s birthday and became an annual “Colston Day”, which for the next six years was an official local holiday. For many, this was the greatest purpose of the statue, to encourage others to emulation. In the same article, the Press called for an art gallery to add to the dignity of Bristol.</p>
<h2>Dubious honour</h2>
<p>Colston’s claim to being worthy of a statue rests on his philanthropic actions in donating to schools and churches as well as <a href="https://www.dolphin-society.org.uk/history">founding a boys’ school and almshouse</a>. <a href="http://www.colstonsgirls.org/">Colston Girls’ School</a> was also founded in 1891 from the endowments of Colston. Nevertheless, as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13527259808722225?journalCode=rjhs20">British academic Sally Morgan</a> remarks, “his little kindnesses seem very little indeed”, especially when it is recognised that the boys school he founded was largely intended to <a href="http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/bristolrecordsociety/publications/bha096.pdf">supply sailors for his own ships</a>. Colston’s philanthropy was not inconsiderable, but it was not as vast as is sometimes claimed. </p>
<p>The Colston societies, the <a href="https://www.dolphin-society.org.uk/history">Dolphin, Anchor and Grateful</a>, which manage Colston’s legacies, were, in an investigation into the condition of the poor in Bristol in the 1880s, accused of <a href="https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/myths-within-myths/?fbclid=IwAR0MaOzzVqi4T9pP7NIAyCQOliE4cqmTWECy-nvSI_bRyU0xeYdHFMybx5I">using the money inefficiently</a> due to its disorganised and arbitrary distribution. </p>
<p>This form of paternalist philanthropy was also increasingly seen as unsuited to the growing issue of the urban poor. The <a href="https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-bristol-strike-wave-1889-90/">wave of strikes in Bristol in 1889-90</a> – and increasing socialist agitation for municipal intervention in living conditions – made aristocratic and independent philanthropy seem an inadequate solution. The investigation from the 1880s had already made clear that this philanthropy was insufficient to aid the expanding and restless population. The erection of the Colston statue can be seen as an attempt to reassert paternalism in the face of anxiety over working class unrest.</p>
<hr>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/public-sculpture-expert-why-i-welcome-the-decision-to-throw-bristols-edward-colston-statue-in-the-river-140285">Public sculpture expert: why I welcome the decision to throw Bristol's Edward Colston statue in the river</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The notion that the erection of the statue in 1895 was part of popular support for his philanthropy, as the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-42404825">statue’s defenders claim</a>, is hard to sustain. There were <a href="https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/myths-within-myths/?fbclid=IwAR0MaOzzVqi4T9pP7NIAyCQOliE4cqmTWECy-nvSI_bRyU0xeYdHFMybx5I">chronic struggles to find the £1,000</a> which was required for the statue. Some of this came from repeated appeals to the various Colston societies in Bristol, but the final amount was only reached after the statue had been unveiled. </p>
<p>It may be that the statue, coupled with the Burke statue of the previous year and the <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/21/slave-trader-edward-colston-faces-defenestration-bristol-cathedral/">dedication of the cathedral window</a> in 1890 to Colston, had stretched the generosity of donors. The original proponent of the statue and member of the Anchor society, J Arrowsmith, eventually paid for the remainder.</p>
<p>For some in the 19th century, Colston represented the respectability of great wealth and inequality, paternalism as a bastion against socialism, and private charity. The slavery on which his fortune was built was obscured for the purposes of a certain narrative of Bristolian history. The toppling and drowning of the statue is the assertion of a new reading of history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Watts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The statue was part of a push in the Victorian era to create mercantile heroes. Colston’s slaving activities were conveniently glossed over.
James Watts, PhD researcher in history, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137010
2020-05-12T09:21:02Z
2020-05-12T09:21:02Z
How England became the ‘sweetshop of Europe’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334038/original/file-20200511-49546-12uf8su.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C18%2C1526%2C1499&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">By the 17th century, wealthy Britons were already experiencing the delights of expensive sugar confections.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In September 1591, Queen Elizabeth I stopped during her annual progress around her kingdom at the home of the Earl of Hertford, Elvetham Hall near Basingstoke in south-east England. The second night’s entertainment was reported to be <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bgdFAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=Lions,+Unicorns,+Beares,+Horses,+Camels,+Buls,+Rams,+Dogs,+Tygers,+Elephants,+Antelopes,+Dromedaries,+Apes,+and+all+other+beasts&source=bl&ots=77AY0bdb35&sig=ACfU3U3vmc4hCVspymF47Q5HVOi_vdrBRQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiu-Kns46vpAhUMTcAKHV6aANEQ6AEwCnoECCMQAQ#v=onepage&q=Lions%2C%20Unicorns%2C%20Beares%2C%20Horses%2C%20Camels%2C%20Buls%2C%20Rams%2C%20Dogs%2C%20Tygers%2C%20Elephants%2C%20Antelopes%2C%20Dromedaries%2C%20Apes%2C%20and%20all%20other%20beasts&f=false">quite the culinary spectacle</a>: a banquet, served in the garden, with more than 1,000 dishes to weigh down the table. </p>
<p>The most impressive and curious of them all were statues made from sugar. Guests marvelled at a virtual menagerie: “Lions, Vnicorns, Beares, Horses, Camels, Buls, Rams, Dogges, Tygers, Elephants, Antelops, Dromedaries, Apes, and all other beasts” had been rendered in the powdery sweet stuff. Of the multitude dishes at the table, it was the ones made from sugar that were most worthy of note. </p>
<p>By 1800, rather than only gracing the tables of monarchs and aristocrats, sugar was on almost every table in England and would have been stirred into pretty much every servant’s cup of tea. Social historian, John Burnett – whose work focused on the working classes – put annual consumption in 1801 at <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ENLmMZS8W8C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=John+Burnett+annual+sugar+consumption+in+1801+at+30.6lb+per+person.&source=bl&ots=iOH7pV5JLA&sig=ACfU3U3o5ZUcr6THoD-w4pHuXU3PhVaRVw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiLjveT_avpAhVUilwKHQeBCc4Q6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=John%20Burnett%20annual%20sugar%20consumption%20in%201801%20at%2030.6lb%20per%20person.&f=false">30.6lb (13.87kg) per person</a>. </p>
<p>Understanding sugar’s rise to ubiquity helps to tell the story of some of the most important phenomena in economic history. The history of sugar is also the history of capitalism, of exploitation, of globalisation and of industrialisation.</p>
<h2>Moorish – and moreish</h2>
<p>Sugar first came to England in the 11th century, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4377370?seq=1">brought back by soldiers returning from the Crusades</a> in what is now the Middle East. Over the next 500 years it remained a rarefied luxury, until Portuguese colonists began producing it at a more industrial level in Brazil during the 1500s. Financed by Dutch merchants, they began to traffic enslaved Africans to farm the sugar. The planters were able to ship <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298209262_The_Sugar_Trade_Brazil_Portugal_and_the_Netherlands_1595-1630_by_Daniel_Strum">commercial quantities to Europe</a>.</p>
<p>In the mid-17th century, British colonists adopted the same business model, using slaves to plant cash crops in Barbados, Jamaica and other smaller islands. And it is from this point that the British relationship with sweetness really accelerates.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334055/original/file-20200511-49558-13wed1z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stamp printed by British Guyana showing sugar cane being transported in punts, circa 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sergey Goryachev via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just as the industry was <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03612759.1974.9946685">evolving in the Caribbean</a>, so too was the trade back to Europe. Sugar spread throughout the British Isles. The Atlantic trading nexus, known as the “triangular trade”, between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, wove a sticky web which traversed oceans and continents, reaching even the rural north-east of England, where, for example, sugar was available from a <a href="https://archive.org/details/autobiographywi00stougoog/page/n7/mode/2up">local grocer in Lancaster</a>. </p>
<p>Sugar came in a number of varieties at a number of different price points and wasn’t confined to the tables of the elite. Triple-refined white sugar remained the most expensive, but a poorer consumer could also buy ordinary brown sugar or dark viscous molasses, known as treacle. Recipe books from the period are filled with ideas for how to use the ingredient, from sprinkling on salad to a fine plum cake. Sugar was particularly useful as it kept fresh goods for longer, turning low-calorie perishable fruit into high-calorie preserves and jams.</p>
<h2>Economic fuel</h2>
<p>Understanding the timeline of our sweet tooth also tells us more about the development of the global economy – and Britain’s role within it. One of the most important facilitators for the increase in home consumption was the rise of the domestic sugar refinery. Where once sugar was processed in the Caribbean and shipped back to Europe, sugar merchants began to import back semi-processed sugar and finish the refining process at home. </p>
<p>By 1700, refineries, or “<a href="https://genfair.co.uk/product/sugarbakers-from-sweat-to-sweetness-26465/">sugar bakers</a>” as they were known, had <a href="https://liverpoolhistorysociety.org.uk/sugar-for-the-house-mona-duggan/">popped up across the length and breadth of the country</a>, from Plymouth to Glasgow, and from Liverpool to Ipswich. Sugar baking was one of the first industrial activities to appear in England. It was comparable to the factories of the industrial revolution, mostly because it used vast amounts of coal to heat the copper pans which boiled the sugar.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334129/original/file-20200511-49569-tvr96a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Albert Dock in Liverpool, where a great deal of imported sugar was landed in England.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ronald Saunders via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The finished product was then shipped around the country, helping to forge transport networks, both internationally and domestically. It feels important to mention, writing this article in lockdown, that the Great Plague of 1665 did a lot to support the expansion of the industry around the country. Refiners left London to set up shop elsewhere and West Indian ships carrying sugar had to dock in other ports to avoid catching the disease. Both phenomena expedited sugar’s geographic expansion. </p>
<p>The English crown supported this burgeoning industrial activity. Protectionist taxation policies effectively subsidised imports of semi-processed sugar, which encouraged the domestic industry. Refining was so successful that British merchants began to export their surplus out to countries in Europe, as well as re-exporting large amounts of brown sugar around the world. This helped to solidify the nation’s balance of trade. Where once the Dutch and Portuguese had dominated the European market, England was fast becoming the sweetshop of Europe. </p>
<p>The multi-faceted story of sugar’s ascent and the growth of the nation’s sweet tooth tells us more about early industrial and capitalist activity in England. While eventually the French overtook Britain as chief European suppliers of sugar in the 18th century, the early sugar trade provided British merchants with a model which was then adopted and adapted for later goods including cotton, and which catalysed the industrial revolution in the following centuries. </p>
<p>Above all the story of sugar is a reminder of the reliance of Britain’s metropolitan economy on the colonies. Integral to – and inextricable from – this story of economic growth is the backbreaking toil of enslaved Africans who produced the cane and enabled our taste for sweetness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mimi Goodall receives funding from the AHRC. </span></em></p>
The story of the growth of Britain’s sugar trade can tell us a lot about the development of capitalism and the slave trade.
Mimi Goodall, PhD candidate in history, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.