10th August 2021
One of the projects on which I am working is a history of the law of slavery in practice.
You may think that you know the broad outlines of the story of slavery – at least in respect of the Atlantic slave trade.
But this short video – for which both script and animation are first-rate – is instructive and revealing, and it should be watched by anyone trying to understand the lasting effects of that trade on the world today.
The video looks at slavery from an African perspective – and emphasises two things that are sometimes missed.
First, how the European slave traders themselves created the demand for the selling of slaves – so that, for example, the capturing of prisoners within Africa for selling on to traders went from being a by-product of wars in Africa to the purpose of the wars.
Demand created its own supply.
Second, how the end of the slave trade meant that African kingdoms that had been dependent on that trade were then so weak for the period following the abolition of the trade and then slavery itself:
‘When the slave trade was finally outlawed in the Americas and Europe, the African kingdoms whose economies it had come to dominate collapsed, leaving them open to conquest and colonisation.’
And so this how the scramble for Africa in the late-1800s resulted from the slave trade that ended in the early- to mid-1800s.
This is an obvious consequence, if you think about it, and joins together slavery and (formal) colonisation as two linked stages of the same exercise of exploitation.
Africa was first made poor, and then it was taken – with the exploitation becoming also of minerals and resources, as well as of labour.
Had it not been for the earlier slave trade, the story of subsequent European imperialism in Africa may have been significantly different.
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One of the curses of an Anglocentric or Eurocentric perspective is that so much of the fuller picture is hidden – or just not looked for.
And this video – and the fuller picture which it shows of markets being created and then cleared – is useful context for the question which I am seeking to address in my research project: how did the legal system and lawyers facilitate slavery?
Slavery was never a mere frolic of a few individual slavers like Edward Colston, but a phenomenon that in turn depended on an immense infrastructure provided by commerce and law.
This video, among other sources, shows how that phenomenon looked in the round.
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Perhaps David Olusoga has covered a lot of this.
Ultimately the end of slavery at that time meant that people got paid for giving up their slaves. The slaves got SFA. And that payment that slave owners received took a long time to be paid off. Longer than WWII debt.
The slaves got their freedom, which I very much hope you don’t regard as “SFA”.
As to how long it took to pay off the debt, it’s debatable. One case could be made that it took until the late 1800’s as the national debt only then returned to the level before the payments were made. Another case could be made that it has not yet been repaid as the national debt has never since returned to zero. But any case is greatly complicated by the fact that one influence on the national debt is the level of existing debt, so maybe if the payments had not been made the money would have been spent on something else.
Regardless of whether it has been paid off or not, I hope everyone would agree that it was a great bargain and it would have been worth spending several times that amount if it had been necessary.
I can add only a small if strange detail. Apparently, in the later 18th century, owning a slave or even a “part” of a slave was considered a safe investment in Britain, the sort suitable for widows and orphans.
The legacies of the compensation paid to slave owners, widows and orphans etc can be found in the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Thanks for reminding us of that link.
My ancestors in the 18th century were Presbyterian Dissenters, people with a very liberal viewpoint. I would not expect them to have owned slaves. I checked using the link, and could not find any obvious relative who got the “compo” as a slave owner.
How much of the money made through this exploitation is still a principle influencer in the governance of the world?
Certainly in this country, very many of our leading politicians have roots in the slave trade.
David, you may also wish to look at the US domestic slave trade. After international trade was banned, an internal market developed selling and moving the enslaved between southern states.
Three men, Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, built an enormously successful business, which relied heavily on the banking system, and lawyers were involved of course in all the documentation, contracts etc. When Franklin died in 1846, his fortune was estimated as $435m in today’s money.
The story of these men is brilliantly told in Dr Joshua Rothman’s ‘The ledger and the chain : how domestic slave traders shaped America’.
The area which is forgotten is the slave trade in East Africa with whole villages taken. That should also be looked at as well when considering the slave trade.
Great observation about how demand stimulates supply – and how suppliers in communities quickly adapt to increased demand with new organisations and networks. Likewise, the observation that when a market has a shock – or demand ceases – the effects on those networks and organisations is devastating. We might think about what will happen to the networks and organisations that support the oil industry when demand for that ceases.