29th March 2023
This morning the Guardian apologised for the role its founders has in respect of the slave trade, but this apology was not perhaps as significant as the publication of the actual detail of that role.
Apologies are inherently gestures, but details can linger, and it is the provision of information that sometimes can shape public understanding more than any apology.
And the detail that should linger is (again) about just how “normal” the slave trade was to Great Britain as it emerged as a great commercial and industrial power.
I have written before – here and elsewhere – about how laws and lawyers facilitated slavery and the slave trade.
Business people – merchants, lawyers, bankers, insurers – thought little about the evils and misery of the slave trade as they went about their businesses: buying and selling, insuring and investing, gaining wealth and making profits.
To the extent anyone had scruples, they were allayed with (flimsy) devices such as the “Yorke-Talbot Opinion”.
But moving from legal London to Manchester and Liverpool, it is no great surprise that those connected with a northern newspaper at a time of the cotton industry also had connections with the slave trade and with slavery in the United States.
And there are more – many more – areas of our national life built on the back of slaves – and where those involved did not, at the time, think of slavery as objectionable or exceptional, but just as a routine if sad fact of life.
It is this quiet ongoing widespread acceptance of slavery by the many – rather than any loud support by a few – which is more subversive of our self-serving self-image as a liberal and tolerant nation.
Even after our own abolition of slavery and direct participation in the slave trade, our industry and commerce continued to prosper from slavery elsewhere.
And by the time that reliance in turn came to an end, many of our great cities and ports had taken on their familiar forms.
The skylines of many places are the monuments to the wealth derived ultimately from slavery.
And the more awareness and understanding of the detail of this widespread involvement in slavery and the profits of slavery, the better.
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Seems there are parallels between the lawyers facilitation of slavery (normal and legal, no judgement implied) and the same profession acting for those damaging our planet
We are starting to see lawyers standing up and saying they will not represent fossil fuel companies regarding more extraction, prosecuting climate protesters etc
Was this shifting from doing the lawful thing to doing the moral thing also seen as abolition gained traction?
“Even after our own abolition of slavery and direct participation in the slave trade, our industry and commerce continued to prosper from slavery elsewhere.”
How many of us today refrain from enquiring too deeply about how our consumer electronics come to be so (relatively, all things considered) cheap? It couldn’t be that we’re still prospering, could it?
“And the detail that should linger is (again) about just how “normal” the slave trade was to Great Britain as it emerged as a great commercial and industrial power.”
This is precisely why I think that institutional apologies for historic involvement in the slave trade are meaningless. It’s like expecting the Prime Minister, now, to apologise for the fact that women were once unable to vote, or for Ford to apologise for the fact that its cars were, once, hideously unsafe by modern standards, or for the Mayor of London to apologise for the slums and sanitation which gave rise to the cholera outbreaks of the 19th century.
We all know that many, many things in the past were unacceptable by the standards of today. But the correct response is the one that has already been made: to change those things. The abolition of the slave trade, universal suffrage, the adoption of consumer safety regulations, the construction of a functional water supply and sewerage system. These are all successes to celebrate; they are part of the story of how we got from where we were to where we now are.
The slave trade was, once, as much a normal part of international business as consumer electronics are now. The reason it is no longer a normal part of international business is because our forebears came to realise that it was immoral. Those of us who came after the abolitionists have nothing to apologise for on behalf of those who came before them. Our responsibility is to ensure that we follow in the abolitionists’ footsteps and take a stand against the evils which are still present in this world. It’s only if we fail to do that, that we have anything to apologise for.
And yet I’m only too aware how much of the infrastructure that keeps me comfortable was built on the back of wealth created by slavery.
And how many people round the world don’t have access to that sort of infrastructure, because their communities weren’t seen as important enough to worry about.
We need to remember that there are many families in the UK who are still extremely well-off because their ancestors were compensated for losing their “assets” when slavery was abolished. That’s nothing to do with hard work, superior intelligence or business competence – just the luck of the draw. We’d be much better off as a nation if we made efforts to improve the life chances of those with less good fortune – including asylum seekers – and boosted the resources we make available to less wealthy nations.
I agree that deeds are more important than words, but that does not mean words have no value.
Such “institutional apologies” may be meaningless for you, but they may hold meaning for the person making the apology, the person to whom the apology is made, and third parties.
“I am sorry” (or collectively “we are sorry”) can be a powerful thing to say, even if the speaker or listener were not directly involved in the wrong being acknowledged.
You are not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But I fear we may be an endangered species.
PS
Odd that there doesn’t seem to be the same outpouring of support for Germany (and its allies) to make reparations for those who suffered as a result of wars it instigated – wars which involved GB spending an awful lot of the assets accumulated in earlier centuries.
Well, as I recall, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to pay substantial reparations after the First World War, and that did not end particularly well.
But then Germany paid significant reparations to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, in compensation for the cost of resettling Holocaust survivors. As was recognised at the time, there was no way any payment could be adequate compensation for what had happened during the war.
Germany (and indeed Japan) have been much more reflective about the negative aspects of their role in world affairs than the UK has ever been.
It’s interesting that people once celebrated as generous benefactors to British cities were often being generous with wealth gained by stealing the freedom of other human beings. This was graphically brought home to me on a visit to Bristol. Edward Colston’s impact on the city is still visible everywhere and it was very satisfying to see his fallen statue, daubed in red paint, lying in a museum and not replaced on its empty plinth as some would like.
Unfettered capitalism leads to such exploitation and it continues today. Legality trumps morality when there’s money to be made from exploiting the vulnerable. These days it is online gambling, slum landlords, cheap labour and the like, though slavery is still around in the murky shadows.
The people who should have apologised for exploiting slavery are long dead. Apologising on their behalf, as the Guardian has done, is an empty gesture. We should do more as a nation to make amends to nations we exploited in a meaningful way, but people living today cannot be held responsible for the appalling actions of their ancestors. Instead our government spends millions to prevent relatively small numbers of people seeking safety from oppression and exploitation, and think it’s important to make laughing gas illegal.
All gestures are “empty gestures”, else they are not gestures.
Some gestures are genuine and have meaning. Empty gestures have neither
“Unfettered capitalism leads to such exploitation”
But the institution of slavery existed before capitalism and non capitalist societies are categorised by the means used to ‘exploit’ the masses. How does feudalism exist without serfdom?
The slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas, which the Guardian’s apology covered, certainly does come within the era of capitalism, even if it wasn’t called that back then.
Of course slavery itself goes back to the earliest human settlements, but it wouldn’t have existed if it the powerful didn’t exploit the weak which is how capitalism works in practice.
There was a good letter on this by Sir Roderick Floud, the economic historian, in the Guardian on 20 March: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/20/like-it-or-not-we-all-bear-some-responsibility-for-slavery.
It comes as no surprise that the founders of the Guardian were drawing on slaves. Nor that a high proportion of our valued country houses were build on the back of income from commodity trades that relied on slaves. The houses that weren’t were often built on the back of Indian (subcontinent) money and we pay much less attention to where that came from. But one suspects that it wasn’t pretty.
I don’t mean this to sound like (or be) a plug for the G generally, but I was impressed with the depth and thoroughness of the historical work as and that in doing so it demonstrates to everyone the depth of the connections. And, kudos to them for publishing an ugly origin story. (Disclosure: I’m a subscriber in the USA, where the term shameful doesn’t even begin to describe our failure here to address any of this.)
Thank you for the link to the letters
You make a good point about the very ordinariness of finance from slavery; I was struck, probably when it was pointed out to me, by Jane Austen’s references to “business interests in the West Indies” of Sit Thomas Bertram (Mansfield Park) and Anne’s Beloved sorting out, in Persuasion, her friend Mrs Smith’s similar business interests. Austen doesn’t elaborate on the nature of the “business” which seem to me to emphasize how society accepted the source of wealth.
I usually refrain from comment/modification of others prose but as I read this excerpt below from your article this ending sprang to mind, apologies: ‘“….. and where those involved did not, at the time, think of slavery as objectionable or exceptional, but just as a routine if sad fact of life.”, if they thought about it at all.’
Except when compensation was offered by government, a lot of thought was given.
Hence I found browsing this UCL study of those who owned (or inherited ownership of) slaves and were compensated for the loss of their “property” quite disturbing especially just how outwardly normal these persons who had lived in my town and countryside were; doctors, lawyers, spinsters, land owners, etc.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/maps/britain#zoom=6&lng=-3.999023&lat=54.495568