In fact he is a biased political campaigner working to attack and do as much damage to Britain as he can. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. Olusoga has written stand-alone history books as well as those accompanying his television series. Britain was happy to force the Bevan Boys down coal mines. Intellectually more convincing anyway for practical and political purposes, demolishing a straw-man often makes a better video or audio clip while simultaneously making your opponents position sound stupid. Black and British: A Forgotten History addresses one of the greatest silences in British historiography. It isnt going to happen anyway. 2023 BBC. As would Beyonce. The strongest argument I can see for reparations is not that white people bear some kind of ancestral blame. "I first read it as a student and it struck me as something that was very different to other things I was reading about the Atlantic slave trade. 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. Dont know if I would rule it out entirely because the demographics are different but it might need a change in the voting dynamics. We are told that an estimated 12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the West Indies and elsewhere in the 18th century. Then the adult men became profitable too. Hes insisting that a household headed by a 21 year old black should have the average wealth of all white households. If black lives really mattered these people would be protesting the 500 shot dead so far by predominantly black men in Chicago this year. But slaves were more valuable, so the British fought the Spanish for a share in the trade and eventually came to dominate it. One in which enslaved people suffered and even died from malnutrition, as the economics of the slave trade meant that it was cheaper, at times, to starve people and then replace them than it was to provide them with food. ", TV historian rejects 'nonsense' over keeping statues, What Black History Month is - and why it matters. He was immersed in it. Less flippantly, Western countries are not of one mind when it comes to the age of consent sex with a 14 year-old is legal in some countries, criminal in others (yes yes, paedophilia versus ephebophilia etc, you got me).. Olusoga has benefited from and added significantly to the work of Fryer and other historians such as James Walvin. Read about our approach to external linking. We do not know enough to be sure. A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. That was a bad experience but he should know that you cannot judge a whole country by what happened when he was young. The agreement is being touted as a . Prof Olusoga says statues, such as those of slave traders . No other race / culture was willing and able to do that. I assume he is not very bright and Race Hustling is very lucrative. Was never entirely sure which bits were believed and which bits were just a fun bit of intellectual muscle-flexing couldnt all have been intended seriously since so many posts contradicted each other. Video1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat, How 10% of Nigerian registered voters delivered victory, Sake brewers toast big rise in global sales, The Indian-American CEO who wants to be US president, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip. They are now CM scum and couldnt care less about America. P rofessor David Olusoga is reviewing a disorientating year from a familiar place: his white-painted study, the one with the guitars hanging from its walls. There is no reason to single White people out for unique levels of criticism. No? He was born in Nigeria but arrived in the . 7 years was the average working lifespan so it is said. Mans a loon. I have done nothing. Used to be on a long-dead and much missed forum where the topics of debate ranged far wider than they do here (as did the viewpoints I think it would be useful if us right-wing brexity mob didnt chase off the sensible non-right-wing non-brexity types so much). She had no interest in esoteric discussions of the war. Maybe Europeans did increase demand. David Olusoga is a 49-year-old historian and presenter Credit: Getty - Contributor David Olusoga is a British Nigerian historian, broadcaster and writer. Deliberately shipping that many people that far in order to participate in a newly-created society whose economic system was designed, pretty much from the ground up, around slave labour? Moreover its arguably unjust that only victims of still-extant states have a route to compensation whereas people from ethnic groups roughly contemporaneously massacred, enslaved and sacrificed by the Aztec Empire have nobody to sue. Because it isnt about who you are, its about who your ancestors were. Yet theyre so many centuries and generations removed from the crime, everybody involved with the decision-making is long-dead and while the responsible state still exists, in practice compensation comes from taxes paid by citizens who had no part in it all. MBE, do not entertain these people, not for one second. The book accompanying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, Slavery in England definitely continued for a couple of generations after the Norman Conquest and Bristol was a major export centre, though there were attempts to ban the export trade in particular (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds has some interesting quotes from the time). Nevertheless, we live in a society that generally regards slavery as an absolute and eternal wrong, and a grave one at that, yet which has historically (at least certain people and places, and including the state itself) benefited from imposing slavery on others. There is no reason to think one system was more or less brutal than the other. Peter completed his award-winning PhD, exploring stress and coping in elite sports coaching, at Sheffield Hallam in 2012. (Britain expended blood and treasure on ending the slave trade, and thereby paid its moral debt already is one way of trying to resolve it, but rather unsatisfactory at righting the wrongs done to those who had already fallen victim to the trade.) "They're not looking to history only to make them feel good and give them comfort, but they're looking to history to tell them things about truths about their society that we have traditionally edited out of British history.". He updates Fryer, citing radioisotope analysis of skeletons and craniometrics, which support written documentation of Aurelian Moors guarding Hadrians Wall and settling in places such as Yorkshire. I dont think the traders can be given a pass on this front either., Just means they werent alone in being in the wrong.. To be honest, I was a bit sceptical about the Olympics coming to London, but the atmosphere across the capital was genuinely wonderful . And the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. One sporting event that has captured your imagination I was fortunate enough to get tickets to see some of the basketball at the London 2012 Olympics, so my brother and I went to watch the GB vs. Spain game. It began to alter (slightly) the history curriculum at university level: the first undergraduate one-year course on black British history and culture was taught at the University of Warwick in 1984. Certainly they killed them casually often for religious reasons. Video, 00:02:30Should black history be taught all year round? Whitey bad, give me cash? Vikings took slaves, including exporting Anglo-Saxons (you must have heard the quote Non Angli, sed Angeli about the English slaves being sold in Italy? But its still awful, even on a historical scale.. Away from the creative arts, the Equiano Project aims to promote race equality and he was mentioned in Parliament during a debate on Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum. The reason why Equiano is not a national name is because slavery is not a part of the history that we teach when it should be because I don't think you can understand the 18th century in particular but also the 19th century without reference to slavery.". "I don't know why this generation has a different relationship with the past, goes to the past, expecting and looking for different things to earlier generations, but that's really is my observation about them," he says adding the internet has played a huge part. No doubt life expectancy of a slave was shorter than that for a free man. if he wants to be an historian he should present a fair and realistic picture of what happened, Your email address will not be published. But its still awful, even on a historical scale. I cant see the point of denying it was all pretty awful. After decades of complaints, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1712 and, Olusoga writes, Independent traders were turned loose upon the shores of Africa. These traders had argued (stone-blind to irony) that the right to enslave Africans was a defining feature of English freedom and that the Royal African Company had breached their status as free-born Englishmen. MBE: The problem with the UK paying reparations is that people like Olusoga would have to pay their share of the greatly increased taxes. It is a political campaign, not a contribution to academic history. The economics of the slave trade may have meant that it was cheaper to work someone to death rather than allowing him a comfortable old age. Prof Olusoga says statues, such as those of slave traders . The Barbados slave code of 1661 stripped Africans of all human rights, and set out ways in which they were to be punished, to exert control over their labour (mutilation of the face, slitting of nostrils, castration, execution). When the American Civil War interrupted the supply of cotton, hundreds of thousands of British workers were made destitute, dependent on soup kitchens, and the British economy was dealt a thunderous blow, all because an ocean away the forced labour of four million enslaved black Americans had been disrupted. Or anything to do with slavery. Well one economist has worked out the amount to be paid (although not on a damages basis, when one imagines blacks might end up paying whites, but on a close the wealth gap basis): A renowned economist has said that $12 trillion should be afforded to black Americans in reparation for slavery to help the close wealth gap. Looking at what happened in Haiti or Jamaica or chunks of Latin America, I dont find either well, could have been much worse or what do you expect, Early Modern West Europeans, how could they have known better? to be particularly convincing responses. . Instead the racket still goes on with endless boatloads of illegals swarming into Europe. In 1796, a bill was defeated by only four votes: a group of abolitionist MPs went to the opera and missed the vote. Fired by religious feeling, they embarked on a campaign of public education and political lobbying unprecedented in scale and revolutionary in nature. Its extraordinary success rested upon the foundation of sympathy laid down during the previous 70 years of abolitionist activity in Britain. Although I would expect the Germans, and perhaps even the Japanese, to be happy they lost the war. And Britain worked for the whole of the 19th century to put down slavery in Africa. Wrong ?!?! Theres an argument about judging people by the standard of their times, though even in the 1500s moral and religious objections to the slave trade had been made and the rationale of crimes against humanity is that some things are so abhorrent they could never truly be legal no matter what moral code the perpetrators justified themselves with. Societies have what morals suit them. This is because forgetting slavery means forgetting its victims. H istorian and broadcaster David Olusoga has been the face of a decolonial turn in British broadcasting that, in recent years, with series including the Bafta-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave. Heroes of 2020 What Marcus Rashford's campaign for hungry children tells us about . It was the first of the slave narratives that I'd ever read and I found it astonishing.". David Olusoga If one disproves his assertions would slavery then be okay? My argument is that Africans were probably happily killing each other for women before the West turned up. Nobody will stop you, honest. It died out with the Romans leaving, and its non-legality repeatedly reaffirmed from the reign of the early Normans onwards.. Over 150 years in America. But werent they lucky compared to the other Germans in Stalingrad? Might, in this case, being 100% of the debating point. Will Britain change? Hey, we do not even have to go that far. Their cities, as well as their comfort, will rapidly decay. In the USA? Not many remember anything about segregation either. It is about the centuries-long engagement with Africa, a consequence of which is the black presence in Britain. and while the responsible state still exists, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant.. David Olusoga, introduces his book Black and British, an exploration of the relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. They have a game plan & youre falling for it. is that the extra demand distorted the market, led directly to more armed slave-raiding expeditions against rival tribes and so on.. Pretty sure if you could, implausibly, trace my family tree through various not-very-literate eras youd pass through at least one Anglo-Saxon who owned a bunch of Britons. The German survivors of Stalingrad were sent to camps and most of them worked to death. What is their strongest argument? "Equiano is the most important voice that we have from the British experience of slavery and the slave trade," he said. Would also apply even if down a different family line there had been beneficiaries of the slave trade. I was doing some genealogy research when I discovered my great grandfather was a well known member of the 18th Kentucky Infantry. . Reasonable estimates have some 50% of the inhabitants of the Sokoto Caliphate as late as the late 19th cent being slaves. Id say theres enormous dangers in treating this as if it was some public school debating society gig. So is Richard Murphy. Anybody can do this. (I suppose it makes a point about blame not being distributed homogeneously, or that a certain group of people shouldnt be guilted just because they share the same colour of skin with another bunch of people you do think are guilty. No one has said we should not consider someone elses viewpoint. They arent going to concede anything. They all get it from White people inciting violence. And even if you personally disagree with it, what would be the strongest argument for some form of legal settlement? The historian tells Michael Segalov about getting up early, reading George Orwell, taking his dog George for a walk, playing his guitar But those were in those long-lost days when democrats and republicans could talk to each other and agree to disagree while both leaving the conversation a little the wiser.. We could just cut to the chase, and impose a reparations tax on anyone who is descended from from anyone who did something, er, wrong. Married an American GI after the war. Viking Dublin was a major slave-trading centre (English, Irish, Scots, anyone else they could get their hands on). A House Through Time returned to BBC Two in May for its third season, and once again is fronted by historian extraordinaire David Olusoga. They are pretty much airbrushed from history, whereas the transatlantic slave trade seems to be wall-to-wall on our TV screens and in our school textbooks. Their demands should simply be refused. There is plenty of slavery about we just do not call it that. 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