"Slavery Has ALWAYS Been a Thing!": A Response.
"Slavery has always been a thing!", my standard reply:
The 'slavery has always been a thing' argument is incredibly dull and not nearly as pithy as folks seem to imagine.
It's precisely because the 'great and the good' in the US and UK forged our modern nations with the sheer scale of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade that we should examine it. We directly benefitted (and benefit) from it. It's not an abstract c'est la vie 'the Pyramids were built by slaves' (which they weren't) argument. It's the foundation of the modern, industrial world.
Our world. The world which invented this social media platform!
And therefore it should be scrutinized.
No one is suggesting that we are personally responsible for slavery or even that the Brits invented slavery, and no one is dismissing the abolishment of slavery within the empire.
However, the Brits didn't engage in hundreds of years of the slave trade and brutal exploitation on an astonishing scale, (setting up our Industrial Revolution, global banking, insurance and trade networks)... Just for the accolade of benevolently 'abolishing slavery' conveniently as it was becoming socially awkward at home and economically less viable across the world.
It truly is a tired argument and I cannot help but wonder why some are so keen to peddle sound-bites which dismiss the context of the origins of the modern world. Not least the simple fact that English is the language of international commerce. Heck, English went to the Moon!
What's more though: the 'abolishment' of slavery was followed in many cases by indentured servitude and a ferocious scientific effort to prove racial hierarchy as a pretext for continued subjugation of colonial holdings. Again... far from benign. And again, directly our society's doing.
We cannot be proud of our history, claiming kinship with figures like Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin and Churchill while dismissing our relationship to the context of the slave trade.
It's one of the benefits of studying the past, to give our times a fuller context. Particularly a portion of history which is directly the forbear of our society.
I am tired of folks who don't see history as something to learn from, rather as a half-remembered platform for platitudes and un-tainted, un-nuanced, national pride.
#history #archaeology #transatlanticslavetrade