Fascinating item on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4) this morning about the ending of slavery in the 1830s (British territories - slavery ended much later elsewhere in the world and still exists today in some places).
University College London has compiled a database of slave owners at the time of abolition http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ .
I was surprised (very surprised) that this amounts to only 3,000 individuals.
The number is surprising because a myth has grown up, promulgated by commentators such as Gary Younge, that British national wealth was founded on the slave trade and that the national economy today is largely buoyant (in so far as it can be said to be buoyant) because of the legacy of the slave trade.
To hear these people talk you would think every family in the country were slave owners in the 18th and early 19th century.
The UCL data tells us plainly that only 3,000 people were slave owners - a tiny proportion of the total population.
I do not need to enter my own family name in the data base - I know who my ancestors were as far back as the 1750s and they did not own slaves or any other property. Like most people in the country I come from a long line of paupers. Our poverty goes all the way back to the Dark Ages.
It has long been a cliche of historians that up until the death of Queen Victoria only four hundred families in England owned all of the wealth. Well thanks to UCL we know which of those families owned slaves. So now the West Indian claque that goes on about "reparations" know exactly who to go after and they can stop the offensive suggestion that the rest of us owe them anything or that the post-war unrestricted West Indian immigration we have experienced is just "payback" for slavery.
Of course Diane Abbott MP is gleefully jumping on this bandwagon (but is it not the case that due to the incidence of violent rape between slave owners and slaves the majority of West Indians are descended from both sides? - if such a thing as ancestral guilt exists, presumably the current West Indians represent both the oppressors and the oppressed).
Charlie Beckett, Director of the think tank Polis and Head of Media at the London School of Economics, indicates that he might be descended from one of the 3,000 slave owners - it would be interesting to trace how many of our current "establishment" (public school educated, Oxbridge educated, and enjoying comfortable quasi-sinecure positions) are from the UCL database and whether we still have an hereditary elite firmly occupying all the positions of power in the areas of politics, media and economics.
And on the subject of the "ancestral guilt" scam, here we see Damian McBride (former adviser to Gordon Brown) trying to tell us that the Highland "clearances" were a variation of ethnic cleansing. All over the United Kingdom the common land was enclosed and the common people (mostly subsistence farmers) given the choice of moving away or starving. This happened in England as well as in Scotland (my mothers' ancestors were cleared off the land in Hampshire and my fathers' ancestors were cleared off the land in south Yorkshire) and the Clearance Acts were passed by Scottish MPs as well as English MPs.
University College London has compiled a database of slave owners at the time of abolition http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ .
I was surprised (very surprised) that this amounts to only 3,000 individuals.
The number is surprising because a myth has grown up, promulgated by commentators such as Gary Younge, that British national wealth was founded on the slave trade and that the national economy today is largely buoyant (in so far as it can be said to be buoyant) because of the legacy of the slave trade.
To hear these people talk you would think every family in the country were slave owners in the 18th and early 19th century.
The UCL data tells us plainly that only 3,000 people were slave owners - a tiny proportion of the total population.
I do not need to enter my own family name in the data base - I know who my ancestors were as far back as the 1750s and they did not own slaves or any other property. Like most people in the country I come from a long line of paupers. Our poverty goes all the way back to the Dark Ages.
It has long been a cliche of historians that up until the death of Queen Victoria only four hundred families in England owned all of the wealth. Well thanks to UCL we know which of those families owned slaves. So now the West Indian claque that goes on about "reparations" know exactly who to go after and they can stop the offensive suggestion that the rest of us owe them anything or that the post-war unrestricted West Indian immigration we have experienced is just "payback" for slavery.
Of course Diane Abbott MP is gleefully jumping on this bandwagon (but is it not the case that due to the incidence of violent rape between slave owners and slaves the majority of West Indians are descended from both sides? - if such a thing as ancestral guilt exists, presumably the current West Indians represent both the oppressors and the oppressed).
Charlie Beckett, Director of the think tank Polis and Head of Media at the London School of Economics, indicates that he might be descended from one of the 3,000 slave owners - it would be interesting to trace how many of our current "establishment" (public school educated, Oxbridge educated, and enjoying comfortable quasi-sinecure positions) are from the UCL database and whether we still have an hereditary elite firmly occupying all the positions of power in the areas of politics, media and economics.
And on the subject of the "ancestral guilt" scam, here we see Damian McBride (former adviser to Gordon Brown) trying to tell us that the Highland "clearances" were a variation of ethnic cleansing. All over the United Kingdom the common land was enclosed and the common people (mostly subsistence farmers) given the choice of moving away or starving. This happened in England as well as in Scotland (my mothers' ancestors were cleared off the land in Hampshire and my fathers' ancestors were cleared off the land in south Yorkshire) and the Clearance Acts were passed by Scottish MPs as well as English MPs.
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