Blair: Britain's 'sorrow' for shame of slave trade
Tony Blair is ready to apologise for the British empire's use of slavery.
It's astonishing to think that nearly 200 years after the 1807 legislation that led to slavery's abolition he is the first British Prime Minister to formally acknowledge the fact that slavery was wrong.
There have been fears expressed that apologising for slavery will open the doors to claims for reparations from the descendants of slaves. This is a tricky one for me. I am unsure what right I would have to claim for reparations based on actions that were taken against my great grandfather, although I have no difficulty with the British government being forced to pay some financial price for the profits she made out of the misery of other people.
Leaving that aside, Blair's comments are to be welcomed. He is to say:'It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time,' the Prime Minister will say. 'Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.'
The British empire did many terrible and dreadful things. It is only right that it expresses some sense of it's shame at what it has done.
It is very rare these days that I find myself approving any of Blair's actions, but on this one he is right to go further than any previous British Prime Minister and agree that what our country engaged in was wrong.
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tag: Blair, British Empire, slavery,
11 comments:
As has been pointed out slavery was legal during the 150 or so years that Britain was involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Not only was it legal, it is difficult to see how British overseas colonies could have operated competitively without slaves, as nearly all our competitors were users of slaves for manual work.
It is worth reminding everybody that slavery has been part of the human condition from the earliest times and all major empires and states have depended on slaves until recently.
The British Empire was almost certainly the first ever in human history to not only abolish slavery in its own territories, but also to try to abolish it throughout the world. The fact that it failed is not to detract from the intention.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4742049.stm
Blame for the Atlantic trade does not only rest with the European countries, such as Spain and Portugal, who were the earliest of those involved but also with the Arab slave traders who established the business in West Africa long before the Europeans arrived.
Responsibility also lay with the African states, such as Dahomey, Ashanti and Benin, which were the main sources of slaves taken in war and transported to the coast for sale to the European traders.
Slavery is regarded as a vile institution by any liberal minded person. It still exists in many countries in one guise or another and the current human trafficing in the sex business and the smuggling of manual workers to countries where they can be forced to work to pay off a debt incurred by their "travel costs" are two examples.
Sorry I forgot to add this link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1357_slavery_today/index.shtml
Antiqua,
My point isn't whether slavery was legal, but whether it ever should have been legal. That is what we are apologising for. It is incomprehensible to me that we can't stand up and say it was wrong. Even if these were different times with different standards. It was wrong.
There were very many people who lives were ruined by what we did and I think we apologise for our own sake, in order to acknowledge a wrong and move on. We are not apologising to the people we ensalved. After all, the people we enslaved are long dead and, as I said in the article, I can't see any way for anyone legitimately to claim compensation for events that occured to their forefathers.
And I agree with you that human trafficing is a form of slavery. Surely that present day wrong increases the need for us to apologise for own part in such a practice, even if we did so many, many years ago?
Just as Mr. Blair is today apologising for slavery, the Prime Ministers of 2300 will be apologisiing for our culture's squandering of oil.
Blair stopped short from making a full apology from fear of compensation. I am for a full apology and i am for compensation. Aren't these ex slaves the poorest in their respective countries now and don't they live in the poorest countries ? And isn't slavery responsible for their poverty ? We are compensating jews for much less. We are also spending on wars in the ME in order to protect Israel.
Why don't we compensate the descendants of ancient slaves ? We will be greatly fighting poverty by doing so while restoring their dignity to people at the same time...
Sophia,
As I said in the article, I would have no problem with us paying back some of the massive profits we made out of other people's misery, however, I can't see how a person could make a successful claim based on actions that were taken against their forefathers.
Perhaps we could simply make some kind of payment to the nation's from which we extracted slaves.
You say, "...although I have no difficulty with the British government being forced to pay some financial price for the profits she made out of the misery of other people" and again below, "[p]erhaps we could simply make some kind of payment to the nation's from which we extracted slaves".
I take issue with this thinking for several reasons:
(1) it overlooks the fact that British individuals were also greatly exploited in ways that today would be considered illegal. It was not only Africans who were greatly abused by the morality of the day.
(2) it overlooks the complicity of African chiefs in supplying slaves to slavers. On your logic, there would also be some intra-African reparatory transfers.
(3) what would the nations in receipt of reparations do with the money? I dare say that the result would be much like that of "resource curse" where the competitiveness of recipient countries is greatly reduced as a consequence of the incoming payments and the money is in any event transferred to Swiss bank accounts by African leaders in much the same spirit as their forefathers collaborated with slavers.
Sir, slavery was an abomination and a moral crime. Natural justice demands a reparation. But quite who and quite how such justice is given remains to be clarified.
mark wrote:
Sir, slavery was an abomination and a moral crime. Natural justice demands a reparation. But quite who and quite how such justice is given remains to be clarified.
Mark, we are actually in agreement. And I notice that, like myself, you feel reparation should be made. However, like myself, you seem unsure of how such justice can be delivered.
That is one of the points I made. I am unsure of how one can legally make a claim based on actions that were taken against one's forefathers.
Mark, Kel,
I agree with you but there are solutions. It shouldn't be the burden of only one country to offer compensation. Slavery is wel documented and it should be all countries who profited from slavery that must establish a fund to offer compensation. I am not against indirect compensations like helping the countries from whichthe slaves came.
Mark, one aspect of your argument seems bizarre to me: the fact that some people participated in the slave trade of their own does not diminish the responsibility of those in the West who prifited from the trade. Your argument is like saying that because there were jews collaborating with nazis in the camps we should not compensate Jews for the holocaust.
Sophia,
Part of the reason that I highlighted the last part of what Mark said was because it appeared to agree with the general idea of compensating someone - persons or country - and also seemed so at odds with the other points he was making.
I was actually amazed listening to Radio 4 yesterday with the level of anger some people were expressing over the notion that Britain had done anything wrong. To some callers it was legal then and that was the end of the matter. I find that a strange morality.
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