Eric Williams: “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” https://twitter.com/Adrian_Hilton/status/1160975829465206784

British slavers forcibly shipped approximately 5.5 million enslaved Africans into their Caribbean colonies over a 180 year period.

Hilary Beckles: "When slavery was abolished...there were just 800,000 persons remaining. That is a retention/survival rate of 15%"

Britain’s main role in the slave trade was to (1) industrialise their transportation & enslavement of millions and (2) their socio-legal ‘perfection’ of a system of racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery, which aimed to maximise profits by reducing a people to livestock

“Cost millions”

Let’s break that down.

The compensation scheme that was used to abolish slavery in the British West Indies in 1834 moved public funds to the pockets of the slaveowning elite members of the British Establishment (including MPs, Peers and Archbishops)

Conveniently left out of this junk food history is not just the lack of acknowledgment of the immorality of compensating slave owners, but the fact that the imposed post-slavery forced labour system that followed was worth £27 million to the planters (over 50% of the total cost)

Thus the formerly enslaved in the British West Indies paid for their own freedom. They were not freed.

Frederick Douglass: “We owe much especially to Clarkson, to Wilberforce, to Fowell Buxton and to the anti-slavery societies at home and abroad; but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the 19th century."

"Until she spoke no Christian nation has abolished negro slavery. Until she spoke no Christian nation had given to the world an organised effort to abolish slavery."

"Until she spoke the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace the South Atlantic painting the sea with the Negro's blood."

"Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit was dumb. Slave-traders lived and slave-traders died. Funeral sermons were preached over them, and of them it was said that they died in the triumphs of the christian faith and went to heaven among the just."

Relevant thread https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/680749407629885441?s=20

If a slave "by the extremity of the correction should chance to die...his death shall not be accounted a felony..." (Virginia, 1669)

"No slave shall be a witness against any person, in any matter, cause, or thing whatsoever, criminal or civil...” (Alabama, 1833)

Daniel O'Connell: "If money is to be given, give it to the wretched slaves; but do not given it to the men who hold a lash over the backs of their fellow creatures. I protest against remuneration to the planters in principle - I protest against it in practice."

I predict that this far-right neo-colonial talking point will become even more mainstream in Brexit Britain over the next few years.

Meanwhile the erasure of the Haitian revolution runs deep. For example as of today @Google’s “people also ask” algorithm on “who was the first to abolish slavery” = Britain.

While @Reuters’ abolition timeline from 2007 skips Haiti completely

The professor seems to have deleted the tweet that prompted this thread, so here’s a screenshot for posterity.