Thread by @MsLegalSass, Dearest @tomhfh , it is time you stopped being a PRICK and [...]

Dearest @tomhfh , it is time you stopped being a PRICK and sit down while I school you on this. Britain was NOT the first country to ban slavery in the world. Thread. https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1269643230318080001

https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1269643230318080001

Let’s put an end to the delusion that Britain abolished slavery - Kenan Malik
The slave trade was actually abolished in 1807. The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act abolished [ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/emancipation.htm], as the name suggests, slavery itself.

A Treasury so loose with its facts might explain something about the state of the British economy. Worse, however, was the claim that British taxpayers helped “buy freedom for slaves”. The government certainly shelled out £20m (about £16bn today) in 1833.

Not to free slaves but to line the pockets of 46,000 British slave owners as “recompense” for losing their “property”. Having grown rich on the profits of an obscene trade, slave owners grew richer still from its ending.

That, scandalously, was what the taxpayer was paying for until 2015. “In 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it

wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.” It is part of a long tradition of the British authorities playing down their central role in the transatlantic slave trade, while claiming credit for ending slavery.

It was not Britain but slaves themselves and radicals in Europe who began the struggle against enslavement. Nevertheless, the “moral capital” of abolitionism, as historian Katie Donington observes, continues to provide “a means of redeeming Britain’s troubling colonial past”.

CHRONOLOGY-Who banned slavery when?

Britain marks 200 years on March 25 since it enacted a law banning the trans-Atlantic slave trade, although full abolition of slavery did not follow for another generation. Following are some key dates in the trans-atlantic

trade in slaves from Africa and its abolition.

1444 - First public sale of African slaves in Lagos, Portugal

1482 - Portuguese start building first permanent slave trading post at Elmina, Gold Coast, now Ghana

1510 - First slaves arrive in the Spanish colonies of South America, having travelled via Spain

1518 - First direct shipment of slaves from Africa to the Americas

1777 - State of Vermont, an independent Republic after the American Revolution, becomes first sovereign state to abolish slavery

1780s - Trans-Atlantic slave trade reaches peak

1787 - The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in Britain by Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson

1792 - Denmark bans import of slaves to its West Indies colonies, although the law only took effect from 1803.

1807 - Britain passes Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, outlawing British Atlantic slave trade.

- United States passes legislation banning the slave trade, effective from start of 1808.

1811 - Spain abolishes slavery, including in its colonies, though Cuba rejects ban and continues to deal in slaves.

1813 - Sweden bans slave trading

1814 - Netherlands bans slave trading

1817 - France bans slave trading, but ban not effective until 1826

1833 - Britain passes Abolition of Slavery Act, ordering gradual abolition of slavery in all British colonies. Plantation owners in the West Indies receive 20 million pounds in compensation

- Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade

1819 - Portugal abolishes slave trade north of the equator

- Britain places a naval squadron off the West African coast to enforce the ban on slave trading

1823 - Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society formed. Members include William Wilberforce

1846 - Danish governor proclaims emancipation of slaves in Danish West Indies, abolishing slavery

1848 - France abolishes slavery

1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, although all slaves are subject to a 20-year apprenticeship

1861 - Netherlands abolishes slavery in Dutch Caribbean colonies

1862 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaims emancipation of slaves with effect from January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution follows in 1865 banning slavery

1886 - Slavery is abolished in Cuba

1888 - Brazil abolishes slavery

1926 - League of Nations adopts Slavery Convention abolishing slavery

1948 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including article stating

“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Let's dig a little deeper shall we? Since you like to defend colonialism and slave trade and somehow say Britain was a champion of banning slave trade. Apologists for colonialism argue that Western powers brought economic development, the rule of law, & liberties to its colonies

According to Gilley, colonialism stressed “the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities” and constituted a “civilizing mission” that “led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples.”

For Biggar, it introduced “order” to the non-Western world. And for many British historians, the British Empire was preeminent in achieving all this. As Niall Ferguson put it in his 2003 book Empire, “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods

capital and labour than the British Empire.… And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.” Its an argument that confuses economic development and political liberalization, on the one hand, with colonialism, on the other

Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent.

“The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both

through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries. It was not just India from which resources flowed back to Britain, though in different countries it happened in different ways.

Britain’s West Indian colonies were at the heart of the “triangular trade” by which goods from Britain were used to purchase slaves from West Africa who were taken to the Caribbean, & from whose labor great riches flowed back to British merchants in Bristol, Liverpool, and London

profits from the slave trade and slave labor came to £3.8 million. Not all profit was reinvested but, suggests Blackburn, “slave-generated profits were large enough to have covered a quarter to a third of Britain’s overall investment needs.”

Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did. Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire shows, in the policies enacted by the colonial powers themselves before independence and in the economic and political

conditions imposed by Western powers after. The horrors of the postcolonial world seem, however, to have created an amnesia about the horrors of colonialism. From Tasmania, where a whole people were virtually wiped out for resisting British rule in the “Black War” of the 1820s

and 1830s; to Jamaica, where the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 led to a six-week rampage by British troops, during which more than four hundred people were killed and almost the same number summarily hanged; to Ireland and a history of bloody terror from Oliver Cromwell’s savage

war of conquest in the seventeenth century to what the Irish historian Thomas Bartlett called the “universal rape, plunder and murder” wrought by British troops after the 1798 Irish rebellion, to the brutal acts of revenge exacted during the Irish War of Independence by the

Black and Tans, a British-controlled paramilitary police force, in the 1920s; to India, where some three million died in the Bengal famine of 1942–1943, caused by the British decision to export rice, for use in the war theaters and for consumption in Britain, from a state that

usually imported rice, and at a time of great local shortage—the experience of the “order” of the British Empire was cruel and ferocious. Perhaps the most egregious claim of the apologists is that the British Empire should be lauded because it helped end slavery; this was

“one of the undoubted benefits of colonialism,” as Gilley puts it. Imagine an arsonist who burns down a building, killing many of its inhabitants. When the people inside try to flee, he forces them back. Eventually, after many hours of this, he decides to help the people,

both inside and outside the building, who are trying to put the fire out. Would we say of this arsonist, “Yes, he may have burned the building down and killed dozens of people, but what really matters is that he threw some water over the fire at the end?”

That is akin to the argument of the apologists for empire.

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