Read on Twitter
#HistoryMatters a thread – recent weeks have highlighted issues of how British history is taught, what gets taught as British history & why this matters. How we understand the past has implications for the politics of the present... 1/n
Who is seen to belong in the present is often related to our understanding of who ‘we’ were in the past. If we imagine ourselves historically as a nation, then politics in the present in organised in those categories... 2/n
If we understand that ‘we’ have always been constituted through empire, then those understandings require transformation. How we conceptualise that empire also matters in terms of who is acknowledged as belonging today... 3/n
Britain emerges on the world stage constituted by processes & relationships that span the globe – it travels East as much as West – and the communities now in Britain come from diverse locations with similar historical trajectories... 4/n
Challenging the parochiality of ‘our island story’ cannot be limited to an address of how Britain was forged through its Atlantic relationships. It was the wealth appropriated (looted?) from the East that was used to enter the trade in human beings across the Atlantic... 5/n
That wealth was also being used to establish the trade in human beings across the Indian ocean world. As @AndreaMajor19 argues, people were taken from India & South East Asia to work on colonial plantations across the region, including in Africa https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/slavery-abolitionism-and-empire-in-india-17721843/0250F1760DC88D16AD2B9003FEEB2539
The abolition of the slave trade across Europe in the early 19th century only stopped the taking of humans from West Africa. It did not prohibit, & in fact accelerated, the taking of human beings from Asia to replace the lost labour... 7/n
Indenture approximated slavery & yet this history is less well known, in part, as @MariaKaladeen argues, because the facts of indenture challenge the narrative of imperial benevolence that dominates discussions of abolition... 8/n https://www.bl.uk/windrush/articles/indenture-to-windrush
Imperial wealth was constituted through the slave trade, the extraction of material resources, the coerced labour of Africans and Asians in colonial plantations, and most insidiously the taxation of imperial subjects for the benefit of the nation... 9/n
Piketty, in Capital & Ideology, states that ‘For the United Kingdom, profits from the slave islands in the 1780s were on the order of 4-5 percent of national income’... 10/n https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980822
By the 1880s, according to Richard Temple, over 50 percent of the money at the disposal of the government at Westminster came from the labour & resources of those within empire & beyond the national state... 11/n
As @Aaaqilah argues, we need 'more detailed cartographies of colonial wealth production' - cartographies that map the trade in human beings across the Indian ocean world together with the journeys across the Atlantic... 12/n https://discoversociety.org/2019/07/03/on-decolonising-our-departments-and-disciplines-respectability-and-belonging/
The East India Company was not simply a trading company; it 'conquered, subjugated & plundered vast tracts of south Asia' @DalrympleWill ... it looted the sub-continent & brought its stolen treasures back to display in the UK... 13/n https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders
For more on these fragments & on the need for an INCLUSIVE reparative history of Britain that brings together the Atlantic with the Indian ocean world, see... END https://discoversociety.org/2020/07/01/focus-accounting-for-british-history/
