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I expect you’ve read @DavidOlusoga’s remarkable, jaw-dropping and often downright shaming “Black and British – a forgotten history.” If not, you really must. Either way, here are nine things I didn’t know before reading it and which I wanted to share. 1/11
2/ To help the 1833 Slavery Abolition Bill pass, the govt agreed to pay £20m to compensate the 46,000 slave owners: 40% of all government spending for that year. (For comparison, 40% of govt spending in 2019/20 > that spent on health, education and defence put together.)
3/ In the mid-19th C some black American abolitionists did not celebrate the “official” US Independence Day, 4 July, preferring instead Britain’s Emancipation Day, 1 August.
4/ Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the world’s best-selling book of the 19th C.
5/ As late as 1807 there were more enslaved people in Africa than in the Americas – although the types of slavery differed.
6/ In the first half of 19th C the British Navy spend 5% of its budget on the West Africa Squadron, a small group of ships dedicated to intercepting slave ships and liberating the occupants. The most famous ship was called the Black Joke.
7/ Large parts of the West Indies were as keen to fight for Britain in WW1 as the people in Britain itself.
8/ In 1914 Britain formed “Bantam Battalions” for people under 5’3”, the minimum height for a soldier at the start of the war.
9/ There was a genuine fear that, despite the desperate need for soldiers, if black troops fought on the Western Front, “their supposed primitive vitality would be set alongside the emasculated sickliness of many British recruits in a way that would damage white prestige.”
10/ Clement Attlee made enquiries about the possibility of diverting the SS Empire Windrush to East Africa, so its occupants could work on groundnut farms.
11/11 The above does no justice to the central arguments of the book, and inevitably does not contextualise the points. For that, read the book. Can't recommend it highly enough.
