Understanding the Legacy of Slavery

They told you a story, about who you are, and where you come from, colonizers, slavers,

oppressors, and you were supposed to feel ashamed, not for anything you did, but for

who you are.

So let's not argue with the story, let's test it.

Britain wrote everything down, let's open the books and see for ourselves.

Start with the obvious question.

While all of this was supposedly being done in their name, who actually were your ancestors?

Here's who they were.

In the year Britain banned the slave trade, fewer than one man in ten could vote, and

no woman could.

Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, for petty theft they could be shipped across

the world, and 160,000 of them were.

Their children were down the mines at eight years old, and in the mills before dawn.

And in Manchester, the average age of death in a laboring family was 17, driven down by

the children who never grew up.

So whatever the powerful were doing, understand this first.

Your ancestors were not the ones doing it, they were also underneath it.

And that is what makes what happened next extraordinary.

Because when word reached those same people of what slavery actually was, of 800,000 human

beings in chains under their own flag, they went to war with it.

And they had no vote, no army, and no seat in parliament.

They fought with what they had, a courtroom.

In 1772, an enslaved man named James Somerset was carried to London in chains, and an English

court ruled that English law could not hold a slave.

He walked out free.

A kitchen.

In 1791, 300,000 families simply stopped buying slave sugar.

Not a march, not a riot.

A decision made at over 300,000 tables.

A signature.

In 1792, 519 petitions hit parliament, carrying 390,000 names, and most of those hands had

no vote.

A signature was the only voice the law allowed them.

So they used it, year after year, until parliament could not hold the line.

In 1807, Britain banned the slave trade.

The people had moved the government's hand,

and when the slave owners demanded a price for the 800,000th they still held,

it was those same people who paid it.

20 million pounds, around 40% of the government's entire annual budget,

a debt the Treasury says was not cleared until 2015.

So if your family paid British taxes before 2015,

your family helped buy the world its freedom.

And here is the part to hold on to.

When Britain paid, it wrote down every claim, 46,000 of them,

in a country of 24 million people.

The slave owners are a list, a real one.

You can search it today.

Your ancestors are not on it.

They are on the other side of the ledger.

With the millions who paid to close it,

then Britain did something no nation had ever done.

It went after slavery everywhere.

From 1808, the Royal Navy kept a squadron off West Africa,

with one order, stop the slave trade.

Over 60 years, it stopped 1,600 slave ships,

and freed 150,000 people at sea.

Around 1,600 sailors died doing it, most of them of disease.

Dockers' sons, weavers' sons,

sewn into sailcloth and buried 4,000 miles from home.

The owners got a ledger, the sailors got the sea.

They did not stop at Africa.

For centuries, Barbary corsairs had taken Europeans

from their own villages and sold them in North Africa.

In 1816, the Royal Navy sailed to Algiers and ended it.

When Brazil kept the trade running,

the Navy burned the slave ships where they lay.

When a king in Lagos kept selling people, Britain removed him.

When American cotton picked by slaves reached Lancashire,

the mill workers chose to starve rather than spin it.

And in 1896 came the last act,

a war in Zanzibar that lasted 38 minutes.

The next year, slavery was abolished by decree.

Today, almost every nation on Earth outlaws slavery.

Where it survives, it hides.

That fight is not over.

But the world that fights it had to be built, and it was built largely at British expense and largely by British hands.

The hands of people who never owned anyone.

So why have you never heard this?

Because within living memory, the story was rewritten.

The trade stayed in the textbooks, and it should be there, but the war against it was cut.

You were taught the crime, and never the cure, the shame, and never the price your family paid to put it right.

But the record does not care what the story says.

The record says the world that outlawed slavery was forced into being by ordinary British people.

School teachers, weavers, miners, and sailors in their sailcloth.

Four thousand miles from home, the powerful exploited the world.

They exploited their own people first, and it was those people who ended slavery.

You were taught the shame, never the pride.

They wrote your ancestors out of the story.

We teach what they want you to forget, story by story, name by name.

Find out more at proudofus.co.uk slash support.

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