Britain's involvement in the slave trade is to be studied by all secondary pupils in England from September.
Oh, right. What aspects of it, I wonder?
Children will study the development of the trade, colonisation and how slavery was linked to the British empire and the industrial revolution.
Uh huh. And will they be studying how Britain, almost single-handedly brought an end to the trade? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller...
The curriculum has been developed with the assistance of the Understanding Slavery Initiative which encourages teachers, educators and young people to examine the history and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through museum artefacts.
The initiative's learning project manager Ruth Fisher said: "There's a lot of mis-education about slavery and it hasn't really been taught in schools at all.
"It's quite interesting in terms of today's history and what students need to know about the past to understand the present.
"You can't really talk about the history of the British empire without discussing this part of history."
She also suggested the sheer impact of slavery on the British economy and how involved it was with slavery has often been underplayed.
Well, this may well be true: however, what is almost always underplayed is how much it cost Britain to bring the trade to an end. As several of us pointed out last year, bringing about the abolition was done so at a colossal cost to Britain (and not just from loss of free labour). In fact, as Timmy pointed out, the abolition of the slave trade cost more than the benefits.
Good, so because our forefathers made a lot of money out of this then we should compensate those harmed. Which is interesting, because the Royal Navy gos on to make another, further claim:Overall, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were bigger than the eighteenth-century profits.
Now isn't that an interesting thought? Indeed, they go further:It was costing financial capital – Britain did indeed pay heavily in ‘subsidies’ to other European countries to induce them to give up or at least curtail their trade in slaves; somewhat less to numerous chiefs on the African coast for the same purpose; vast sums to its own slave-owners in the West Indies to purchase the freedom of their slaves in 1833; more again to meet the costs of maintaining a squadron on the coast of Africa. It has been estimated that great as was the wealth generated by the slave trade in the half century before 1807, the costs of suppressing it added up to a similar sum:¹ “.. by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.” Above all, the campaign was costing the lives of British seamen: a sacrifice that might be worth making to put an end to the slave trade, but a sacrifice wasted if the only result was further suffering for many of the trade’s victims.
So what we have here is what I would call a very interesting situation indeed.
Isn't it just? And what do you want to bet that this information that will be taught to our little darlings in the classrooms? What do you want to bet that the curriculum insists that the guilt is laid on good and thick? Further, there will probably be a requirement to hire some Black Advocacy Group to come in and teach the kiddies—perhaps through the medium of a play, or a physical daaaaarrrsse theatre piece—about the horrors that their ancestors might have endured.
But the idea that—realising the error of her ways (and I see that they do intend to mention Wilberforce)—Britain spent more money suppressing the slave trade (because it was right to do so) than she ever benefited from said trade...? No, that won't get a look-in: I guarantee it...
UPDATE: the Conservative Party Reptile—who is, if I recall correctly, a history graduate—pisses all over these idiots' chips in quite spectacular fashion. Here are a few highlights...
The numbers of British people directly involved in the slave trade, whether in shipping the poor slaves across the Atlantic or using slave labour on plantations in the British West Indies, was so low. There were no slaves in England after that remarkable judgment by Lord Mansfield in the case of R v Somerset "The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it." So, while the slave trade was an important aspect of world history, I'm not sure that it's a central facet of British history.
Well, the thing is that the slave trade has very little relation to the pattern of British colonisation - in 1807 when the trade was abolished, British colonialism was located predominantly in India, with the West Indies already being marginalised. African colonialism came much later, and European settlement was focused in the south and east - not the west where the slave trade was centred. Equally, what we really know as the British Empire was a creation of the mid-to-late nineteenth century more than the 18th. By the time the flag was flying and the map was being painted pink, the relation of Britain to the slave trade was in spending massive amounts of money - more according to some than was earned in the trade - in trying to stamp out the global trade.
More importantly, despite the Marxist view that the industrial revolution was brought about by the surplus profits of the slave trade, there simply isn't the evidence to support this. Even at the peak of the trade, the money it was bringing in was marginal at best. Stanley Engerman, professor of economic history at Rochester, has calculated that the contribution made by slave sale proceeds to the British economy in 1770 - at the height of the trade - was a mere 0.0054% of National Income. The point here is that this is contentious economic history and certainly not settled historical fact - the teaching of the industrial revolution should really not be taught as an adjunct to the slave trade.
Teach children about the Empire by all means - it's hard to comprehend any British History after about 1750 if you don't talk about it - but don't pretend that slavery is all that it was, or that the slave trade is what has driven modern Britain, because it wasn't, and it hasn't.
Not that any of this... er... historical fact is going to make any impression on these agenda-driven loonies: our children will be taught that this oh-so-fucking-wonderful Utopia that they inhabit was built solely on their evil ancestors' joyous exploitation of the utterly innocent African slaves, and that they should feel very, very guilty.
And in the inner city schools, the (predominantly black) children will no doubt be told that they should feel a sense of entitlement because the evil whities enslaved their great-grandparents and made them pick cotton in Sunderland, or something.
The agenda is guilt, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope that you feel its crushing burden even now—or it will be back to