Australians know how this one goes: a group of academics with an axe to grind conjure up a website long on bogus ‘I Just Reckon’ bullshit, and very, very short on evidence. But, simply by dint of having been almost entirely spun out of whole cloth by tendentious bullshit-artist, it becomes cemented as unchallengeable ‘truth’.
Here in Australia, the prize contender is the so-called ‘Massacre Map’. Numerous sceptical historians have pointed out that sources for its claims are invariably either non-existent, extremely tenuous (third- and fourth-hand accounts, often collected decades or a century later), directly contradictory of the actual evidence or grotesquely slanted (for instance, ignoring that unprovoked Aboriginal massacres of whites precipitated revenge attacks, or that actual massacres were massive scandals and treated as what they were: criminal acts).
For Britons, there’s an added layer of salt rubbed into the historical wound: the nation that sacrificed more blood and treasure than any other in history to end slavery, is being pilloried by people comfortably removed by centuries from the slave trade.
The Register of British Slave Traders (https://britishslavetraders.org/) has just been published. It’s the product of three years of research undertaken by teams from three universities, led by Professor Will Pettigrew, Professor of Global British History at King’s College, London. It has been trailed and excerpted in eight different articles published in the Guardian in the week beginning Monday 14th September. It is being used by David Olusoga in his new two-part BBC series on the history of the slave trade.
Because of course it is. There’s nothing the Nigerian immigrant Olusoga won’t do to pour scorn on the country that took him in and made him wealthy and famous.
Professor Pettigrew and his industrious academic conscripts have gifted us a register tracking some 13,000 individuals who managed to back the slave trade across two-and-a-half centuries. One might expect a mountain of hard data to accompany such a monument of moral preening. Instead, one finds vibes. As one astute commentator dryly noted:
‘Nothing is presented in proportion or given statistical context.’
And that might as well be the mission statement of modern academia.
Take, for instance, the breathless exposé regarding the Church of England. We are solemnly informed that 45 clergymen held investments in the trade. Scandalous! Yet, as a spot of elementary arithmetic reveals, across the centuries in question there were thousands upon thousands of parishes spanning the realm. To find a paltry 45 clerics dabbling in the trade across 250 years suggests not a hotbed of clerical villainy, but a remarkably abstemious clergy. But nuance does not sell Guardian column inches.
Pettigrew concedes that his traders formed a microscopic fraction of the populace, yet insists they wielded “outsized influence”. The usual suspects from the cultural pantheon – John Gay, Sir Godfrey Kneller, George Frideric Handel – are dragged out for the standard ritual of guilt by association. If Handel penned tunes with profits touching the trade, are we to burn our copies of Messiah? By this logic, every contemporary consumer gorging on cheap electronics or fast fashion is personally culpable for every misery inflicted in the labour-camps of Xinjiang or the sweatshops of Bangladesh.
Consider the sheer demographic reality. Between 1550 and 1801, upwards of 25 million souls lived and died in Britain. The vast majority were labourers and proletarians earning a pittance, completely disenfranchised until the late Victorian era. To suggest that these wretched souls were somehow co-conspirators in the royal monopolies or joint-stock ventures of the elite is historical illiteracy of the highest order.
For a proper reckoning of economic reality, one must turn to figures who actually understood ledgers, such as Henry Brougham. Back in 1804, utilising rigorous calculations championed by William Pitt the Younger, Brougham dismantled the myth that the trade formed the bedrock of British prosperity. He demonstrated that the traffic accounted for a paltry three per cent of exports, operating essentially as a precarious, loss-ridden gamble.
Modern economic historians of actual repute, such as Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr and the venerable David Eltis, have long since buried the Marxist fairy tale that slave-grown sugar financed the Industrial Revolution. As Eltis memorably observed, it is quite beyond belief that slavery could have kick-started British industrial growth, and European economies would likely have looked identical had slave colonies never existed. Similar arguments have been made that the American South could never have taken in a single African slave, and their economic development would barely have changed.
The Guardian-reading clerisy can wail into their organic sourdough all they like, but the numbers simply refuse to cooperate with their grand narrative. Slavery was an unmitigated moral horror, but pretending it formed the beating heart of modern Britain is nothing more than historical fabrication dressed up in academic robes.
