Your Daily Ten@10 - 2025/152

This is edition 2025/152 of the Ten@10 newsletter.

Hi all,

Thank you to all the many people who left messages on Juana's obituary. The sentiments and messages mean a great deal.

This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.

Enjoy!

• 📜 Activist Narrative vs. Historical Reality – Modern anti-colonial activists portray Britain as uniquely evil for its role in slavery, ignoring the global scale of the practice and Britain’s leadership in abolition.
• 🌍 Slavery Was Universal – Every major civilisation practised slavery: ancient Egypt, Rome, Vikings, Ottomans, Islamic empires, African kingdoms, and Māori societies in pre-colonial New Zealand.
• 🚢 Transatlantic Trade Context – Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade was significant but neither unique nor the largest. The Arab and Indian Ocean slave trades predated and outlasted the Atlantic one, moving millions more people.
• ✊ Abolitionists’ Fight – Campaigners like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and Olaudah Equiano led a decades-long struggle to abolish the slave trade, culminating in the 1807 Abolition Act and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
• ⛵ Royal Navy’s Crusade – Britain’s West Africa Squadron captured 1,600+ slave ships and freed 150,000+ Africans between 1808–1860, showing abolition was a global effort, not just a domestic policy.
• 💰 A Costly Moral Choice – Britain paid £20 million (≈40% of annual expenditure) to compensate slaveowners, borrowing so much that taxpayers were repaying the debt until 2015 — even though most Brits never owned slaves.
• 🕌 Other Regions Lagged – Many nations, especially in the Islamic world, continued slavery long after Britain abolished it: Brazil (1888), Qatar (1952), Saudi Arabia and Yemen (1962), Mauritania (1981).
• ⚠️ Modern Slavery Persists – Human trafficking and open slave markets still exist today, notably in Libya since 2011 and in global sex trafficking networks, yet activists fixate on 18th-century Britain instead.
• 🏛️ Historical Distortion – School curriculums, museums, and media often stop Britain’s story at its role in the slave trade, erasing its abolitionist leadership to fit anti-Western political narratives.
• 🎭 Nuance Over Slogans – The “British = bad” vs. “colonised = good” framing simplifies history into propaganda, flattening the complexity of human motives, morality, and progress.
• 🧩 History’s Tapestry – All civilisations, empires, and heroes are morally mixed. Figures like Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. achieved greatness despite deep flaws; history should reflect this complexity.
• 🇳🇿 New Zealand Context – Current narratives oversimplify colonial history into victim/villain binaries, undermining a truthful understanding of Aotearoa’s past and its place in global history.
• 🔍 Call for Honesty – Britain’s legacy on slavery is neither spotless nor uniquely wicked but extraordinary: it stands out not for practising slavery, but for using imperial power and resources to end it.