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Frank
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The societies we most admire from antiquity, the Romans and Greeks, were both slave societies, with slave ownership in ancient Athens similar in its extent to car ownership today.
Both North and South America had slave economies before Europeans arrived, and after their arrival the trans-Atlantic slave trade powered plantations throughout the region.
China had slavery under the Qing dynasty, and the Moguls practised it in India. Africans enslaved Africans and some of the highest ranking advisers in the Ottoman Empire were slaves.
The Vikings, and their descendants in Kyivan Rus, in what is now Ukraine, were prolific slavers in eastern Europe to the extent that their predations gave rise to the ethnic term Slavs, or slaves.
Accounts of sexual slavery also are documented in Australia among Aboriginal people.
No doubt as a result of American exceptionalism and cultural dominance, as well as Eurocentrism, Australians are fascinated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade more than any other.
This started when the Portuguese, the only western European slave economy of the time, purchased Africans for sale and shipped them to Brazil in 1526.
Britain was not a slave economy in the 16th century but, before the Norman Conquest in 1066, 10 per cent to 30 per cent of the population had been slaves. The Normans opposed slavery. William the Conqueror’s ninth law banned the export of slaves and in 1102 the Church Council in London condemned slavery. By 1200 it had died out.
Subsequent court cases affirmed that there was no status of slavery under the common law, so slaves could not exist in Britain and any slave brought there was free.
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Most of us believe in the concept of historical progress, but for this concept to make any sense things must have been worse in the past, and they frequently were.
But we don’t have the luxury of living simultaneously in the present and the past, and undoubtedly some things we routinely do today will be viewed as immoral and inhumane in a couple of centuries.
It’s easy to sit in the 21st century and critique the 17th century, but if you lived in the past what would you have done? Work with what you have, maybe improving it incrementally, or sit it out in isolation somewhere?
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But, to borrow an insight from American economist Thomas Sowell in another context: What is surprising is not that slavery existed but that it was abolished.
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In 1807, under the influence of noted abolitionist William Wilberforce and others, the British parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, which banned any trade in slaves using British-flagged ships. The margin in the House of Commons was 283 to 17, with 94 per cent supporting it.
As Britain accounted for 42 per cent of the Atlantic slave trade at the time, this was significant.
Britain also used its diplomatic influence to enter into treaties with other countries to abolish the trade in their areas of influence, with the Royal Navy used to interdict shipping.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act did not immediately abolish slavery. What it did was pay compensation to the owners of slaves and change the slaves’ status to that of apprentice. The apprentices then had four to six years to work out their indenture. This was further compensation to the former owner, as well as providing a phasing-in period.
Territory controlled by the East India Company also was exempted, which included India, although here slaves were mostly owned by Indians. Slavery in India predated the arrival of the British. It was abolished 11 years later in 1844.
You may argue that this approach is too gradualist and too favourable to the slave owners, but what would be the alternative and how moral would that outcome be?
From 1861 to 1865 the US fought a civil war over slavery that resulted in the deaths of between 600,000 and one million men – a greater proportion of the population by far than the US has lost in any other war.
They destroyed their economy and created enmities that exist to this day. Sometimes there is no perfect way.
The British achieved their emancipation without a war, although at some cost. The compensation was £20m, or 40 per cent of the British budget. While government revenue was smaller then, amounting to about 12.5 per cent of gross domestic product, it is the equivalent of $450bn as a percentage of Australia’s budget.
This money was borrowed and completely repaid only in 2015.
The British also used the Royal Navy to actively suppress the slave trade, and much of their interference in Africa was directed to this end.
Generally, this was under treaty agreements with other countries, but in 1850 the Royal Navy blockaded Brazil to pressure it to ban the trade. Wanting to avoid war with Britain, it did this in 1850.
So for every year it was a slaver the empire spent roughly another year doing its best to eradicate slavery.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/britain-did-more-to-abolish-slavery-than-any-other-nation/news-story/2a79b96bfa396c48cbd8e4e03cf460aa
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