Lushington Brady: Britain Has a Lot to Be Proud About

When the Empire led the world in stamping out slavery.

In his travelling lecture tour, Explorers: the Age of Discovery, James May makes an unfashionable point: the British Empire wasn’t all bad. In fact, it did an awful lot of good. Niall Ferguson makes the same point in his book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Like Ferguson, May doesn’t minimalise the evils of colonialism (although he oddly refrains from pointing out that it was the default mode of international relations for nearly 5000 years), but he rightly points out that the British did an awful lot of good. The Pax Britannica, enforced by the Royal Navy, for instance.

Most importantly, the abolition of slavery.

What the passionately ignorant hordes of statue destroyers in recent years actually know about slavery would struggle to fill a beer coaster. American college students are literally convinced that the United States invented slavery. University-educated cretins in Britain seem to think much the same thing about the erstwhile empire.

Even May makes curious omissions in his discussion of British abolitionism. While acknowledging that British ships were long involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, he fails to point out that the numbers shipped to the Americas was dwarfed by the tens of millions trafficked within Africa itself, mostly to Islamic empires. Nor that the Arab and African trade in African slaves spanned a thousand years longer than the trans-Atlantic trade.

What he also fails to get across is just how massive the abolitionist movement was in 19th century Britain. You think climate change activists are fanatic? They’re a pale shadow of the abolitionist cause.

The great humanitarian cause of the 19th century was the abolition of slavery. It is simply impossible to exaggerate the effect it had on the whole country as Britons basked in the glow of a moral crusade successfully achieved, and it came to epitomise the very definition of what it was to be British.

In an address to a London crowd in 1825, London Lord Mayor William Venables stated that, “the question of slavery… was a question of doing all that lay in their power to promote the abolition of slavery in all parts of the world”. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, between 1807 and 1860, forcibly ended the trans-Atlantic slave trade, seizing approximately 1600 ships involved in the slave trade and freeing 150,000 Africans, at the cost of 1600 British lives.

But the abolitionist cause also kick started a fascination with ‘darkest’ (i.e., unknown) Africa. But as the Royal Geographic Society’s intrepid explorers penetrated deep into the African interior, Britain was shocked to learn that the job of stamping out slavery was far from finished.

Naturally enough, the British assumed that their past success with abolition gave them both the experience and the moral obligation to continue the work, although the circumstances of the trade were different. African tribes continued to enslave their neighbours much as they had always done, but Europeans were no longer their primary market.

Nor, indeed, had they ever been. Then, as had been the case for centuries, the Islamic world was the epicentre of African slavery. The sheer pervasiveness of slavery in the Ottoman empire stunned the British who encountered it. In the 1883 words of explorer and abolitionist Samuel Baker (whose own wife, Florence, was a liberated white slave):

“As I had the honour to command the first expedition that was ever organised for the suppression of the slave trade in Central Africa [by the Khedive of Egypt], I can testify that no conquest was either attempted or effected of any country that was not already over-run by bands of slave hunters; those brigands were beyond the reach of Egyptian law, and it became necessary to establish the government in order to bring them within the power of the Khedive and thereby relieve the natives from the enslavers.”

To the south of Lake Victoria another slave dependent economy, also controlled by Arab traders, was responsible for even more extremes of misery.

The question then became how to do it. Eradicating the trans-Atlantic trade turned out to be a bit of a doddle, given Britain’s world-dominating navy. Its standing army, on the other hand, was a fraction of the navy’s power. At its 19th century height, the Royal Navy massed nearly 500 battleships and cruisers alone. Stopping slavery on the land, in the interior of Africa, was a vastly different challenge.

Everybody accepted that slavery in all its evil manifestations had to end and the only real debate was how best this could be achieved. British slave owners might have been persuaded to accept compensation for loss of their property rights, but nobody ever contemplated paying off Islamic slavers. The Anti-Slavery Society wanted all nations to step up to their responsibilities:

“Fifty years ago England was all ablaze with an anti-slavery enthusiasm… it would be well for the cause of humanity if a similar enthusiasm could be kindled among the nations of the civilised world, in order to compel by the force of an irresistible moral pressure the putting down of slavery in Egypt and other Oriental countries.”

It was remarkable men like David Livingstone, who, while passionate missionaries, realised that “missionary work, teaching by example and shining the light of Christian values into the darker corners of the continent, was not enough”. Slavery was, in the end, Livingstone realised, a commercial enterprise. The object, then, was to bring commerce to the African interior and “convince the natives that there was more value to be had in trading goods than trading people”.

Since there was no system of government capable of ending the traffic in human life in central Africa itself, successive British Governments found themselves under pressure to intervene and impose anti-slavery. But despite popular calls to support Livingstone’s commercial solution, politicians remained sceptical because the region had so little to offer – or so it seemed at that time – to offset the huge costs involved.

And the costs were indeed huge. British taxpayers only finished paying off the sums borrowed to end slavery in the 19th century in 2015. In the end, persuaded by strategic arguments, the British government agreed to help fund Sir William Mackinnon’s British-India Steam Navigation Company and the Imperial British East Africa Company, even though the railway built from the Suez Canal to Lake Victoria was “absurdly uneconomic”.

Even then, Islamic slavery was shockingly tenacious.

Saudi Arabia and Yemen only [abolished slavery] in 1962, after a century of prevarication and pressure from the West. The last known child captured by slavers in the central lakes region of Africa died in 1974, well within the lifetime of many readers of this article and in the less accessible, war-torn regions of central Africa, sex trafficking and the practice of forcing child to be soldiers, both within the definition of modern slavery, still torment the villages.

With the UN-engineered collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, Muslim-run open-air slave markets quickly reappeared in Tripoli. A hallmark of the Islamic State’s short-lived caliphate was brutal slavery, especially sex slavery.

By contrast, Britain’s slavery record is, far from shameful, a shining example.

Lushington describes himself as Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. This article was first published HERE