With the Commonwealth heads of government meeting having taken place in Samoa at the end of October, slavery reparations are in the headlines again. The Guardian says: “a Downing Street source indicated that the UK could support some forms of reparatory justice, such as restructuring financial institutions and providing debt relief.” Restorative justice could take various forms such as the UK making a formal apology, giving economic and public health aid, or creating educational programmes, but for some unaccountable reason, Sir Keir Starmer seems to have ruled out formal apology.
Instead, he commented: “Our generation can say the slave trade and the practice was abhorrent and we should talk about our history. We can’t change our history but we should certainly talk about our history.”
Challenge accepted.
Twisting history
Starmer certainly has a point. Various Tory current and former Tory MPs have failed to cover themselves in glory when it comes to discussion of our colonial and slave-owning past. The right and far-right distort, misrepresent and even lie about, history. By examining some of the right’s sophistry, we can move forward into a more honest discourse, and positive, useful action.
In October, Robert Jenrick MP, in an exclusive for The Daily Mail, sang from a hymn sheet that the far right would recognise, arguing that former colonies should thank the British empire for its legacy: “The territories colonised by our empire were not advanced democracies. Many had been cruel, slave-trading powers. Some had never been independent. The British empire broke the long chain of violent tyranny as we came to introduce – gradually and imperfectly – Christian values.” More on this ‘Christian values’ angle, later.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s version of Empire and slavery
And former Tory MP Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg had this to say when interviewing activist Femi Nylander on GB News last year: “the British empire stopped slavery in 1807, we banned it in the British empire some years later than that …” He has made a few similar pronouncements in the past year or so. He appears to have a rather slippery grasp on the history of slavery.
Rees-Mogg studied history at Trinity College, Oxford and is somewhat of an amateur historian. Research for his widely slated 2019 book about the Victorians, appeared to come entirely from secondary sources. Not for him years of toil in archives, up to his elbows in the primary sources of the professional historian. This supine lack of any intellectual rigour betrays itself again with his ebullient-but-wonky take on the history of slavery. To know why Rees-Mogg’s take on slavery is historically inaccurate, it’s necessary to have an overview of that history.
Slaves in the UK
In the UK, the slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished with the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. This was the culmination of decades of work by campaigners such as Yorkshireman William Wilberforce, MP, Somerset writer and philanthropist, Hannah More and Cambridgeshire campaigner, Thomas Clarkson. The act discouraged but didn’t end slavery: it addressed trading in slaves, without making owning slaves illegal. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did bring an end to slavery, although still not entirely.
Many Britons have the clichéd view that slaves were rarely actually here in the UK or if so, were liveried household staff in grand houses, not toiling in the fields. We imagine that British enslavers were at a remove, unlike American plantation owners who were living alongside slaves, personally exploiting, raping and killing them.
While it’s true that UK slave owners owned slaves on Caribbean plantations, and almost saw slave ownership the same as owning, say, railway shares – an investment in a distant, abstract thing – that’s not the whole picture. In fact, the reality of slavery was closer to home than many seem to think. And there are traces of slaves’ lives right here in 18th-century Yorkshire.
Slavery in Dent town
The Sill family at Whernside were statesmen (a northern word for yeoman farmers) who invested in slave ships, profited from a plantation in Jamaica with 266 slaves, and even kept slaves on their estate in Dent (then in Yorkshire, now Cumbria). The profits from slaves and the slave trade enabled them to upgrade their home, turning what had been a statesman’s farmhouse into an impressive pile. In local folklore, there is alleged to be an unmarked, now lost, graveyard for the Dent slaves somewhere just outside Dent town.
In my book, Their Darkest Materials, I covered the story of former slave Thomas Anson, who escaped slavery, running away from the Sills’ farm in 1758 and joining the 4th Dragoons where he served as a trumpeter until the late 1760s. He was discharged honourably becoming quite possibly the first ever recorded black Chelsea Pensioner. My research also led me to believe that some of the famous ‘Terrible Knitters of Dent’ could well have been descendants of Sills’ slaves.
It’s worth saying that many other Dent and Yorkshire statesmen were supporters of Wilberforce and were passionately opposed to the slave trade. In the poll books for around 1800, in one village in the Vale of York, there were three yeoman farmers with the vote – all my ancestors – and, I was pleased to see, every one voted for Wilberforce.
Compromise and slaver compensation
Abolitionists were an active and growing movement in the late eighteenth century and are excellently documented at the Wilberforce House Museum in Hull. When researching in the York University archives, I spent a year or two wading through the records from the city’s progressive Retreat asylum (a Quaker institution) and was intrigued to see amongst the Patient Disbursement Records, a patient buying books on the abolition movement. Abolitionists could be found everywhere.
In 1835, the British government took out a loan to compensate enslavers for losing their income after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. It had been the only way abolitionists had been able to get the legislation through parliament, after decades of campaigning. Former slaves were never compensated, though, only owners.
Britain did not lead abolition
Recently, in one of Rees-Mogg’s ‘State of the Nation’ broadcasts on GB News, he claimed: “we were the only country in the world [to] stop slavery.” He has repeatedly made a number of similar such statements on his TV show and on X. But he is wrong.
In just the one hundred years before the UK’s 1833 act, approximately 118 laws in at least 47 nations were passed to end slavery in certain territories. Slavery was abolished in many countries across the world, from ancient times to the 20th century. The right’s claim that the UK was the only country to end slavery is arrant nonsense and Rees-Mogg’s assertion that the UK is: “…the only country in the world…no country ever wanted to stop slavery until the British did it and we stopped it across the world…” is demonstrably incorrect.
To abolish you must first create
The disingenuous right-wing argument of course glosses over the fact that for any nation to end slavery, they also had to start it.
The focus on abolition is a standard far-right bait-and-switch to distract from the fact that slavery existed in the first place. It’s equivalent to saying “I’m thumping you in the face, but I just decided to stop, therefore I never committed a crime. I stopped first. I’m the first person ever in the history of the world to stop thumping people in the face.”
There’s often a thread of ‘whataboutery’ in the arguments, too, such as in a January 2024 interview with Nylander, when Rees-Mogg remarked: “The Portuguese transported far more slaves than the UK did, as did the Ottoman Empire.”
From the look in his eyes when he says this, he thinks this is a ‘gotcha’ moment. The right resorts to whataboutery, often historically inaccurate, when they have no real argument to make.
Later in the same discussion, Rees-Mogg delivers an old chestnut, worthy of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s dumbed-down rhetoric: “The slaves were sold to the slave traders in the countries in which they originate.”
In another diatribe, Mogg elaborates: “What about the African countries that were invading each other and selling slaves: who were the merchants of the slave trade?…They’d been trading slaves for generations. They sold them to the highest bidder…Should we get money from the United States because they’re richer than us?”
Here’s Jenrick again, quoted in The Guardian: “The territories colonised by our empire were not advanced democracies. Many had been cruel, slave-trading powers. Some had never been independent. The British empire broke the long chain of violent tyranny…”
Which of course, somehow invalidates the acts of British enslavers and absolves us of the tyranny of colonialism in one fell swoop.
Anyone else’s guilt in the history of trafficking humans, is not germane to the discussion of our own role in that bloody, cruel history.
William Wilberforce
At the heart of any discussion about slavery’s abolition is Independent Yorkshire MP, William Wilberforce (1759–1833). Although he was often aligned with William Pitt the Younger (who never described himself as a Tory, the idea of factions/parties was in flux around this time anyway), Wilberforce saw himself as a Yorkshire MP for his constituents, not belonging to any faction. Although loyal to Pitt, he also never wavered in his decades in parliament (1780–1825) from being an Independent MP.
Yet, it seems, in the way progressive thinking politicians can get used as human shields by bad actors, contemporary Tories have started appropriating Wilberforce as one of their own: the ultimate in horrible history. Former Tory Leader William Hague, wrote a stolid biography of Wilberforce that did not perpetuate this inaccuracy, but it seems more recent Tories have decided Wilberforce was a Tory, or they can safely pretend that he was.
Christianity and abolitionism
There is also much emphasis on Wilberforce’s actions being a result of his Christianity which is undeniably true.
Abolition had Christian motives and prime movers, but its roots were in non-conformism – Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, Baptists and other evangelical “low church” groups who were the diametric opposite of Roman Catholicism or the high church Church of England, at that time. And these prime movers wanted to abolish slavery because it was, in their view, contrary to the teachings of the Bible.
Yorkshire was a powerhouse of non-conformism in the early 19th century and Wilberforce wasn’t the only Yorkshire person active in the abolition movement, but he was the most prominent.
Rees-Mogg (a Roman Catholic) shouldn’t be appropriating Christianity like this. On X he said: “…we were motivated by Christian charity.” Which is particularly offensive. It’s not ‘charity’ to end an evil that you are choosing to do. Is it?
It was never Christian to rip people away from their lives, kidnap them, transport them in appalling conditions to another continent, exploit their labour, rape and murder them with no consequences. And to pretend the foundations of colonialism and slavery were in Christianity is disingenuous. Empire was about trade, acquisition, and economic gain, with Christianity but a handy fig leaf to cover it.
The abolition movement had its roots in Christianity. Did slavery?
Rees-Mogg’s privileged background
Rees-Mogg is descended on his father’s side from a line of Church of England vicars, commissioned army officers, and lawyers in Somerset. Whether or not his own ancestors directly profited from slavery (and I have not found any evidence of this), like many, they certainly reaped the rewards of white privilege and the general economic benefits that colonialism and slavery brought. There is no evidence of the Rees-Moggs being abolitionists, that I could find.
Much of the Rees-Mogg family money seems to have come from another form of exploitation – coal mining: that serendipity of finding coal under your land which happened to some landowners in the 19th century. A search of the British Library Newspapers database provides a series of snapshots of the Rees-Moggs, developing a picture of the prosperous lives of the bog-standard provincial gentry, with the usual parade of ladies in ‘am dram’ and at flower festivals.
At one point, two Rees-Moggs appear to have been on the guardians’ board of the local workhouse and in November 1851, John and William Rees-Mogg wrote to the Bath Chronicle’s editor to deny that Clutton Union Workhouse had refused admission to a heavily pregnant woman, about to go into labour. It reminded me of the death of poor Fanny Robin in Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. The thought of the Rees-Moggs in their top hats, making excuses for the workhouse’s brutality, seemed unsurprising.
Truth is the precursor to reparation
The right has brought revisionism, whataboutery and outright lies to the discussion of the history of slavery, while conveniently ignoring that many people to this day live in the aftershock of slavery: poverty, lower life expectancies and negative privilege of every kind.
“Racial disparities in some European nations cannot be tackled if legacies of colonialism and slavery are ignored, a report by an EU-wide network of anti-racism groups said on Wednesday.” (Reuters, September 25, 2024).
Accurate history, followed by apologies and restorative justice, in several forms, are the very least debt that has come due.
