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i normally wouldn't bother even engaging with what this cartoonish goblin says, he looks like the shifty stepson character who turns out to be the killer in an episode of Midsomer Murders. 
but what he's doing here is both so violently racist *and* a historical and contemporary point of convergence for so many white people with wildly different senses of their own personal politics or ethics.
the effort to decontextualise & dehistoricise racial Atlantic Slavery is a common racist trope. it obscures huge variation btwn diff forms of slavery under diff historically specific modes of production. more importantly it erases the significance of Atlantic slavery today
no-one talks about the impact of ancient Roman slavery on present-day Italians because it's not relevant. whereas Atlantic slavery, at the apex of European Colonialism and the growth of the capitalist world-system, has so undeniably formed our world and its social relations.
to say "we" are all descended from both slaves & slave-owners might be part of his meaningless point about slave universality in human history but it's really about erasing diff now. difference that has been inscribed through violence for centuries & he thinks can be dismissed
as do lots of other white Brits who think ppl should just "get over" colonial histories. Hannan's main interest is always British capitalist class nationalism, hence he parrots one of its great proud claims: abolitionism. so wonderfully destroyed by James
the European left also has a long history of leading or following in terms of these dismissals. eg a broad section of the 19thC workers movement in US & UK supported the continuation of racial slavery, often arguing that life on the plantation was easier than factory exploitation
Having recently read Eric Williams' "Capitalism and Slavery" I thought I'd share some important passages. Tacking it onto the above because of its enduring dismantling of Hannan's typical whitewashing hagiography. And cos it complements CLR James' great work (thread nested above)
These early passages underline not just how Britain dominated the slave trade and slavery-based regimes of production and racial domination but crucially connects this to every aspect of British society and its industrial and urban development
These passages give you a glimpse of Williams' structural analysis of the competing sections within British capital, as well as against other national capitals, that is the main factor in Britain slowly developing a policy of "abolition".
These passages are a great glimpse at Williams' structural analysis of material forces - the competing sections of capital in Britain, as well as the competition between national capitals, that more than anything lay behind the British gov's slowly adopted policy of "abolition"
And these bits show how little "abolition" meant to some of these great heroes of British history, politics, culture. And how much British capital continued to profit from slave labour in the US, Cuba, Brazil, decades after "abolition" and "emancipation"
And right at the last, with little hint it was coming, Williams joins James, Du Bois & others as that generation of black radical historians who overthrew centuries of white supremacist historiography & centred the world-historical agency of black struggle vs slavery & oppression
So yeah, really worth reading. Great detail and exhaustive research, with caustic sarcasm for British bourgeois hypocrisy. Cool as fuck author photo on this edition too.
