feel so exhilarated by the actions of ppl on the ground this week, in the context of such collective trauma. thank u to the horse for running that cop into that traffic light & thank u to the Bristol "mob" for drowning that slave trader & terrifying those who identify with him ❤
re the statues, it's been such a powerful and effective intervention. it shows how direct action can inject radical, antiracist counter-history into the discourse. Let's build on the removal of statues, and never lose sight of the ongoing linkages of "the colonial" & the present.
the period in which England, then Britain (after 1707), came to dominate the slave trade was a period of rapid state development in which the building blocks of today's modern state were forged. that is, racial slavery is constitutive & foundational to British modernity.
this was the period in which the functions & violence of the state became more centralised & systematised. the growth of the navy and army. when the Union formed, the offices of state set up, Parliamentary oligarchy grabbed more power from the monarch, the Bank of England founded
That Parliament was filled with landowners and filled with slave-owners. The composition of the Hanoverian ruling class was a mix of royalty, aristocracy and merchants (huge numbers of whom traded in human beings.) These men also totally controlled the justice system.
UK involvement in slave trading stretches as far back as 1500s but received official & royal patronage as monarchs, MPs, City of London, John Locke!, all enriched themselves on the backs of enslaved African ppl. The Royal African Company was a chartered, shareholder corporation.
England, then Britain, developed practices of colonisation and plantation exploitation in Ireland then extended them to the form of racial slavery in the "New World" for the intensive production of tobacco and sugar. Superprofits of colonial slave production fed back to the
Metropole, filling Britain's coffers in the form of tax revenue and for slaveowning capital to expand and reinvest. The exploitation of slave labour was a central plank of Britain's industrial development, the rapid growth of small, parochial villages & towns into large cities.
The centralising force of nation-state formation in Britain, complete with a centralised national church, gave rise to the development of early popular patriotism. A raced and gendered construction built around the figure of the "Freeborn Englishman".
This powerful national-racial ideology bolstered cross-class coalitions, defined freedom narrowly as a raced, gendered, national entitlement, whose opposite was slavery wich was overwhelmingly seen as a natural condition for Black ppl.
English/British "New World" colonies were also filled w/ the surplus workers of early manufacture & land clearances. Indentured rather than enslaved, the festering ideology of racial slavery & "freeborn Englishman" helped segment the labouring classes to form "white" coalitions
So all I'm saying, I guess, is that it's not just the geographic iconography of celebrating slavers and colonialists and racists, or even that our rulers are descended from them or wealthy because of their proximity to these forms of accumulation, exploitation and dispossession.
It's that Britain is built on this. There's no complexity argument. The work of "race" in the world and ongoing imperialism as a factor of life and death is disproportionately caused by this terrible place. By these celebrated men. Who all belong at the bottom of the sea.
basically
