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Alan Lester

@aljhlester

Jul 15

1/11 🧵Now that I have been able to read the teaching guidelines attacked in this @Telegraph article by @Craig_Simpson_ I can address its central claim: that they “insist” the “British Empire must be presented like Nazi Germany”.

Of course, they do no such thing. In fact, in the current version of the guidelines, there is not one single mention of Nazi Germany. I had to ask the organisation for older versions to check that the comparison was not a complete fabrication.

It turns out that in an older version of the guidelines mentioned Nazi Germany once (the Telegraph does so seven times).

Read 12 tweets

Alan Lester

@aljhlester

Jul 10

🧵1/9 One of the many interesting exchanges in this discussion is about a question that all those trying to engage publicly in British colonial history will hear time and time again: why don't you talk about the Belgian [or substitute any other] empire?

2. Subjecting this question to a process of elimination is revealing. Let's start with a field well outside of History. Do we hear oncologists being asked why they are not epidemiologists? No. Within professional fields, people are 'allowed', indeed encouraged, to specialise.

3. Within the field of History do we hear Tudor specialists being asked why they don't talk about the Mughals? No. Do hear hear historians of WWII asked why they don't cover the Franco-Prussian War? No. Historians are 'allowed' to specialise in themes, places or periods.

Read 9 tweets

Alan Lester

@aljhlester

Jul 8

1/6 🧵I’ve given a few talks recently about trans-Atlantic slavery in British history, to people who really don’t want to hear it. I don’t mean haranguing shoppers in Oxford Street, but talks to church, community and business groups comprised of small ‘c’ conservative White people who’ve been willing to hear me out, even if they find it uncomfortable.

I’ve kept it factual and based it on two main databases: on British participation in the trans-Atlantic slave ‘trade’ and on slave ownership.

On every occasion, there have been two main objections. In case its useful for others, this thread sets out what they are, along with my own attempts to answer:slavevoyages.org
ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

1. What about other slave systems – notably the Muslims/Arabs/Barbary Corsairs. Weren’t they just as ‘bad’?

a) The Arab slave trading system along the east African coast, across the Red Sea and the Sahara Desert took some 4-10 million people into captivity over a 1000 year period. The trans-Atlantic system was far more intense, taking over 12.5 million captives across the Atlantic in a 350 year period.

b) Islamic systems of slavery largely disregarded ethnicity or race. Captives were taken from sub-Saharan and North Africa and from Barbary raids across the Mediterranean into Western Europe. In the trans-Atlantic system, captivity was exclusive to Black African people, with enduring implications for European ideas of racial difference, developed to ‘explain’ and justify the system.

c) In the Arab system, captives often became free through conversion to Islam and their children were not necessarily born into a state of captivity. It was possible for many who were initially sold to reach a high rank in the ‘host’ society’. In the trans-Atlantic system few captives could gain manumission and captives’ children were not only born into a state of slavery but were regularly separated from their parents trough sale to other owners.

d) In the Arab system, captives were taken for domestic or military service or for sexual exploitation. In the trans-Atlantic system, captives were exploited for all of these purposes, but their primary purpose was twofold: to serve as capital assets upon which loans could be leveraged, and to produce and refine commercial crops on semi-industrialised plantations. Both their value as ‘assets’ (which amounted to 40% of British government revenue when compensation was paid to their ‘owners’ for their emancipation) and their unpaid work transformed the global economy and helped transform Britain into an industrial power.

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Alan Lester

@aljhlester

May 26

Like all propaganda, this popular thread contains seeds of truth, distortions and crucial omissions. I’ll go through them post by post.

1. All empires could be described as being, in many ways a force for good. Or a force for the violent imposition of certain groups’ exclusive privilege.
2. Nearly everywhere the British Empire raised the standard of living for those to whom it directed resources, labour & political preference, while impoverishing others for their benefit. The former were mainly White Britons and their local allies, the latter exclusively Black & Brown subjects.
3. It developed infrastructure to serve primarily British investors’ and military imperatives and sustain its rule. Much of this was inherited and put to use on behalf of the masses only after independence.
4. It promoted education for a relatively small proportion of its subjects in order that its colonial states and economies might operate effectively. Education provided by churches and other institutions outside of government fostered an elite group of nationalists demanding independence. In settler colonies, government-provided education was intended to eradicate Indigenous culture. It resulted in the abuses of residential schools and stolen generations.

Britain did not almost single-handedly eradicate slavery …

This is pretty much true.

By and large true, although at this point it was only the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa. British forces conquered the rest of that country in a series of wars against Griqua, Xhosa, Zulu, Pedi, Tswana, Sotho and other African peoples and against Afrikaans-speaking settlers during between the treaty and 1902.

Read 16 tweets

Alan Lester

@aljhlester

Apr 24

1/5. I know I’m going on about this a lot but for someone who’s quite invested in historical truth, I think it’s really important to respond now that @KemiBadenoch has unleashed those dogs of culture war, the @Telegraph and @iealondo, by denying the role of colonial exploitation in British economic history.

Yesterday I showed how this denial is based on cherry picking ‘evidence’ and lying:

In this final thread (at least until the next round of public denial), I will reassert what has long been seen as the bleedin’ obvious by scholars of Empire: the various ways in which colonial rule enabled both Britain and Britons overseas (an important distinction) generally, but not always, to profit.

Now seems to be a good time to reassert the most basic facts of the colonial economy.

I’ll move broadly eastwards from the UK on map below, noting some of the main forms of exploitation as we travel around the world. It’s by no means a comprehensive account but it gives the basics.alanlester.co.uk/blog/response-…

2. Let’s start with the UK itself. As I noted yesterday, even before the recent work affirming Eric Williams’ highlighting the significance of trans-Atlantic slavery to the British economy, conservative historians contributing to the 1999 Oxford History of the British Empire volumes acknowledged that the colonies made a net economic contribution to Britain’s aggregate prosperity. At certain times, an absolutely vital one.

Since then, with the following up of some but not all Williams’ insights, Maxine Berg and @pathudson48’s Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution estimated that slavery contributed roughly 10 per cent of national income in the late C18, while investment of its profits accelerated the Industrial Revolution.

As I posted yesterday, in an 1884 statistical survey of the Empire, Richard temple estimated that only around 44% of the funds available for government expenditure within the UK were raised within the UK; the rest coming from colonial possessions overseas and especially the taxation of Indians.amzn.eu/d/43EU5B3

3. Leaving Britain on our eastward journey:

West Africa: Aside from being denuded of people to supply enslaved labour for British planters across the Atlantic, one of the major profit-making enterprises for British companies was palm oil. It was grown in plantations developed on African peoples’ land after the overthrow of leaders who objected to British trade terms.

South Africa: Britons invested heavily in the gold and diamond mines, made profitable only by the colonial state’s removal of African people from their lands in a series of wars of aggression in the 1870s and their consequent need to find employment for minimal wages.

Kenya: British settlers established on Kikuyu land grew rich in coffee and sisal plantations.

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Alan Lester

@aljhlester

Apr 23

1/6. Now the Institute of Economic Affairs, the right wing think tank that understood economic affairs so well that it inspired Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, is getting in on the act of supporting @KemiBadenoch’s historical denialism.

Let’s look at the ‘argument’ here. It starts with the usual straw man. Historians have demonstrated in thousands of research publications that British investors’ ability to appropriate land and subordinate people in some 40 overseas colonies, ensuring a supply of commodities such as tea, cotton, opium, rubber, meat and wool produced with free or low cost labour, made a significant contribution to Britain’s economic growth.

Because this is so self-evident, to challenge it would be absurd. To make any political capital out of attacking those who highlight it, Badenoch and her supporters have to pretend that their ‘opponents’ position is more extreme.

They therefore object to an invented position: that Britain owed *all* of its economic success to slavery or colonialism. “Empire Didn’t Make Britain Rich”. It doesn’t matter that no one is claiming that Empire *alone* did make Britain rich; in refuting it this invented claim, the intention is to undermine the case that colonial exploitation played any substantial role at all.

In the following posts I’ll show how they then fabricate ‘evidence’ to make their own extreme and denialist case.

archive.ph/2024.04.22-111…

2. Next comes the lie:

3. Intrigued by the evidence that purportedly showed Williams to be plain wrong, when most specialist historians now qualify rather than reject his argument, and even more intrigued by the ridiculous assertion that British business people and settlers invested in empire to make themselves poorer, I clicked on the ‘evidence’ link.

It took me to another article by the same IEA author and this ‘proof’:

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