1/9 Thanks initially to a reference from @philmcraig I've been reading about the six of Charles Dickens' seven sons who went careering around the Empire in search of wealth, status and adventure: 2/ 9 The oldest, Charles Culliford Boz [Charley] Dickens set off for the East, intending to be a tea merchant. Inevitably this entailed an acquaintance with the Indian opium trade that financed Britain's tea imports.

🧵 1/12 On the Decline of the West

It seems like only yesterday that observers were proclaiming the end of history & triumph of the West. Yet many now see Trump & his populist counterparts as the backstop against its terminal decline.
2. Ever since its ’discovery’ of the New World, a fundamental schism, experienced by many around the world as rampant hypocrisy, has defined the modern West. Currently the West’s historic contradictions are unravelling, while Trump & Co. promise to hold them together.

🧵 Tips on Teaching the British Empire 1/8
Talking to teachers lately, it seems a condensed guide to the main foundations of the C19 British Empire might be helpful. Here's how I introduce if to first year undergrads in three 50m sessions. It comprised three major geographical zones: the Atlantic world, Indian Ocean world and Settler colonial world. Each had its own dynamics, yet they were linked by projects and networks - e.g. commerce, governance, humanitarianism, racial ideology & diaspora.

On Reparations in British History

1/5 Few Britons appreciate that in the early 1870s the US government demanded reparations from the British government of over $2 Billion ($48 Billion today).

.history.state.gov/milestones/186… The demand was not for Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery, but for illicitly helping the Confederate states that tried to retain it during the US Civil War.

If I had to distill the top 3 myths being aired again & again to block a conversation on reparations it would be these:

Myth 1: That Britain abolished slavery around the world. Fact: Britain’s limited abolition was accompanied by the continued coercion of Black & Brown people to supply unpaid labour across the Empire. Myth 2: that compensation paid at the end of slavery somehow erases any financial debt to the descendants of the enslaved. Fact: compensation went to slave-owners. The enslaved never received a penny for their unpaid work & trauma. This meant that descendants of the perpetrators inherited vast compensation payments while the enslaved had no assets to pass on.
For example, the Drax family acquired £3 M in compensation when the captives it owned were freed in Barbados. It is now demanding another £3 M for its former plantation land, on which the Barbados government wants to house descendants of those captives.

On False Historical Equivalents

1/14🧵Amidst all the talk of reparations demands surrounding the Commonwealth Summit, two oft-repeated false historical equivalences are receiving a vigorous airing.
independent.co.uk/news/barbados-… 2. First I want to clarify my position. I'm an historian, not an activist for reparations. I get why the very idea of them is galling to those who see no reason why they should pay distant strangers, who were never enslaved, because of the sins of their ancestors.
theweek.com/news/uk-news/9…

1/9 🧵The right wing press, informed originally by its allies in History Reclaimed, is repeating this misinformation again and again in its attempts to prevent a conversation about reparations. Each time it is repeated it needs to be called out because it is being used to suggest that Britons made enormous financial sacrifices to end slavery around the world.
Here is the reality: 2/9 The figure of 1.8 % (often rounded up to 2%) of GDP being spent on antislavery is based on the table below from an academic article by Kaufmann and Pape: library.fes.de/libalt/journal…

1/11 @JamesHeartfield has written an article for @spikedonline about reparations, a hot topic as the Commonwealth summit approaches. I think it worth responding to because it airs some of the misrepresentations serving to block a discussion:spiked-online.com/2024/10/15/dav… 2. First is the notion that slave-ownership was the preserve of a small elite and not something that benefitted British society as a whole. Using figures from ucl.ac.uk/lbs/, James writes "that just one person in every 275 owned a slave. This shows that, unsurprisingly, slave-owning was an elite concern."
The numbers are correct, as of 1833 when the Act for the Abolition of Slavery was passed, but of course generations of Britons had owned enslaved people in the Caribbean prior to that snapshot moment when the system came to an end.

1/7 A few people have asked me recently about the origins of the current campaign by right-wingers to deny and disavow key aspects of British colonial history. Even before the anti-Black Lives Matter backlash, the Rhodes Must Fall debate at Oxford was pivotal.
This is why: 2/7 It was pivotal because of the way that some of those committed to the statue’s retention chose to respond to anti-racist activists’ demands for its removal:

amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

1/13 A 🧵 on The British Social Attitudes Survey and the Hard Right’s Pathology of Denialism

The right-wing media has reacted badly to the latest social attitudes survey, especially its revelation of declining pride in Britain’s history. natcen.ac.uk/publications/b… In 2013, 86% of respondents said they were proud of that history. That figure has now fallen to 64%. Predictably, the drop prompted the clutching of pearls and tearing of hair. But the reaction also reveals a fundamental misdiagnosis and a pathology of denialism on the Right.

🧵1/25 I was alerted to this latest @History_Reclaim and @Telegraph propaganda piece on Empire a while back, but have only just got around the reading it. (I was preoccupied promoting a book by specialists). Here's my response with apologies for length: telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/2… 2. No surprise that Robert Tombs' piece (how does he get such ready access to this paper?) is a mixture of misinformation, hyperbole and attacks on *anti*-racism. Let's start with the misinformation: Tombs declares that 'A company providing teaching materials to schools..

1/8. It’s great having historians like @holland_tom encouraging public interest in the past on platforms like . There’s also no problem with them being generally quite patriotic. But it’s a worry when they prize nationalist mythology over critical historical enquiry.podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the… 2. Having read a critical review of by someone who admits to having ‘sympathy with the underlying neoconservative politics’ of Nigel Biggar (and apparently without having read the book himself),hurstpublishers.com/book/the-truth…

1/7. I missed this article responding to the recent race hate riots from Robert Tombs when first published in the Telegraph. It’s enormously revealing.

2. No surprise that it adopts the line that these indefensible attacks were ultimately the consequence of liberal challenges to the social order and the “arrival year after year of large numbers of strangers”. historyreclaimed.co.uk/violent-disord…

1/10 As discussions start about how to commemorate 200 years since the abolition of slavery as an institution in certain British colonies (1834) it might be useful to get a few facts straight before members of History Reclaimed start misinforming The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, GB TV etc. 2. This lobbying company has already repeated claims that the Church of England never invested in slavery, that the British Empire had no involvement in slavery, that Britain was the first country to abolish the slave trade and slavery, that Britain alone suppressed other countries’ slave trades and that slavery was suppressed in all British colonies.

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.

🧵1/13
Enough. The @Telegraph has gone too far with its condemnation of teaching about colonial history. There's at least three brainless statements from this latest piece of concocted outrage (& more to come):
archive.ph/aL4Op 2/13
1. @Craig_Simpson_'s idea that the "teaching of colonialism as invading and exploiting" is shocking.
The Oxford definition of colonialism is:

🧵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.

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: slavevoyages.org on British participation in the trans-Atlantic slave ‘trade’ and ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ 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: 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.

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.

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

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: