TLW's African Slaveryscope™ (African Slavery Historyscope) |
By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper™ |
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. |
Original Pub. Date: Aug. 9, 2018. Last Update: Feb. 2, 2022. |
Westerners are not only known as history ignoramuses, but double dumbass history ignoramuses when it comes to African Slavery. Since I'm the one-and-only Historyscoper (tm), let me quickly bring you up to speed before you dive into my Master Historyscope.
The Abe Lincoln of England; if it were only that easy in America? On May 14, 1772 after African slave James Somersett (Somerset) travels with his massah Charles Stuart of Va. to England in 1769, and his case is seized on by cool take-on-the-establishment English abolitionist atty. Granville Sharp (1735-1813), who had lost a similar case in 1767 over mistreated slave Jonathan Strong, Scottish-born judge William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705-93) of the Court of King's High Bench rules (erin go bragh?) in the Somersett Case that there is no legal basis for slavery in England, and that a slaveowner bringing a slave into England even temporarily grants him/her their freedom; slavery is eliminated in England on June 22 - erin go bragh?
On May 13, 1838 Scottish abolitionist Zachary Macaulay (b. 1768) dies in London; a memorial in Westminster Abbey depicts a kneeling slave with the motto "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" On Aug. 1, 1838 all slaves in the British Empire are freed after the period of forced apprenticeship under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act ends; of 4M African slaves imported to the British West Indies to work sugar plantations, only 400K remain.
In 1944 Trinidadian scholar Eric Eustace Williams (1911-81) pub. Capitalism and Slavery, based on his 1938 doctoral thesis at St. Catherine's College, Oxford U., where he graduates #1 among history majors; it claims that the British slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not humanitarian reasons, pissing-off British publishers and forcing it to be pub. in the U.S. until Hungarian-born Andre Deutsch pub. it in the U.K.; "The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it"; "When British capitalism depended on [sugar and cotton plantations in] the West Indies, they [the capitalists] ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly [on sugar] a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly"; "The Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery."
On Aug. 31-Sept. 8, 2001 the World Conference Against Racism (Durban I) in Durban, South Africa issues a Report on the Slave Trade, calling slavery a "crime against humanity" and demanding apologies and reparations; it recognizes Islamophobia (not Islamophilia?) as a form of prejudice; too bad, under chmn. Mary Robinson of Ireland it goes on to condemn Israel for racism and apartheid, causing the U.S. to walk out, with U.S. state secy. Colin Powell uttering the soundbyte: "I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of Zionism equals racism, or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust, or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel, or that singles out only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse"; too bad, in Nov. 2010 Pres. Obama awards Robinson the Medal of Freedom.