Slavery by another name? .....Indian Indentured Labour .... on the wireless today

Now this is one I am listening to.

It is another in the series from BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. 

Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. 

These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. 

From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. 

Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora.

With Purba Hossain, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, Neha Hui, Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Reading, and, Clem Seecharan, Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan University

Produced by Simon Tillotson"

Pictures; Ceylon, 1944 from the collection of Bob Ward

*Indian Indentured Labour, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002vc9m

Who in Eltham owned a slave in the summer of 1831?

This is not such a sensational question as you might think.  

Slavery permeated deep into both our economy and our society and contrary to the popularly held belief it was not just the big cities of Liverpool, Bristol and London that benefited from both the Slave Trade and the produce grown and made by slave labour.

And even after the abolition of the trade in 1807 it would be another twenty-six years before slavery itself was abolished and on terms that saw the owners compensated to the tune of £20 million.

So, I am not surprised that “Eight of Eltham’s residents ‘owned’ slaves in 1833.  In total they held more enslaved people in the West Indies than the total population of Eltham then”.*

And these eight included familiar names, like Milne, Grant, Pitt-Rivers Currey, Lance Hill, and Warner, who between them were associated with properties like Cliefden House, Danson House, Eltham Lodge, and the Lord Chancellor’s lodgings.

I had always planned to follow up the story of the families who owned slaves in Chorlton-cum-Hardy where I now live, with a similar piece of research on Eltham where I grew up.**

But other projects intervened and now that story has been completed by Margaret Taylor and Sally Simmons, whose article appeared in the latest edition of the Eltham Society’s newsletter.

Never one to steal other peoples’ research or attempt a cack-handed version of their story which has been done so well, I will suggest you read the original piece, which will only require a subscription to the Eltham Society, the aims of which are enshrined in their motto: "Preserving the past, Conserving the present, and Protecting the future".

The article describes the eight families, their connection to slavery and the degree to which they were compensated after the abolition of slavery.

Now I had assumed that most of that taxpayer’s money went to a small group of large plantation owners based mainly in the West Indies, but the final settlement according  to Legacies of British Slave-ownership extended to  "over 45,000 claimants, and about 3,000 of them were living in Britain in the 1830s. ***

Although claimants living in Britain were in the minority, they tended to own the largest stakes of property; about £10 million of the total £20 million compensation was paid to these 3,000 people in Britain. 

Many were very wealthy but there were a wide range of claimants, from rich landowners to widows with children who wrote to the compensation commission complaining of their poverty." 

The site  and can be found at Legacies of British Slave-ownership, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

It is the “umbrella for two projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, now complete, and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833.

Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present. 

The stories of enslaved men and women, however, are no less important than those of slave-owners, and we hope that the encyclopedia produced in the first phase of the project, while at present primarily a resource for studying slave-owners, will also provide information of value to those researching enslaved people.

We are now tracking back to 1763 the ownership histories of the 4000 or so estates identified in that project. At the core of the completed project is this online Encyclopedia of British Slave-ownership containing information about every slave-owner in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, or the Cape at the moment of abolition in 1833. 

Entries include information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of these men and women, with a particular emphasis on the "absentee" owners based in Britain.

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission, set up to manage the distribution of the £20 million compensation, provide a more or less complete census of slave-ownership in the British Empire in the 1830s. The individuals named in these records form the starting point of the Encyclopedia.

And the data base can be searched by name, or browsed through the subject headings of “commercial, cultural, historical, imperial, physical and political.”

So, there you have it, I thoroughly enjoyed the article on Eltham’s connection to slavery and share the authors conclusion,  that if a small group of “Eltham people were slave owners the other 2, 158 were not”.***

Leaving me just to post a link to the membership page of the Eltham Society.*****

Pictures; Cliefden House Eltham from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm  in 1977, courtesy of Jean Gammons, and Cliefden House, 2014, from the collection of John King, and detail of Eltham High Street, 1844 from the Tithe map for Eltham courtesy of Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, http://www.kent.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/kent_history/kent_history__library_centre.aspx

*Coronavirus and the Lockdown, Margaret Taylor and Sally Simmons, The Eltham Society Newsletter 222, December 2020, The Eltham Society, http://www.theelthamsociety.org.uk/

**Slavery, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=slavery

***Legacies of British Slave-ownership, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

****ibid Coronavirus and the Lockdown, page 31

*****Eltham Society, http://www.theelthamsociety.org.uk/membership.html

Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh ..... on the wireless ..... all this week

Now a long time ago I came across the book Black Jacobins, Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.

The book was written in 1938 book by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, a history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. 

It examines the brutal conditions of slavery as well as the social and political status of the slave-owners, poor or "small" whites, and "free" blacks and mulattoes leading up to the Revolution. 

The work explores the dynamics of the Caribbean economy and the European feudal system during the era before the Haitian Revolution, and places each revolution in comparative historical and economic perspective. Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes a central and symbolic character in James' narrative of the Haitian Revolution.*

And all this week there is a fresh look at Toussaint L'Ouverture on the wireless.

"Toussaint Louverture summed up the inhumanity of slavery in its systematic tendency ‘to tear away the son from his mother, the brother from his sister, the father from his son’.

In this first episode, Sudhir Hazareesingh looks at what little is known of Toussaint's early life, his progress to coachman and his education by the Jesuits.

As an intelligent man who could read, it is likely he was key in shaping the strategy of the slave uprising in 1791, but he was also a man of mystery and there is very little documented material of his life. He spread misinformation about himself and had a complex extended family with possibly 16 children.

Toussaint was a tactical leader and, after the uprising, he took time to consolidate his military position and as a rebel leader declared, ‘I was the first to favour a cause that I have always upheld ...what we have begun, I will finish’.Author: Sudhir Hazareesingh,  Abridger: Libby Spurrier, Reader: Adrian Lester, Producer: Celia de Wolff

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4"

Picture; A portrait of Toussaint Louverture, oil on Canvas, signed and dated 'Girardin a Nantes an '13'. (L’an XIII du calendrier républicain, correspond aux années 1804 et 1805 du calendrier grégorien.)

Source allposters.com AuthorAlexandre-François-Louis, comte de Girardin

*The Black Jacobins, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins

**Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pff1

Stories of resistance ….... the new book on how enslaved women fought back

Now it was by pure chance that I listened to Woman’s Hour today but I am glad I did, because I might otherwise have missed the story behind the A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance, by Stella Dadzie.

 

The sleeve notes from the programme pretty much do the trick of introducing Ms Dadzie and the book

 “Stella Dadzie is a teacher, writer, artist and education activist. In her new book, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance, she reveals the largely untold stories of women of African descent who, caught up in the horrors of over 400 years of slavery, were transported across the Atlantic to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and beyond.

 Women, who Stella reveals, were central to slave rebellions and played a vital role in developing a culture of slave resistance and liberation across the Caribbean”.**

 And listening to Ms Dadzi what struck me was that all too often we see the slaves as victims, and lump them all together, despite the fact that they were stolen from different places, with different cultures, and pay only lip service to the way they fought back.

 So despite the obivious fact that enslaved women had few opportunities to record their stories they left plenty of small clues that show they played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance.

 Picture; cover A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance

 *A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance, Stella Dadzie, Verso Books ISBN: 9781788738842

 **Woman's Hour, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p6dq

"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong"* ……… debates on the very right of one individual to enslave another ……….. today on the wireless

We are going through one of those periods when the forces of darkness can mount campaigns to deny the Holocaust, when antisemitism is openly shouted outloud across social media, and slavery is again practicised.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Not that Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and slavery ever went away, it’s just that for a while they appeared to go underground.

Which brings me to the In Our Times programme on Radio 4, which is broadcast today, and features the The Valladolid Debate

It is a subject I was unaware of, so I am greatly interested in what I will learn, and the implications for today.

“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the debate in Valladolid, Spain in 1550, over Spanish rights to enslave the native peoples in the newly conquered lands. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, was trying to end the encomienda system in which those who now owned the land could also take the people in forced labour. 

Juan Gines Sepulveda, a philosopher, argued for the colonists' property rights over people, asserting that some native Americans were 'natural slaves' as defined by Aristotle. 

Valladolid became seen as the first open attempt by European colonists to discuss the ethics of slavery, and Las Casas became known as 'Saviour of the Indians' and an advocate for human rights, although for some time he argued that African slaves be imported to do the work in place of the native people, before repenting.

With Caroline Dodds Pennock, John Edwards, and Julia McClure

Producer: Simon Tillotson**

Picture; Portrait of Bartolomé de Las Casas, c.1484 – 1566, General Archive of the Indies  Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q477051
Source/Photographer Informations source : National Geographic & Álvaro Huerga, Bartolomé de Las Casas: Vie et œuvres

*Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Albert G. Hodges, 1864, full letter from Abraham Lincoln Online http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/hodges.htm

**The Valladolid Debate, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fgmw