Aamer Anwar STUC No Slavery No Racism Rally 24-11-07

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Why should it suddenly be a topic of revulsion at all, when it had been tolerated in various forms throughout various societies for thousands of years with only minimal dissent? Christian sects hammered against the slave system hard, but Christianity had been complicit in slavery until then. Clearly, the eighteenth century revolutionary tradition obviously deserves the lion's share of the credit.

[leftstuff]

Only in part can this pressure can be explained by a moral revulsion against the extremity of British slavery, which was far less accepting of individual emancipation (manumission) than slave-owners in Latin America for example, and always had laws restricting a slaveholder's ability to free slaves.

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The American South had to work much harder to legitimise slavery in light of the critique originating in the overthrow of the British empire, despite extensive official protection in terms of domestic and foreign policy. The British government was under waves of skilled diplomatic and political attack from millions of Britons before it first moved to abolish its involvement in the trade in 1807 and finally effectively abolished the practise of slavery in the empire by 1834.

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Perunatic that would only hold if ignoring the disgusting working conditions of the British working-classes and anti-slavery were mutually exclusive.

The fact is that the emancipationist movements in the early modern era were unprecedented. There were hugely significant anti-slavery currents in the Enlightenment expressed by the likes of Bentham (is any evil to be mandated simply by calling it a trade?, he wondered).

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It was a persistent claim of the abused lower classes that the middle classes cared more for the plight of negroes than they did for the indigenous victims of the industrial holocaust. Charles Dickens satirized this phenomenon. It's a matter of historical fact.

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Genteel eighteenth century anti-slavery was a means by which the middle-classes in Britain were able to ignore the disgusting working conditions of the British working-classes, whose suffering ensured their comfortable lifestyles. In psychology this is known as displacement. The concern that economically secure Brits have about minorities and migrants operates under the aegis of the same veiled selfishness.