Lloyd’s of London and Church of England also to be approached over role in past exploitation

  • @[email protected]
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    -31 year ago

    The British started half-heartedly “fighting the slave trade” as a calculated political/economic move after losing their biggest slave colony, the USA. For 200 years slavery built their empire, then they decided that depriving their rivals of more slaves was more beneficial. Literally nothing about this was “moral”. They still maintained hundreds of thousands of slaves in their own colonies, such as in the Caribbean. “Fighting the slave trade” actually just meant not letting their competitors, the Spanish, Americans, and French, import more of them.

    The slaves the British lost in the USA were replaced with workers in India who for all practical intents and purposes were practically enslaved. Without Indian workers to replace their lost American slaves, Britain never would have “abolished” the slave trade.

    The biggest opponent to the abolition of the slave trade was the royalty of Lagos,

    My man never heard about the USA? They had a civil war about it, made the news at the time. ( Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and international…)