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I had a friend who worked at Liberty, and she was always raving about the place that's unusual company to get to work in, lots of really interesting problems making people's lives better. That's what I'm really passionate about. Obviously, engineering is the bread and butter. That's the core of what it does. So we're really excellent engineers. I think it probably gets a bit better every year. We're hiring experienced software engineers. Not so much Liberty I.T. jobs reach beyond.

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I'm very pleased to say this episode of Dan Snow's history, it is brought to you by Sky. Scott, I want to let you know that a discovery of witches is returning for a second series. All the episodes are available now. If you don't know about it, it's a cool sort of historical fantasy mash up. So I was a big fan of the first series. And the second series is even better because this time Matthew and Dana are heroes, are heroes who are in love with each other.

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It's not an easy relationship, by the way. You'll see why they're hiding in the world of Elizabethan London. And obviously on hand is a powerful witch who needs to help Diana because Diana has got magic folks. As you know, anyone who has magic struggles to control it goes with the territory. We all know that's the Luke Skywalker vibe. Matthew needs to find work in Elizabethan London, which, as you'll see, is pretty difficult. And don't forget to find a way to get back to the present day where obviously they face a bunch of dangers as well.

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All episodes now available on Sky. Hello, everybody.

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Hello. Welcome to Denseness History. At this episode of the podcast, first broadcast on the 1st of February 2021, we did January when we completed January. Congratulations. Always a big day, always a big day. That was. I've got a big podcast for you. I've got Michael Tali's a historian, an academic, and he's written a big book, a big book on how the establishment resisted the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. Don't forget, everybody, don't forget.

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Eighty seven parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. Well done them excellent. But for the next 25 years, 700000 human beings remained in a state of enslavement in British colonies in the Caribbean. This injustice became the focus of another giant abolitionist campaign. And that campaign was fiercely, fiercely resisted by the famous West India interest. Some of the most famous names of 19th century politics, Tories, very Liberal Tories and even Liberals, people like Canning Peel Gladstone, they all believe that the institution of slavery should endure.

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And it was that kind of ferocious rearguard action that ensured that when slavery was abolished in 1833, it came in the form of a giant compensation package to the slave owners of the British Empire. No money was passed to the formerly enslaved people themselves. In this podcast, Michael Taylor takes me through that extraordinary story, a remarkable and forgotten struggle of 19th century British politics and society. Don't forget, if you want to listen to all these episodes, the podcast, without any adverts on them or from before 2019, the only place you can do that is on our new History Channel history hit TV.

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It's got audio on that. It's got video on there. It just been relaunched. It's looking beautiful. It's a whole new platform. Everyone, usability is much better. You can listen to podcasts much easier. You can skip ahead. You can go back. You can do all the kind of cool things you could do on any podcast player. And it's also got hundreds of hours of history documentaries and more and more going up all the time. It's a pretty sweet set up.

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So head over to history, hit TV, join the revolution. In the meantime, enjoy the excellent Michael Taylor.

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Thank you so much, come on the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me. As we come to the end of the 18th century, how aware were people in Britain of slavery? Is it something like today? We all know the destruction of the Amazon is a complete existential threat, but few of us actually can feel it viscerally. Understand it, visualize it.

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I think in certain cities, in certain communities, the realities of the slave trade and slavery are very present in places like Bristol and Liverpool and Glasgow, which are port cities built on the Atlantic trade.

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I think everybody realizes that they are dependent to a certain degree on slavery for their prosperity and in London as well. But the vast majority of Britons in the late 18th century will never leave their own parish, let alone visit Barbados.

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So whenever the abolitionists begin their campaign, they have to begin with a campaign of information before persuasion. They need to really exemplifying illustrate how horrific conditions on slave ships, on plantations are before they can persuade people to join a political movement.

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And you talk about the establishment and the interest in this book as a lover of 18th century politics. I'm so fascinated by interest within parliament.

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Give me a sense of what is the West Indies, the plant's interest in parliament, how powerful lobby it might be worth saying something first about interests in general, because in the late 18th, early 19th century, there aren't political parties as we know them. It's not really until the middle of the 19th century that we developed the party system as we know it today. So what we have instead are loose coalitions of Whigs and Tories, the Tories being the broadly conservative friends of the established church and the land that interests the Whigs being the relatively liberal.

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But they're certainly not radicals. Friends of finance and dissenting religion interests are effectively political lobbies whose anxieties focus on a specific sector or issue. And these are really the formidable political unit of the age, because on the issues that matter to them, because their interests are so intimately connected with the politics that affect them, they are able to crack a whip and get people to act en masse in parliament whenever they need to.

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On the West, India interest is really one of the most powerful political lobbies that Britain has ever seen. By this point, University College London have this legacies of British slave ownership database and there are upwards of 100 employees in that during this period. So they really do have an outsized influence over parliamentary politics.

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And today we talk about politicians being in in hock to interests, but the interests are going to go to the trouble of actually finding politicians and then buying them lobbyists right back in the 18th century. You could cut out the middleman. If you're a wealthy former or indeed a serving naval officer or a plantation owner, you could just you just go get yourself a seat in parliament. Yeah, of course.

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So before the reform of nineteen thirty to broaden boroughs are rife, Old Sarum is the byword for electoral corruption. And there are 14 electors, none of which live in Alstrom because nobody does. But the seat returns to an there in Cornwall is particularly badly affected by this phenomenon.

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There are places for seven voters return to MPs and it's because of this because the planters and the traders can control so many seats in parliament simply by buying them that nothing really happens in Parliament to deal with slavery, to address slavery before Parliament itself is reformed.

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It's Thomas Peters and it's the sort of founder of the dynasty. He makes a ton of money, quote unquote, finding a huge diamond in India and becomes one of most dominant political figures in Cornwall with that cash rate. I mean, these days, that is, I guess, the definition of.

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And then his son thinks that, you know, Britain's blue water imperial strategy is central to national interest because suppressed by the central to the family interest.

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Yeah, I'm that's kind of a story that repeats with all of the major slaveholders in this area who Charles Rosellas, who becomes Bahrein Seefried. Is George cutting's best friend, which is quite a good story if you want to influence national politics. But at the age of twenty one, so he's barely old enough to vote finishes Oxford doesn't graduate by SC. That's his career sorted. There are certainly no meritocracy in this. And by buying these seats like Thomas Pitt, like Charles Rosellas, any number of Jamaican Barbadian ponder's begin to dominate affairs in the chamber.

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So that's those people that are directly involved in slave trading and the commodities production in the West Indies. What explains, though, the slave owning adjacent politicians that you outlined in this book, so many of the leading lights of early 19th century Britain seemed just as hellbent on slavery as the actual slave owners themselves. Yes.

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So for this, it's worth considering the importance of the West in these, really, because we just finished the Napoleonic Wars, America is beginning to assert itself in the global stage, the former Latin American colonies or Spanish colonies that empires crumbling and there are no. Most trading opportunities with Latin American republics in the 18 towns in the 1920s, so everybody really wants on their when I say everybody, I mean conservative politicians really want to maintain a British presence in the West Indies.

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And this means that they don't want to get away with slavery because there's this predominating theory of the time of political economy that holds that if the enslaved person on the plantation are freed, they will not work. And if they do not work, the plantation economy will collapse. And if the plantation economy collapses, Britain will lose control over over the region. So there is that strategic, military and commercial concern. There's also something to be said about property. So whenever the abolitionists took on the slave trade earlier and eventually succeeded in the age of seven to get parliament to pass, not to abolish it, they never once attempted to abolish slavery itself or even to address slavery.

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Wilberforce stood up in the House of Commons and said it would be madness to attempt to free the slaves because in his opinion, they were unfit to receive freedom under a couple of reasons for this, for leaving slavery itself alone. One is biblical.

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So all the way through the Bible, there are verses which express, if not regulation or approval, let's say a tacit approval of slave holding. The slave trade was very different because there's a phrase in Deuteronomy that is repeated in one of the books of Timothy, I think called Men Stealing, and this is outlawed completely. So there was a theological and a biblical division between the slave trade and slavery that was left alone. The other is property. It's very easy or relatively easy to stop a fleet of merchant ships from participating in a certain trade.

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It's a discrete economic offensive, report reports ports. And stopping that henceforth is much, much easier than attempting to confiscate legally held property, which is why a lot of parliamentarians and a lot of legal thinkers of the day regarded slaves.

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So with the background, whenever we get into the 20s, whenever the abolitionists are trying to at least sort of ameliorate and then emancipate the slaves, they come up against this continual brick wall of property. They can spin an argument here.

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So, well, if you come for the slaves that are next, are you going to come for my farm in Norfolk next? Are you going to come for the factory that I've just built in Yorkshire?

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So it's because of these things, which is generally an inherently conservative politicians who are willing to uphold the rights of property within a context, within a biblical context where that's permissible.

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Right.

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And we should probably just cover the basic stuff that's going on.

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Said eighty seven parliament outlawed that slave trade, as you say, but it would not be till the sort of early to mid eighteen thirties that the abolition of slavery itself. So in the meantime, well, West Indian planters, they want to able to import enslaved Africans. People born in captivity would continue in a condition of slavery, I presume. Yes.

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So it's one of the popular misconceptions, I think, in British history that after the abolition of the slave trade, slavery itself was abolished. That's absolute nonsense. So on New Year's Day, whenever the last slave ship docks or put to other uses, there are still 700000 enslaved people in the Caribbean. There are 300000 in Jamaica alone, which is more than in any British city of the day except for London. And the abolition of the trade has absolutely no effect on their condition, on their daily lives.

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There was an assumption on the part of the abolitionists that because the planters could no longer imports new African people into their plantations, that they would have to treat everybody better so their life expectancy would increase on that. Slavery by degrees would simply wither away. That doesn't happen between 1887 and the foundation of the Anti Slavery Society in eighteen twenty three. The direction of travel generally is not towards abolition.

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But during the Napoleonic wars, Britain seizes Trinidad and Demerara, so it actually expands its slave empire in 1816 whenever they propose a registry of slaves, which is the way the abolitionists wanted to, I guess, keep an eye on how many slaves were being imported illicitly into the Caribbean. This sparks of rebellion in Barbados and the backlash is so furious that Wilberforce has to sign a pledge to the Prince Regent saying that, no, we are not going to attempt to abolish slavery.

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So in the meantime, the planters are relatively content, I would say, with a degree of political protection from abolitionism. And this continues for the first years of the campaign itself. That's not to say that the interest is growing in strength necessarily, because these are difficult times economically. And the value of the plantations and the value of sugar in the price of sugar has been decreasing generally over the previous decades. But certainly whenever the abolitionists finally rise themselves in eighteen twenty three, they do so because their hopes had been sorely disappointed and because the cause of abolitionism over the previous 16 years hadn't really gone anywhere.

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The late teens and 20s and 30s were a time of extraordinary radical. Discontent and agitation in the UK, to what extent was slavery part of that? So you've got, you know, people like famously Henry had to speak at a meeting at Peterloo Massacre on that progressive platform with slavery important over slavery, over the horizon, even for British radicals.

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So there is this perhaps unexpected relationship that develops between British radicals who are focused on parliamentary reform and workers' rights on the slaveholders. It's not with the abolitionists that they find common ground. It's these working class radicals, not necessarily, but people like Richard Carlisle or Sidler or Rosa and especially William Colbert, who I know you've discussed before in the show. They despise the abolitionists and they cannot understand why the British parliament, the government, would not address themselves to the concerns of British workers before doing so for West Indian slaves.

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And in their arguments, there's an incipient nebulous form of the arguments against foreign aid. It's what Dickens goes on to describe as telescopic philanthropy in bleak eyes. And a lot of these people on their platforms, they say, well, I feel very badly for the people who are enslaved in the West Indies, but my priority is white slavery. And they want to sort out the factories. They want to sort of reform of parliament before they do anything else.

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That's a powerful combination of working class or certainly artisanal British radicals, aristocratic conservative interests. So how on earth the abolitionist make any ground at all?

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Well, the simple answer is that for a very long time, the abolitionists just didn't make any progress at all. The campaign begins in eighteen, twenty three when Thomas Buxton opposes the amelioration and the gradual emancipation of colonial slaves. George Canning, who's the leader of the House at the time, the foreign secretary, stands up and says these are very good ideas, but we're not really going to do anything about it. But we'll sign the Commons up to a series of resolutions which are proposed by the planters, not by parliament, and then are communicated to the West Indies as recommendations, not as law.

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It's left up to the colonial legislatures to put into effect all of these recommendations. And this is a kind of game that Parliament and Lord Liverpool's Tory government plays for the rest of its four years.

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They make all the right signs. They write some dead letter pieces of legislation and recommendations, and they expect nothing to be done and nothing is done. Well, then happens in nineteen twenty seven, is it? Lord, Liverpool has a stroke and dies. Counting takes over. Then he dies. Viscount Goodrich replaces him and he can't form a government. So in the midst of this political chaos at Westminster, again, nothing gets done. I mean, nothing was done at all, let alone embark on serious legislation, even if they'd want to.

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Wellington then comes in in 1828 and Wellington's arguably the most proslavery politician of the day is the reason he's in the front cover of the book.

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And under Wellington and his colonial secretary, George Murray, there's a real act of resistance towards doing anything towards abolition. The historians have known for a very long time that Wellington stands foursquare behind the slaveholding interest.

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And the only reason eventually that the abolitionists get anywhere is because of Ireland, because in 1829, Daniel O'Connell and his sort of liberal supporters eventually persuaded Wellington appeal to unite Catholic emancipation in Ireland for fear of really creating a civil war in Wellington's military experience here tells them that as much as he abhors the idea of Catholic emancipation, that's better than trying to fight civil war in Ireland.

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So whenever they do that, there's about 80 or so ultra Tory MPs regard Wellington and people as betrayers of the Protestant national interest. So they effectively switch sides or go and sit in their own in the house. And Wellington is suddenly left on fairly shaky ground. He wins a very, very slim majority in the next general election. But then because he gets up in the first or second night in the Lords in the new parliament and says, I'm absolutely going to do nothing about parliamentary reform, it's absolutely disgraceful to think that we should do anything.

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Our Constitution is perfect the way it is. Why would I change it? And this leads to a revolt in the House, the ultras, the Whigs band together, they defeat him over a measure that's really insignificant. It's about the civil list, but he sees the writing on the wall. He loses a motion of confidence in his government and suddenly the Whigs are brought in.

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So it's a Tory civil war that opens up the political opportunity for the abolitionists and the opportunities the Whigs coming to buy. That's not to say, as I said previously, they're not radicals. They're not necessarily anti slavery, but they're much more likely to entertain plans for emancipation and then emancipation when it does occur.

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How important is of ideology here and enlightenment within the Imperial Centre? How important is the gigantic slave revolt in Jamaica? I mean, how important are events, dear boy?

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Enormously important. If the first major slave revolt of this little decade that I study comes and Demerara nineteen twenty three. And there is a really fierce backlash because it is thought that by mentioning freedom and slavery in Parliament on this issue and rumours make their way across the Atlantic and inspire this slave rebellion is for the abolitionism will bring bloodshed in eighteen thirty one, thirty two.

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However, when tens of thousands of enslaved people in Jamaica rebelle over Christmas under the leadership of a Baptist deacon known as Tom Sharpe, it receives a very different welcome whenever the news reaches London and the Whigs in power at the time, and especially of Goodrich's neo colonial secretary having somewhat resurrected his career under the Whigs and not the Tories, he realizes that if slavery persists, it's not abolitionism that will cause this bloodshed, it's slavery itself, and that it would be madness and folly to continue to enslave so many people so far away.

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So I don't think that in the corridors of power, to use the phrase, there is this radical enlightenment, an improvement of views and the sense that we must do the right thing. It's fear in the end that encourages the Whigs in government to do something at last about slavery, emancipation.

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And we should just quickly, what is the thing that they do and how conservative does that now feel?

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It so the proposal that was eventually brought forward and the fear stops and starts, and it took a lot longer than the abolitionists hoped that it would. But Stanley, who goes on to become Lord Derby and prime minister in the 50s and 60s, he's the colonial secretary who puts forward a plan of emancipation. There's a lack of a year. Slaveholders will receive 20 million pounds in compensation because, as I mentioned earlier, the enslaved people are regarded as property and this is compensation for the confiscation of that property.

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At the same time, if that were not generous enough, there is a period of effectively slavery by another name known as the apprenticeship. So whenever slavery itself ends in eighteen thirty four, there was a period of six years for some people, a little bit less for those who were younger, where the former slaves would work on the same plantations, in the same jobs for the same masters, for no money. And this was a means of securing the labor system of the colonies for a while.

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And during this period, after fulfilling their statutory obligations under the apprenticeship, the former slaves could earn a little bit more money and perhaps buy their freedom a bit earlier.

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So these were two really significant currents that were shaking in the direction of the slaveholders. And the generosity of them was something that really appalled the abolitionists. And it was a house of cards that almost collapsed in the summer of eighteen thirty three because the abolition we're fighting each other about whether or not to consent to these measures in the end sense as they saw it, prevailed on the accepted the measures.

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Am I right in thinking that astonishing amount of money, how much are they going to spend this purchase?

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It was 20 million pounds in eighteen thirty three, which was said to represent the value of the colonies of the enslaved people themselves and twenty million pounds in eighteen thirty three. Admittedly, there is a smaller state, but this is 40 percent of the government expenditure that year, which is a staggering sum. It's a staggered song. Yeah, I mean, it's the largest sort of bail out of the 19th century, effectively, it's the largest specific payout from the government to an interest group or to any real stakeholder in society until the 2008 bailout of the banks.

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How should we think about this story? What I was reading or perhaps thinking like is this a story about the eventual like the unstoppable march of, you know, you can put obstacles up, you can delay, you can dig your feet, Liverpool away, but eventually this is a story of civilised values overcoming dark ones? Or is this, in fact, the opposite? Like I can't make my mind up is there's actually a story of just how corrupt and disastrous our politics can be.

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It was the ninth century and can still be now. And really this only came about because of a bizarre series of accidents on either side of the Atlantic.

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I think I would er slightly closer to that second darker version of events. It's absolute nonsense to suggest that emancipating slaves in the colonies was inevitable or that this was the, you know, the denouement of some sweeping and triumphant movement of British sense of decency and justice. That's the story that we like to tell ourselves. But it doesn't really get borne out by any of the facts.

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There is contingency, there is corruption. There are events, dear boy, as you said. And without those events, it's actually very hard to see how emancipation happens without that 20 million pounds in compensation, without the apprenticeship with the slaveholders have agreed, probably not. Would they have made good on their promises to rebel and become the new state of the American Union? They might have done they might have got beaten senselessly by the Royal Navy and the British Army probably would have overpowered them.

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But abolition is not a fait accompli and it really is quite frustrating.

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And one of the reasons that I wrote the book, whenever we regard ourselves as I say, we, the British public, regard Britain as the leading link in terms of abolishing the slave trade and then emancipating colonial slaves. Because much of the northern United States had done this before Britain had even attempted it.

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Haiti had abolished slavery in its constitution in the eighteen, hundreds and much of Latin America had abolished slavery as well. So Britain gets there eventually, but it follows rebellions. It follows corrupt bargains. And I think if we want to get ourselves into, you know, this great civilizing mission narrative, I think we should do some more reading.

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It also makes me sort of profoundly nervous about, you know, whether it's tackling climate change today or any of the huge challenges that face us. The idea that if you simply win an argument, if you just write enough brilliant tweets, even actually if you convinced most of the people that what change occurs in actually the most confusing and Byzantine way through constitutions and legislatures and executive branches.

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So it's quite a difficult book to read if you believe that we are at the dawn of an era of sweeping political, economic and social change and environmental change.

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Today, there's something that prefaces pretty much every proslavery argument that's made during this time. And it's a statement which runs something along the lines of, of course, I detest and despise slavery in the abstract, but and after the.

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But there are economic concerns. There are religious concerns. There are legal concerns, political concerns. And these arguments, OK, they come in different shapes and they're addressed towards different issues. But you mentioned climate change. I think almost everybody will say, yes, we really should do something about this.

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But and sometimes it does take something to break through, something catastrophic possibly to break through that veneer of apathy. In the case of slavery, it was the rebellion.

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Yeah, it's fascinating how often whether it's the collapse of the Roman power in the collapse of Borbon power in the late 18th century, it's actually the strange defection of Ultra's rather than the success of sort of progressive outsiders. It's actually a collapse of intra establishment morale or functioning that leads to the ultimate crisis.

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Yeah, and within that, there are still contingent events. If Louis the 16th hadn't been so eager to support the American Revolution when the French Revolution have occurred in the way that it did or when it did. Probably not.

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But whenever I talk about the interest in the establishment and the British political hierarchy, more generally, the appetite conservative regime had been really pretty solid for quite a while. You can arguably back to whenever it first came into power in the 70s and 80s. It's effectively the same system of government run by the same families on the same political interests for over 40 years. But whenever they fall out over religion, the whole thing falls apart and that creates the opportunity for change.

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I'm trying to think of some other examples of where this might well, conservative party politics in the 2010s might be a good place to start.

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Yeah, that's that's a great example. Had Jeremy Corbyn won that election, it would have been a great example of a completely intra conservative squabble just blowing apart their ascendancy.

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I was thinking more of talking of harbingers of great change with the Tories losing their right wing or fearing the loss of their right wing and then making their manifesto commitment on the referendum. So maybe it isn't necessarily the collapse of but even the fear of collapse is enough to initiate these great changes.

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Yeah, there's there's an interesting comparative thought to be done. Speaking of comparative history, do you find yourself whacking yourself on the head with giant books whenever you see people on the right in today's politics celebrating the British Empire's role in both abolishing the slave trade and then and then slavery itself?

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Yeah, if I can't find a really heavy book, I'll find something harder and heavier. The people who celebrate these things and who celebrate Empire, it always strikes me really quite amazingly how these would almost certainly have been the people resisting the abolition of slavery. They possess, I think, the same mindset and certainly the same position on the political spectrum, even though all things are relative. And what really annoyed me over the summer following the toppling of Colston's statue and being dumped into Bristol Harbor, the general narrative around are we must preserve these statues because otherwise we are deleting history if we take them down.

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That's absolute nonsense. I had been of the opinion that the statues in the names should stay in place as reminders of the darker elements of British imperial history. But it soon became clear that without the base level of knowledge about what actually happened, these reminders don't have any effect in terms of the statues generally. I think we struggle to communicate as historians that statues do not represent the past. They represent the positions and the opinions of the community at the time whenever they were erected.

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So whenever the statue of Coulston was put up in the 90s, that doesn't represent the 17th century, taking down the statue doesn't delete him from the history books. And we can say the same of Churchill or Cunningham or Wellington or people or any of these people. Taking down the statue will not remove them from history. Rather, it will say what it represents is the people who take the statue down saying that we should no longer celebrate and agitate and lionize these men because.

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Well, I don't think people are going to say that we don't need heroes. But I think there should be a recognition that certain people in the British pantheon really should not be celebrated in the way that we do, or at least as equally as we do.

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I'm not sure, man. I'm not sure we do need heroes. I think the whole concept is really difficult. You know, I'm fascinated by Nelson's tactical brilliance in fleet actions. I don't need him as a hero. You know, I even like to wear a little Nelson hoodie occasionally. Like, it's funny when my daughter walks past a Nelson hoodie, but I don't encourage her to be like, no, I'd like to adopt Nelson's worldview and outlook in all things.

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I think heroes are a funny problem, aren't they?

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And they are a problem. And certainly I don't think that if, say, we decided to take the statue of Nelson down from the top of the Cole, would we end up forgetting about Nelson? Would his victory at Trafalgar get forgotten? Would we start rewriting histories of the Napoleonic wars or remove them? Of course we wouldn't. Historians are never going to forget people if there isn't a statue. There's just something about the role of these historical figures in society that is problematic.

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Do we want them to remind ourselves of a past of glorious past? There's no long gone. Are these statues the residue of imperial greatness that we're trying desperately to hang onto? I like Nelson's column.

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Folks don't at me suggest we pull it down. However, quick question. I wasn't suggesting that we take it, but also also who does remember now? It's like really it's a pretty small group of us. Like we there are people who read about and think about Nelson and then there's the rest of the population. And I think the former group is pretty small. I don't think the statues are working anyway. Right. Who actually knows about General Havelock?

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Yeah, a diminishing, really small number of people, I would say. Yeah. So, you know, why do we put them up in the first place?

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I mean, who are we going to erect a statue to in the next couple of years from the second half of the twentieth century? Besides Thatcher getting on a couple of weeks ago is the very process for the phenomenon of erecting statues dying?

[00:32:56]

I, I suspect, by the way, I should pick you up because I do feel nervous, you and I, busily slacking off people on the Republican Party, the Conservative Party in the UK, who would, of course, argue they despise the idea of slavery and they are genuinely proud of the abolitionist movements in the early 19th century. Why is it that we're being so rude out of hand about those people? Let's just clarify what we mean when we say those are the kind of people.

[00:33:19]

Do you mean those are the kind of people for whom economic security, geopolitical safety, revenue from sources, even if they're a little bit unethical, like fossil fuels, are more important than being whiter than white?

[00:33:32]

No, I don't think so. I think I think what really we're getting I'm getting at is that conservatism can actually, despite its name, evolves so quickly to forgets its previous positions and it can quickly find new positions to adopt that the conservatives who resisted abolishing slavery in the 20s and 30s could without hesitation celebrate it as soon as emancipation was passed and as soon as emancipation was affected. Robert Peel was one of the most. Yulan Proslavery figures of the 18 20s and nineteen thirties, and yet there are speeches given by him in time worth a couple of years later saying that emancipation was one of the brightest stars in the British firmament and one of the brightest pages in British history.

[00:34:12]

And Tory MPs Gladstone, for example, his maiden speech in Parliament was intended to defend slavery on Iran as an explicitly proslavery candidate in 1832. And yet he evolved this completely new political persona for himself as soon as emancipation was affected. So it's not obvious, you know what I'm saying? Those people are Republicans and conservatives. I think there's just a very curious political position which is adopted where those individuals in history who were most resistant to change can suddenly celebrate the change as if it were their own.

[00:34:43]

Interesting stuff.

[00:34:44]

So your brilliant book is called The Interest How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery. Get out of the Bookshops.

[00:34:51]

Take an interest in the interest, everybody. And thank you so much for coming on this podcast. Thank you for having me.

[00:35:04]

How about just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundie. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material. You guys, in return, a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review.

[00:35:33]

I really appreciate that. From the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favor. Then more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.