Leading black intellectual Paul Gilroy spoke at a very successful Socialist Worker meeting last week attended by 300 people on ‘Who Really Ended the Slave Trade?’ It discussed the commemoration of the 1807 Act that formally ended the trade in the British Empire.
Here are extracts from his speech
‘The commemoration is a chance to reflect, a chance to remember, a chance to honour a history of struggle. But it’s also a chance to make an assessment of black social life in this country, about the shape and place of racism here and about the contemporary relevance of racial divisions to the politics, economics and cultural life of this country.
I really wanted to support the commemoration but I found it hard to join in the official version which felt too much like “business as usual”.
It missed the elephant in the room – capitalism – and its transition from mercantile to industrial form. Slaves were property, they were pieces of property. And their sufferings and their resistance offer, I claim, a deeper commentary on the idea of private property than the one that comes out of the Marxist tradition.
CLR James in 1969 wrote an essay on Black Studies which was rising up in the academic sense at that time. He says, “To talk to me of Black Studies as something only of concern to black people is an utter denial. This history is the history of Western civilisation. I can’t see it otherwise – this is a history that black people and white people – all serious students of modern history and the history of the world – have to know.”
We do hear a lot about Britishness these days. It seems to me that part of the explosion of official commemoration is about that.
This commemorative process is about a celebration and
affirmation of the 'British' values they want to claim and monopolise. They want
to show that their capitalism, and their colonial imperial adventures are somehow clean operations, infused with the moral spirit of the legacy of abolitionism.
To them, the slave trade was brought to an end, by William Wilberforce above all. I like the idea that British people might be made to identify with a humane figure, one who made efforts to achieve this notable source of good. But I don’t think he achieved these things by himself, or that the amount of good he did personally
was proportionate to the volume of the bad stuff that preceded it.
In 1816, eight years after prohibition, the African Society of London told Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary at that time, that an estimated 60,000 slaves were being shipped across the Atlantic every year. British interests supported and provisioned that operation, mostly in Spanish ships carrying slaves to Brazil and Cuba. That process continued through the 1840s.
The vein of work established by Eric Williams, the great Trinidadian historian, argues that directly and indirectly, the profits obtained from the triangular trade between Britain, Africa and the New World colonies provided one of the main streams for the accumulation of capital which financed the industrial revolution.
Eric's work has been vilified and attacked systematically over and over again for at least 60 years. His’ critics want their liberal tradition to be clean and wholesome. They want to dwell in a world where moral sentiments are seen to dominate economic imperatives.
They are disoriented by the idea that capitalism remains a brutal and unchecked system which continues into the present, enveloped in violence. So the history of the slave trade, in a distorted official version, becomes a way to keep the histories of capitalism and liberalism clean, to keep them sanctified.
That’s what the commemoration is addressed to, rather than the rapacious turbo-capitalism and the new imperial adventures of the present.