BaxiBoo

Another lecture informing British patriots that their country participated in the slave trade, as though this were some astonishing discovery carefully concealed from the history books. Yes, Britain participated extensively in the Atlantic slave trade, and the cruelty and suffering were appalling. But history did not begin in 1562, nor was slavery a uniquely British invention. Long before British merchants appeared on the African coast, Arab and Muslim slave traders operated extensive networks across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. African rulers and tribal intermediaries also captured, enslaved and sold people, sometimes through warfare and organised raiding. The Romans built an empire sustained partly by slave labour; the Goths and Visigoths inherited and practised forms of slavery; and successive Chinese dynasties maintained systems of bondage and servitude. Slavery was endemic across much of human history, practised by societies of different races, religions and civilisations. This does not excuse Britain's involvement. It places it in historical context, something apparently regarded as a dangerous activity whenever the object is to deliver a sermon rather than an education. And there is another chapter conveniently overlooked: Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, legislated to abolish slavery throughout most of its empire in 1833, and subsequently deployed the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic trade, at considerable financial and human cost. These achievements do not erase earlier crimes, but neither should earlier crimes erase them. How wonderfully selective to catalogue Britain's historical sins whilst treating those of other civilisations as inconvenient footnotes. History must be studied in its entirety, not carved into politically useful accusations. We can acknowledge historical atrocities without assigning inherited guilt to people born centuries afterwards. The dead deserve historical truth, the victims deserve remembrance, and the living deserve to be judged by their own conduct. Patriotism is not denying history; it is the maturity to acknowledge both a nation's failures and its achievements without turning either into a political weapon.