NotWelshButLivesInWales

Britain ran the slave trade. Britain sent seven-year-olds into the mills. And Britain ended both. 🇬🇧 How can one country be the villain and the hero? It can't. There were two Britains. One owned people. The other did the work. When slavery ended, historians counted every slave owner living in Britain. About three thousand, in a country of sixteen million. 📜 Bankers, merchants, lords and MPs. The other Britain couldn't vote them out: most men had no vote, and no woman had one. 🗳️ Take Samuel Greg. In 1784 he built Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, in Cheshire. By the time he retired, it was the biggest cotton mill in the country. More than half his workers were children. Many were orphans from the workhouse. 🧵 Four thousand miles away, the Greg family owned the Hillsborough sugar plantation on Dominica, worked by enslaved Africans. 🌴 The blankets they slept under were made at his mill. Orphan children here. Enslaved Africans there. Making money for the same family. So who stood up to them? In 1787 a young campaigner called Thomas Clarkson went to Bristol. ⚓ Thompson, landlord of the Seven Stars pub, refused to help trick sailors onto the slave ships. Instead he took Clarkson round the dockside pubs at night, at real risk to himself. The crew lists showed two slave ships to Africa had killed more British sailors than eighty-three ships to Newfoundland. Their stories helped turn the country against the trade. Manchester didn't even have an MP. So more than ten thousand people, about one in five in the town, signed a petition to end it. ✍️ In 1830 Richard Oastler heard about Bradford's mills. One boy of about ten worked from six in the morning till ten at night. Oastler wrote to the Leeds Mercury. He called it Yorkshire Slavery. 📰 In April 1832, thousands of mill workers walked to York to fight for their children. They called it the Pilgrimage of Mercy. 🚶 Against slavery, women went door to door. One petition in May 1833 carried 187,000 women's names. Not one of them could vote. 👩 Then came two dates. 28 August 1833: Britain signs the law to end slavery across most of the Empire. 🇬🇧 29 August 1833: the very next day, it signs the Factory Act. No child under nine in most textile mills. 🏛️ Neither law was a gift from the slave owners. Both were won by people with no vote, no money and no power. So next time someone tells you "Britain did this", ask them: which Britain? Odds are five thousand to one you come from the side that won. Watch the full story. 🎥 Be part of us. 🧵👈🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 Britain sent warships into a friendly country's harbours. 🔥 And burned its ships at anchor. ⚓ That country was Brazil 🇧🇷 More enslaved Africans were taken to Brazil than to any other country on earth. ⛓️ Not America 🇺🇸 Brazil 🇧🇷 Nearly half of everyone shipped across the Atlantic went there. Ten times more than the United States. 🌍 In 1826 Britain made Brazil sign a treaty. The trade would end by 1830. 📜 Brazil signed. Then ignored it. They even had a phrase for laws like that: "para inglês ver". For the English to see. 👀 Tens of thousands of people kept arriving every year. 😔 So Britain changed the law. Brazilian slave ships could now be tried in British courts as pirates. ⚖️ In 1850 the Royal Navy sailed into Brazil's ports, under the guns of the forts. They cut out the slave ships and burned them. 🚢 Emperor Pedro II's government had a choice. War with Britain. Or end the trade. ⚔️ That September, Brazil banned it. Within two years the trade was dead. 🕊️ Yet today only one country is asked to feel ashamed. 🤔 The one that stopped it. 🇬🇧 Be part of us. 🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

209 years ago today, Britain ARMED an African king. 🇬🇧 Muskets. Gunpowder. Ten thousand gun flints. Four hundred red coats. 💂 British sergeants to train his army. A salary in gold and silver, every year. 💰 Britain wanted him to win. 👑 Valley after valley. Chief after chief. Until two-thirds of Madagascar was under his rule. 🗺️ On purpose. 👀 Why? 🤔 Because on that island, chiefs raided villages and sold the people. To French slave ships. To Arab dhows. To other African kingdoms. ⛓️ Then they bought guns with the money. To raid more villages. 🔥 Guns for people. People for guns. 🔁 Britain had banned its own slave trade in 1807. But it couldn’t guard every beach on an island nearly a thousand miles long. 🌊 So a sergeant from Cork travelled 28 days, by canoe and on foot, to reach the king. 🛶 For two months they bargained. Then he made an offer nobody had authorised. 🤝 Every gun the slave trade gave the king, Britain would give him free. If he stopped selling people. ✋ On 23 October 1817, the king signed. Selling his people abroad would be punished by death. ✍️ Then Britain helped him take the island. Port after port, every one closed to the slave ships. ⚓ They teach you Britain profited from slavery. 📚 They never teach you how we got them to stop selling their own people. 🤫 Britain armed an African king. On purpose. 🇬🇧 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

They teach you the world got connected in the 1990s. 
Not that a British ship did it in 1866. 🇬🇧 Watch the full story. 🎥 When Abraham Lincoln was shot, London didn’t find out for twelve days. ⏳ An American called Cyrus Field dreamed of a wire under the ocean. 
But nobody in America could make it. Only Britain could. 🇬🇧🏭 Two warships tried to lay it. HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara. 🚢 
It snapped. It broke. Again and again. 💔 In August 1858 it finally held. America went wild. 🎆 
Three weeks later the cable was dead. For seven years the ocean stayed silent.
Then Britain took it on. 🇬🇧 A new cable from Greenwich. 
The only ship on earth big enough to carry it: Brunel’s giant, the Great Eastern. ⚓ In 1865, twelve hundred miles out, the cable snapped. 
It sank more than two miles down. 🌊 Most people would have given up… 
They made another cable instead. 💪 July 1866. Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. 
Britain and America were joined. News that took twelve days now took minutes. ⚡ But the job wasn’t finished. 
They went back for the cable they’d lost. Two and a half miles down. Nearly thirty attempts. 🪝 Then the spot of light moved. 
The cable was alive. ✨ The wharf is still there in Greenwich. The house on it is a pub now. 
You can drink a pint where the world was wired. 🍺 We come from people who go back for it. 🇬🇧 Help us bring Britain back up from the dark: proudofus.co.uk Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧