Why did China and Japan seek to greatly restrict maritime trade with Europe and America? One reason was the slave trade. The Chinese and Japanese didn't want their own people to be shipped off to far away places to serve foreign masters.
Some Chieftans and other Rulers, however, actively encouraged the slave trade. One reason for this was that they needed to import weapons and trade goods so as to retain their independence or expand their territories.
The historian, David Olusoga, is of Nigerian descent on his father's side. Yoruba people both profited from and were the victims of the slave trade. This means that whereas anyone directly from Nigeria may have enjoyed greater status and inherited wealth because their ancestors captured or transported and sold slaves to Europeans, it is certain that Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American people are undoubtedly the victims of that vicious and deeply repugnant type of commerce.
The Guardian Newspaper is owned by a Trust founded by people who indirectly benefited from the slave trade. They did not capture or sell such slaves as their primary occupation. But they may have employed slaves or bought the produce of slave labour. The Guardian, with great fanfare and publicity, is devoting a niggardly sum to some supposed type of reparation to those of us who are descended from the people their ancestors referred to as niggers. However, one must distinguish between people of slave ancestry and others, who might look like them but who were never enslaved by Europeans. Indeed, they may have sold slaves to the White Man.
Olusoga, in a poetic essay to mark the Guardian's virtue signalling venture, writes of a trick. What trick might that be? Is it one whereby he ignores what his ancestors might have done in terms of capturing, transporting and selling African people? Or is he going to present us historical facts? Let us see-
If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely?
One is not fooled by a magician's tricks. We know David Copperfield can't actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear. What we pay for is the experience of not being able to detect quite how the trick is worked. Even if we know sleight of hand is involved, we will applaud and feel we have got our money's worth if our eye was not quick enough to detect the legerdemain. Thus professional magicians might compliment each other on their not being able to tell which method was used to pull off a deception.
The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.
Ideology is smoke and mirrors, rhetoric is smoke and mirrors, as is virtue signalling. There is some obvious logical fallacy which is being covered over by the prestidigitator's patter.
Like all the best illusions it draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the illusionist does not want you to see.
In this case, the African guys selling African slaves they had captured or transported
It is carefully designed to frame and delineate our understanding of the past by focusing our attention away from certain linkages and connections.
People from Nigeria may have profited from the transcontinental Slave trade. They weren't the victims of it. Indeed, if their countries lost independence as a result of the abolition of the trade, we might say they were the victims of Wilberforce and his abolitionist crew.
The illusion in question works like this: it marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes.
The only people who do this corralling are stupid shitheads who teach a worthless subject. Don't teach History in Skool. Cretins teach it with the intention of cretinizing kids.
What would be the point of turning people of West Indian descent against those of Nigerian descent on the grounds that the latter might have sold the former's ancestors to 'the Man'? There was plenty of animosity between the two groups when I was growing up. But that was based on the fact that Nigerians in this country were much richer, better educated, and were rising rapidly in any and every worthwhile field. Since then, however, people of West Indian origin too have risen rapidly. Thus it would be foolish to revive any sort of school-yard feud between the two. Perhaps the intention is to unite Black against White- but a lot of White kids must now be of East European descent. They had nothing whatever to do with the slave trade.
It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history,
Fuck history. Stop teaching it. The thing is a waste of time.
rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country.
Study economics by all means. Those flows are the datasets from which we estimate the parameters of our Structural Causal Models.
What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance.
We should be getting West Indian origin kids to stab Nigerian origin kids in the school yard. Whites will be left alone because it will turn out they are Irish or Polish or hopelessly working class.
It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists.
We should be naming and shaming Yoruba chiefs instead and tracking down their descendants so wannable Yardies can get some practice in carving them up.
It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them.
But there were Africans and Asians who had capital and who had key industrial raw materials. Why didn't they have an industrial revolution save by copying the UK? The answer has to do with rising real wages which made substituting steam power for muscle power profitable. One reason for this was that Brits had gotten rid of serfdom or slavery centuries previously. Another is that England was determined to defend itself from richer and more powerful Continental neighbours. As with West African states which used the Slave Trade to finance their own defense forces, so too with England. It engaged in repugnant types of commerce so as to be able to fight off those who might use that ill gotten wealth and power to conquer their island and impose their own religion and aristocracy upon it.
WHAT IS THE COTTON CAPITAL SERIES?
Cotton Capital explores how transatlantic slavery shaped the Guardian, Manchester, Britain and the world.
It is stupid shit because it is based on lies, wokeness and fake outrage. Some Manchester merchant who bought cotton or insured shipping cargoes is not as great a villain as an African Chief who enslaved and sold fellow Africans.
This smoke-and-mirrors trick sits at the centre of British history. It draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the illusionist does not want you to see.
Africans enslaved and sold Africans. No doubt, some of them spoke Arabic- but they were still African. The only 'trick' here is pretending that some ship broker or manufacturer was actually kidnapping people and forcing them to work by whipping them.
The trick was constructed over centuries by politicians, lobbyists and journalists who sought to create a highly romanticised version of our national story.
Fuck off! Stories are for kids or kiddie-fiddlers. Narratives don't matter. Money does. Defeating your enemies on Sea or on Land and plundering their treasuries is profitable in itself. A couple of scribblers, and later on a couple of school masters, might make a slender living by praising those who made a lot of money and gained a lot of power by winning battles or creating business empires, but such pedagogues did not matter then and do not matter know. The Guardian may have some woke or virtue signalling narrative of its own. But it can be easily countered by a Tweet from QAnon. The point about stupid lies is that everybody can tell them. Professors of shit subject can't compete with yet sexier narratives involving shape shifting lizards and Illuminati.
They were assisted in this task by generations of historians
i.e. low IQ pedagogues whom nobody gave a toss about
who were equally determined to construct British history around the biographies of “great men” whose achievements, they believed, proved the nation’s supposed exceptionalism.
You can make a bit of money saying your country or religion or ideology is great. Saying you are shit and your country is shit and all its vaunted heroes sucked cock and shat themselves incessantly tends to be ill rewarded.
The illusion is effective because we are all subconsciously schooled in it.
No. We subconsciously understand that England is better off than most parts of Africa because the English did smart things. That's why a lot of us darkies live here and don't want to return to where our parents or grandparents came from.
It has long shaped the history delivered to us at school
Sensible kids spend their time masturbating or day dreaming about Princesses with big knockers during History lessons. My mistake was to also do this during Mathematics lectures.
and, as we are not taught of the existence of the redacted and missing chapters,
e.g. those about African slave-raiders. They were very efficient. Indeed, I believe there are still plenty of efficient people smuggling operations in Africa. Come to think of it, when Olasugo was 3 years old MGM released 'Shaft in Africa' about an African-American detective who breaks up a people smuggling ring bringing Africans into Europe. I recall watching the movie in Kenya. It was not popular there. People already knew that they'd be better off emigrating. The movie even flopped in America. Blaxploitation must feature a super-rich 'Wakanda' not the impoverished reality of the mother continent.
I also recall an Indian scholar of French nationality who had researched the role played by his grandfather in getting France to surrender territory to independent India. He was invited to talk about this in that very place. Sadly, when his audience there found out that the man's grandfather was responsible for their losing the right to emigrate to Europe, they chased the fellow away.
we have no reason to go in search of them. This approach to the past is so powerful that it is capable – as I recently discovered – of triggering a form of cognitive dissonance.
This guy has convinced himself that his father's people were victims, not possible beneficiaries, of the transatlantic slave trade.
I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it. In those lectures, or in the question-and-answer sessions that follow them, I have appealed to audiences to recognise how the illusion operates.
They were laughing at you mate. You are complaining about what your father's people did to the ancestors of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American people.
None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery.
Once offered proper payment for recognizing nonsense, the fellow had no difficulty doing so at all. That's how cognitive dissonance works. Give me enough money and my cognition changes to what you want it to be. Beating is equally effective.
Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged.
It was the vehicle of the Non-Conformist Mill owners who wanted an end to the Corn Laws, Slavery and so forth. If you are a cotton or sugar manufacturer in Manchester, you don't want slave labour in the Indies doing 'value adding manufacturing' in line with the 'gravity model'.
An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school –
nobody is taught history at school. You read a few books in the library, if that's what you want to do. I suppose there may be 'History Boys' who need to go to Oxbridge so as to come out of the closet and then join the BBC and marry Elton John or whatever but such people don't greatly matter- at least not to working class darkies like yours truly. I'm lying. I'm as jealous as fuck of them. But then blokes like me don't matter at all even in our own scheme of things.
was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores.
That's true enough. Manchester didn't really impact much on Indian or African history. In the former case its crowing achievement was the Mody-Lees agreement. That didn't last long.
More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.
But the quantum of that power was less than the wind energy generated by one of my less noisy farts.
THE FORGOTTEN CHAPTER
One possible reason why I failed to make the obvious connections relates to my family history and how it shapes my thinking. In 1819, the year the Manchester and Salford yeomanry charged their horses into the huge crowd of working people at Peterloo – the event that inspired John Edward Taylor to found the Manchester Guardian
This cretin has confused the Manchester Observer, which Taylor was opposed to because of its stand on Peterloo, with the Guardian which only came out after its competitor was suppressed. This is a story about the wealthy pursuing what they wanted- viz. getting more parliamentary representation and less agricultural protection (i.e. being able to pay lower real wages)- while abandoning the radicals, the Trade Unionists and the 'Chartists' who demanded universal suffrage.
– my ancestors, on my mother’s side, were scraping a living from the fields outside the tiny town of Tranent, in the Scottish lowlands. Two decades earlier, in 1797, they had been living in Tranent when another cavalry unit, the Cinque Port Light Dragoons, had attacked another group of protesters. The people of Tranent had been protesting against the conscription of local men into the British militia during Britain’s wars against revolutionary France. The number of people killed in what became known as the Tranent massacre is uncertain. Estimates range from around 12 to 20, a death toll comparable to that at Peterloo. Some people in Scotland regard the massacre at Tranent as that nation’s equivalent to Peterloo.
Meanwhile, some Yorubas were selling others into slavery. Consider the following letter written by a Nigerian historian- Dear Yoruba people, my name is Professor Banji Akintoye. This letter comes to you as an overdue apology from the several generations of the Yoruba race that are dispersed around the world. This is not an ordinary letter; it is an epistle borne out of deep revelation and shared by many children of God of Yoruba extraction all over the universe.
“Predating colonialism and slavery in Africa in the 18 and 19 centuries, the Yoruba race had engaged in internal conflicts, resulting in marauding, intra-tribal and internecine warfare. Historians mostly agree that such civil unrests did not result in commercialisation of human captives until the era of colonialism and slave trade on the African soil. Yet, we have to agree that foreigners did not do this without the cooperation of some of the indigenous people, the Yoruba.
“According to the revelation referenced above, a segment of the captive Yoruba sons and daughters hauled into slavery looked back and placed a curse on the land and the people that violated their humanities by selling them into slavery. Furthermore, Holy Spirit revealed that some among the Yoruba captives committed suicide by jumping off the captive ships into their deaths deep into the Atlantic Ocean, while others simply placed the curse and endured the shame by continuing the captive’s journey. For this, the need for reconciliation and unreserved apologies is real and past due.
“Against this backdrop of atrocity of historical proportions unleashed against the peoples of Black Africa, which escalated into the full-blown slavery, the current generation of the Yoruba seeks to tender an unreserved, heart-felt apology on behalf of our past generations of forefathers, monarchs and chiefs who participated in slavery.”
This working-class history of political protest and the struggle for rights is every bit as personal to me as the history of imperial expansion that, a century after the Tranent massacre, saw my Nigerian ancestors forced into the British empire – literally at gunpoint.
The Brits gave the excuse of ending the slave-trade to take over Yoruba land. The problem was that the increased market for cash crops itself motivated an internal slave trade. It must be said that West Africans rose very rapidly in education, commerce, the Church and the professions. The likely future success of the people of that region was already apparent. Thus 'Scientific Racism' against Africans was completely unempirical and relied on 'phenomenological' arguments. Sadly, in the thinking of people like Pearson, Statistical methodology became infected with that Teutonic type of stupidity.
And it was the working people killed at Tranent and Peterloo to whom my mind rushed when approached by the Scott Trust. At that moment I fell – utterly and completely – for the exact same trick I have spent years urging others to guard against. The knowledge that the cotton that enabled John Edward Taylor and his fellow investors to found the Guardian was produced by enslaved people in the American south remained sealed away in a separate compartment, overwhelmed by an involuntary and unexamined synaptic rush.
Isn't it wonderful what a little money from a Trust can do?
When we do take a moment to think about the horrors of American slavery we rarely make connections to the mills of Manchester.
Indians make it to their own cotton boom which led to mills in Mumbai and Ahmedabad and the financing of the Mahacrackpot.
Knowing how a trick is done did not – it turned out – render me in the least immune to its power, I am embarrassed to say.
Prostitutes are said 'to turn a trick'. The changing hands of money is the only magic here.
Indeed, I didn’t recognise any of this until the summer of 2020, when Alex Graham, then the chair of the Scott Trust, asked me to help set up a research project on Taylor and the 11 Manchester merchants who founded the Guardian and their links to slavery. At that moment I instantly saw the connections my mind had, somehow, bypassed three years earlier.
The same thing would happen to me if they paid me.
The historians who were later appointed to carry out research into the finances and business dealings of the Guardian’s founders found evidence that nearly all were connected to slavery.
If paid enough, they'd have found that nearly all were connected to sucking off homeless Nigerian dudes on a planet far far away.
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