April 15th 2025
For the April meeting, our humanists group welcomed Bernard North who gave a thought-provoking talk on the history of slavery. With thanks to our friends at the Ludlow Probus Club for the summary.
Bernard commenced by advising that many of our national institutions had connections to slavery – including the Bank of England. Britain’s prosperity today was founded on profits from slavery. We tend to concentrate on the British involvement in transporting slaves from West Africa to the United States. But slavery and slave trading was global, going back thousands of years.
Both Christians and Muslims enslaved people who were captured in warfare. The oldest known slave society was in the Iran/Iraq region between 6000-2000 BC, with the oldest known reference is 1754 BC. Middle East Muslims believed slavery was in the service of Islam and mankind as the slaves of God, perpetuated in the name of Abdullah – which means ‘slave of Allah’.
The Muslim empire had a huge slave trade, an estimated 7.2 million crossing the Sahara to the Arab world between the mid-7th and 20th century. Records in the Middle East show 10,000 slaves could be sold in one day– Julius Caesar is noted as selling thousands in a single day. Ancient Greece could be argued to be the world’s first true ‘slave society’. At the height of the Roman Empire, up to 30 per cent of the total population were enslaved.
In Anglo Saxon Britain, slavery was prevalent and continued under the Vikings. Britons later became victims, between 1530 and 1600 when Barbary Coast corsairs took about 1.25 million white slaves from Europe into north and west Africa.
Slavery had been endemic in Africa thousands of years before Europeans became engaged in it. The transatlantic slave trade of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries was to service sugar production in Brazil which demanded vast amounts of labour. The West African kingdoms captured fellow Africans and sold them into slavery for goods and arms. These enslaved people were then transported to the colonies in the New World to work with cotton, sugar, rum, tobacco and other commodities.
Earlier, the Spanish and Portuguese pioneered and dominated the slave trade. Britian became involved in 1640. The trade was triangular with Bristol and Liverpool being the dominant ports the ships returned to with their commodities before returning to Africa with trade goods. Between 1525 and 1866 about 12.5 million Africans were shipped in about 35,000 transatlantic voyages.
The Quakers were the first to turn against slavery and William Wilberforce MP (1759-1833) was a leading abolitionist. He died just after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 became law. His response to those who thought slavery should not have been abolished: “You can choose to look the other way, but never again can you say that you never knew.”
Whilst Britain was late in becoming involved in the trade, it was one of the first nations to abolish it. Slavery continues today in one form or another across the world and we may never be entirely free of it. Thomas Jefferson, in his Declaration of Independence said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
At the Commonwealth Summit in October 2024, fresh calls were made for the UK to pay reparations for its slave trade role, but along with other nations refused. (In 1833 the British government agreed £20,000,000 compensation for slave owners – but nothing was paid to slaves.)
This was a complex and fascinating subject, and Bernard threw up a huge number of facts which many of us had probably not previously known. A truly absorbing talk.