Of the millions of slaves taken from Africa and sold in the new world, only about 5% of them went to America-BBC, “How Britain is facing up to its hidden slavery history”

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“About 30 million slaves were uprooted from Africa and sold in the new world,...but what a lot of people don’t know is that only something like 5% of those slaves went to America.“...The amount of taxpayer money used to pay off British slave owners for loss of their slaves “was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. You have to ask, how come your tax money was paying off this compensation [to British slave owners], and you didn’t know about it, never learned about it in school.”…Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves” over a period 245 years beginning in 1562.

July 3, 2020, “How Britain is facing up to its hidden slavery history,” BBC.com, Holly Williams

“An estimated 2.3 million African slaves were sent to the British Caribbean, but compared to narratives about the US, these stories have been rarely told….

(“Journalist turned playwright Juliet Gilkes Romero has written new play The Whip”..)

[Journalist-turned-playwright Juliet Gilkes] Romero believes it’s…who gets to tell what stories on the global stage. “We hear about black Americans, but we don’t hear the British stories. About 30 million slaves were uprooted from Africa and sold in the new world,…but what a lot of people don’t know is that only something like 5% of those slaves went to America,” she points out; 55% were sold to Brazil and Spanish South America and 35% were sold in the West Indies [for British sugar plantations]. “And yet the American narrative is first and foremost. That’s because of Hollywood–unless we’re telling these stories, people don’t know.”…

But Britain’s involvement is now starting to be subject to greater attention:...The Whip is, in fact, one of several British slavery narratives to get a high-profile airing….

Romero was commissioned to write the work in 2015–but the subject gained traction when, in 2018, HM Treasury tweeted: “Here’s today’s surprising #FridayFact. Millions of you have helped end the slave trade through your taxes…The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.”…

The British government spent £20 million, a staggering 40% of its budget in 1833, to buy freedom for slaves. That’s equivalent to approximately £20bn today, making it one of the biggest ever government bailouts. The cost was so high, the vast loans the government took out to fund it were only just paid off in 2015….

The money didn’t go to the slaves, but to their owners. That’s right: the British taxpayer, until five years ago, was paying off debts that the government racked up in order to compensate British slave owners for their loss of ‘property’….

And what’s even more shocking is that supposedly freed slaves were in fact committed to six to 12 years of further service as unpaid ‘apprentices’, meaning slave owners were compensated to the tunes of millions – and continued to get free labour. It wasn’t until 1838 that these…apprenticeships were abolished too, and slaves in the British Empire were truly emancipated….

Records show that ancestors of former Prime Minister David Cameron and authors George Orwell and Graham Greene all profited at the time from these massive pay-outs, as did Prime Minister William Gladstone, who helped his father claim for £106,769. That’s a payment of around £83 million in today’s money, to just a single family.…

“What blew me away was here I was, a working woman, a descendent of the transatlantic slave trade, and I helped pay off this massive loan,” says Romero, whose parents came to the UK from Trinidad and Barbados in the 1960s. “That added urgency to what I wanted to write-I just thought I’ve got to get this out there.”…

Romero feels frustrated that the British public too often simply don’t know the real stories about our own shameful past – that, historically, we haven’t been told by our politicians, through our education systems, or through our art….

Romero says…“You have to wonder how much it was suppressed. You have to ask, how come your tax money was paying off this compensation, and you didn’t know about it, never learned about it in school.””…

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Added: “Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves” over a period 245 years beginning in 1562 during reign of Elizabeth 1.

“Life on the [sugar] plantations was extremely hard with a third of newly imported slaves dying within three years. This created a constant demand for new slaves to replace them.”…“The sugar colonies were Britain’s most valuable colonies.…Between 1750 and 1780, about 70% of the [UK] government’s total income came from taxes on goods from its colonies.…The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire....Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves” over a period 245 years beginning in 1562 during the reign of Elizabeth 1….Slave Trade was the richest part of Britain’s trade in the 18th century.”

“London, Sugar and Slavery” permanent exhibition “documents how British involvement in slavery came about because of the growing consumption of tea and coffee. …This meant an increased need for sugar, and for cheap labor on colonial sugar cane plantations. On display is a tall collar with long spikes that slaves were forced to wear so that they would snag among the trees if they tried to escape.”.…”By the mid-1700s there were approximately 15,000 black servants-many of them slaves-in London.”

“"The formation of the City of London was shaped significantly by sugar,” said Nick Draper, one of the lead researchers on University College London’s groundbreaking Legacies of British Slave Ownership project. “Merchants in London would advance credit to planters and guarantee remittances to slave traders so that London merchant houses became the center of this economic system built on Caribbean slavery.”” Bloomberg

 

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