Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
SWEET AND BUCOLIC SLAVERY
I’m
not going to say it was an epiphany, because I had thought about it often
before. But when I saw my thoughts confirmed in black-and-white, I felt oddly
comforted that the world had moved on a little.
Let me put this into context.
We were staying with our son
in the North of England. He lives in a village outside Durham but, twice a
week, he commutes to and from his work in Lancaster – a drive of two hours or
so each way, almost from coast to coast. He invited us one day to accompany him
on his drive. So we found ourselves whizzing across England; past a pub which
our son assured us sold the best ale in the north; past two or three ruined
castles with villages straggling about them; past fertile farmlands and the
obscenely huge estate of the ennobled Raby family, where the road has to run
for miles in a ring, and out of its direct course, around the walls enclosing
Raby land; and later past huge, daunting and infertile moors.
Arriving in Lancaster, our
son headed for his office and left us to ramble around the town for the day.
It may, once upon a time,
have been one of the busiest ports in England and it is officially a city, but
walking its streets, it is hard to think of it as anything other than a large
town.
We headed for a café first,
of course. We climbed up to the formidable rose-coloured Lancaster Castle,
which, until just a few decades ago, was still functioning as one of Her
Majesty’s Prisons. We looked into the old medieval priory church,
protestantised since the creation of the Anglican Church, but still with a
placard saying prayers were offered for this church at the shrine of Our Lady
of Walsingham, so suggesting a strong Anglo-Catholic tendency. And, though the
day was overcast and rather drizzly, we wandered by the canals, admiring the
painted houseboats and barges floating on what had once been one of the great
feats of the early Industrial Revolution, before the railways
came along and
trumped the canals as a system of long-distance haulage. By the canalside, a
good restaurant served us a good lunch – bouillabaisse and a Spanish red wine
for her; battered bass and a large local stout for me. Are there any greater
culinary delights after you have been sightseeing?
But amidst all this was the
near-epiphany.
And then the section
honouring the 18th century entrepreneurs, who had made the town the
prosperous mercantile centre that it once was. In old frames, their respectable
faces stared out from their commissioned portraits, and the faces of their
comfortable and well-dressed wives. Held up for our admiration were the solid,
industrious people who had once made personal fortunes, built their mansions,
engaged in philanthropy and made Lancaster great.
Most of them made their
fortunes in Virginia and the West Indies, discreet placards told us.
At which point my sceptical
and condescending mind went into overdrive. “Is this little local museum going to be honest and tell us exactly
how they made their fortunes?”, I wondered, knowing full well that anyone
making a fortune in Virginia and the West Indies in the 18th century
must have been engaged in the slave trade.
I was too quick off the mark,
for turning a corner, I discovered a whole room openly and honestly
acknowledging the reality of slavery. There were prints of West Indian slave
plantations, the well-known cutaway image of how slaves were crammed into the
holds of slavers’ ships, and much accurate historical data. A large wall-chart
showed the notorious traders’ “triangle” – from England down to West Africa to
buy (or kidnap) slaves; over to Virginia and the West Indies to sell the
slaves, and to buy cotton or tobacco or other marketable commodities; and then
back to England to sell the cotton or tobacco at a huge profit before repeating
the voyage.
Thus were Lancashire mills
supplied with cotton. Thus did the Industrial Revolution get powered. Thus were
fortunes made by those solid entrepreneurs. Thus were local philanthropies
funded. The hard reality, openly admitted here, was that for at least two
centuries slavery was one of the mainstays of the economy of Britain (and other
European countries). Lancaster and other thriving ports throve because of
slavery.
So often I have been bemused
by the fact that traditional English history books trumpeted the achievements
of the likes of William Wilberforce for bringing an end to the British slave
trade, and yet hardly mentioned that trade before they get to its abolition. It
was an interesting historical legerdemain. Wilberforce et al were (quite
justifiably) praised, but the centrality of slavery to the old British economy
was virtually ignored. This was transparently in the interests of suggesting
the unblemished fairness and “decency” of the English.
So this was my (sort of)
epiphany. The happy realization that even a local English museum, set on lauding
its local heroes, is nowadays not above facing the morally indefensible side of
its history. It is good to know that the old glossing of evil is no longer
acceptable.
The little museum did contain
a few mitigating phrases in its expose. It noted that, as the slave trade was
then an everyday reality, it was easy for the families and dependents of
entrepreneurs to ignore its reality. Besides, slavery was far away, did not
impinge directly upon most English lives, and could easily be pushed to the
back of everybody’s minds, in just the same way that we ignore the Asian and
South American sweatshops that make our cheap goods. The only images of slavery
most English people (not directly involved in the trade) ever saw were prints
and paintings, which presented British slave colonies in almost romantic and
bucolic terms. Even today, looking at such images conveys to us a beguiling
unreality. We have to look hard and think hard before we realize that we are
looking at the enslaved and their privileged owners.
Lancaster’s Maritime Museum
is not a place that tourists are ever likely to flock to. But it is proof that,
in its attitudes, one corner of the world has moved on.
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