Slavery did not make Britain rich, finds report

15 comments

1. No shit. It made a few individuals who chose to engage in trading and transporting them rich. We didn’t start the slave trade, but we did abolish it. We also never had slaves in the UK.

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3. British colonialism was always about generating private wealth and using public funds to subsidise the losses. Slavery is the perfect example, whilst it was allowed in the Empire it created massive amounts of wealth for people that ran the trade and those who owned Carribbean plantations. When the government outlawed it, they specifically chose to pay owners for slaves freed. That was a debt that the UK only finished paying off in 2015, that’s right you had modern-day workers paying taxes that essentially paid 18th century slavers. Another example would be India, massive profits for the private corporations and businesses, protected (after the East India company) by public British taxes.

4. That entire era was transferring wealth and blood from the poor to the upper classes.

   Even at a netloss to the nation. Hideous times.

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6. Typical telegraph shite. Why are their articles even allowed here?

7. The report doesn’t seem to acknowledge the role slavery had in caribbean in pretty much creating and supporting the sugar plantations there.

   The very same sugar plantations that were the reason we gave up North America during the Revolutionary War and that funded the whole British Empire for the majority of the 18th century.

8. “The transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, but we do not usually hear the claim that ‘brewing financed the Industrial Revolution’ or ‘sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution’.”

   Not this book is talking about the actual transatlantic slave trade, not the British using slaves in places like the Caribbean which nobody argues make Britain rich. Read any literature of the period similar to Pride and Prejudice. Those guys got their money from oversea plantations.

9. See I told you they did it to help other nations develop! /s

   u/s what is the point of whitewashing the British empire at this point?

10. ‘Institute of Economic Affairs’. 

    Their skill in understanding Economics is why your mortgage is currently very expensive. They wrote the Truss budget. 

11. Based on work by the **Institute of Economic Affairs**, one of Britain’s oldest and least transparently funded right wing think tanks.

12. I mean define Britain. It certainly made some people in Britain very rich. As someone who is half black by way of the British Caribbean and half white by way of a Scottish mining village I know what my white ancestors didn’t personally gain a penny from the subjugation of my other parents ancestors *but* they did gain from the large endowments left by these families. 

    Think of all the universities and grand building built on the backs of a few but at least those that were fucked over *in* Britain get to enjoy some of the results. My family in St Vincent got less than jack shit. 

13. Funny, I’ve been getting told that slavery was the sole source of British wealth and power for years.

14. No problem having a statue saying “so and so, dude invented this which was cool but they was also a bit of a cn*t” everyone’s happy.

15. It was the relentless exploitation of our colonial holdings instead!

    Thanks for everything India, and sorry about the famines. Enjoy your railways.