Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain and the Slave Trade

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain was a key player in the transportation of millions of enslaved Africans to the colonies. Their labour in often brutal conditions was a vital component in enriching Britain and turning it into a global superpower. The business of slavery did not just make plantation owners and other elites wealthy though, in fact, its reach touched every aspect and stratum of British society. From the money to found schools, to welsh cloth makers, publicans, chocolate makers to Sir Isaac Newton and the scientific revolution Britain truly was a slave society, even if those slaves were thousands of miles away in the Americas or the Caribbean. To explore the hidden history of slavery Dan is joined by Moya Lothian-McLean, a journalist and presenter of the fantastic Human Resources podcast which examines this issue. Moya and Dan discuss the role of slavery in British economics and society and also her very personal connection to this story as the descendent of both Black African Slaves and White slave owners or overseers.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm just lying on my bunk, taking a little break, enjoying a day of intense activity on a beautiful square-rigged wooden ship off the south coast of England. I'm here in a cabin with four people in it, four of us from Team History Hit, snoring away last night, I tell you they did. But all day we're filming on this wonderful tall ship, making a programme, not about Nelson, no, there's too many programmes about him, filming on this wonderful tall ship, making a programme, not about Nelson, no, there's too many programmes about him, about the men of his fleet,

and some women, in fact, the men and women of Nelson's fleet, who collectively made Britain the most dominant maritime force the world had ever known. We're doing that because, at least this month, it's the anniversary of Trafalgar. I'll be releasing this programme

on historyhit.tv. Please do check it out. It's like Netflix for history, lots of wonderful history documentaries. And I will also be doing a special podcast on the Battle of Trafalgar. Now, usually I do these introductions and I say this has nothing to do with the content of this podcast. But I'm thrilled to say it does have something to do with the content of this podcast, because while the Royal Navy was smashing the French and Spanish in the early years of the 19th century, it was also guarding Britain's merchant ships

that were carrying enslaved Africans to plantations in the New World and bringing back the sugar, the produce of those plantations, back to Europe. Happily, just a couple of years after Trafalgar, the slave trade was abolished and those same naval ships found themselves in the position of having to suppress that trade, now illegal, in enslaved Africans. Slavery is being talked about everywhere at the moment. It feels like we're having a reappraisal of Britain and other European nations' roles in the transatlantic slave trade. And my guest on the podcast today has been part of that reappraisal. She is the excellent Moya Lothian

Maclean, with a very particular personal story that connects her to that trade in enslaved Africans and owning enslaved Africans and she has got a new podcast series out on the slave trade and slavery itself and I want to catch up with her and see what she learned it was a great pleasure talking to her she's a new talent on the scene she's a new bright star in the firmament and it was great to get on the podcast so everyone enjoy this wonderful podcast with Moya and go and subscribe to historyhit.tv. Moya, great to have you on the pod. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to talk to you.

Well, first of all, let's just start because your new project is so interesting. But I'm really interested in your personal connection, just like I'm a product of the Atlantic world, my Anglo-Canadian-ness. What about you? Okay, so my background is quite interesting. It's something that I hadn't really thought about until recently properly in this project as part of that. So I'm mixed race black. My dad is Jamaican or was Jamaican rather, and my mum is white British. So my dad left when I was quite young and then proceeded to promptly die, which was very rude when you're trying to discover things about your history. So the history I have from that side of my family has been handed down both orally and secondhand.

So when I got the call to be like, oh, we're starting this new podcast from Broccoli and it's about slavery, are you interested potentially in, know a history and b this particular history I was like yes one because I did history university I've always been so fascinated by history but two because I had this personal connection where I haven't really got much insight into the black side the Jamaican side of my family my Lothian I know is for my dad there are lots of Lothians in Jamaica. It's the fifth highest incidence of the surname in the world. And the other countries are all ex-British colonies. So you do the math. I think it was 1.32% of slave owners in Jamaica were Scottish. So there's that side of it. And other things I've been told is that my paternal grandma was

descended from the Maroons, which is the name they had for the slaves who resisted and escaped and went off and lived in the mountains. And I think there was a white Scottish great-grandfather also on my paternal grandma's side, who'd clearly gone to Jamaica as part of that sort of colonial migration and plantation society. So when I was asked if I wanted to be involved with this podcast, as I said, I thought it'd be a really good chance to dig up some of my social history. If I can't access my personal history through my father and track down those roots I thought okay well what's the next best thing discovering this history in general exploring the hidden history of slavery and plantation society and how it both impacts the family that I have in Jamaica and would have impacted my white British ancestors here and I didn't quite realize how relevant it would be to

me honestly like some of the interviews we've done have been so so close to home and the second season which we're working on now I'm not afraid to say that there's been several interviews where I've ended up crying in them because they've got so close to my own personal history I mean they've been so sort of emotional going on that journey especially when we got we're doing a lot right now on Scotland which I'm very excited for people to hear about, but looking into the history of Scottish migration and connecting it to my own history was very affecting. I'm afraid, let's go there, because you opened the door there. Let's go there. What aspects of it in particular, what were you able to find out?

So obviously, like, I can't pin down exactly where the loathing comes from this stage, because I'm not a genealogist. I'm not quite um not yet famous enough to be on who do you think you are um so I think it was that I was hearing stories about either mixed-race children who were brought back to Scotland for their education a lot of Scottish people who involved in either slave owning or went over as overseers they would have these mixed-race children they would bring them back to Scotland the experiences of those children was just so fascinating to me these lives were brought into such color in a way that I hadn't heard about the sort of enslaved lives because I can trace my white ancestors quite easily we've got a big family tree going that far back but when you're tracing your history of your black side especially if you're descended from slaves it is really

really difficult it's what I call a black hole so hearing about the lives of mixed-race children it felt very parallel to things I'd experienced but also just hearing about these people these young men particularly who went over from Scotland because it was primarily young men and they often went over as part of this colonial migration project because they really embraced even when Scotland had this fierce sense of independence there was a real embrace of what the British empire had to offer after the union so they would go over to places like Jamaica and Grenada and they would come back and they'd have either mixed-race children or I just imagined it in connection to my own life and I imagined you know the roots of my family name Lothian starting from

that and I suddenly had this I would call it almost I guess I can't ever have insight insight into the lives of enslaved people but it suddenly brought the lives of my ancestors into such sharp focus it just felt so emotional it was a lot of pain because hearing about people's lives who were enslaved it really drains you but also I felt like almost proud that I got to uncover this history and I got to sort of honor them in that way when I couldn't go back and like know exactly who my great-great-grandmother was or what her daily life was like on a plantation so in that sense it was very very affecting and also just I think anything connected to identity and discovering more of who

you are is extremely impactful and I hope that's been something that audience members will have taken as well especially if they are descended from slaves but also if they're descended from white British people who are involved in this plantation society there's a quote in the first episode that I insisted on including which is from Bob Marley who was also a mixed race Jamaican and it's if you don't know your history you don't know where you're coming from and I say I don't know I'm coming from I don't know I'm going to because when you haven't got that part of your history you haven't got that part of grounding in yourself and I do think it feels like you're unmoored you don't know where you sit so in that sense to get back to just

Scotland particularly I hadn't thought much about my Scottish side I just had always been like yeah I've got two Scottish names but suddenly this is why I have two Scottish names this is where it's come from this is how it fits into this wider pattern of history and I think fitting yourself into a social history as well is really really like impactful. Every time I read new books about slave trade or listen to podcasts like yours I'm just struck by the tentacles that reached into parts of Britain that we don't think of as being connected with the slave trade. And you've got some pretty stunning examples. I mean, that seems to be one of the things that you guys really went out hard to try and connect up the dots. Just give me, whether it's Newton or whatever it is, give me some of those examples. Yeah, of course. So I think one of my

favourites is probably the Newton example. We use Newton as a jumping off point to look, Isaac Newton that is, to look at how the Plantation Society impacted on scientific development. So we looked at Newton and his theory of gravity. And one of the things we looked at was how he got the data to prove that. And he used slave colonies. He used data from slave colonies such as Martinique and Virginia, because we have this idea of science existing in a vacuum. It doesn't exist in a vacuum science is rational but only as rational as the society it's produced by so scientific development was very very entwined with plantation society and colonies and it goes from things to like

collecting samples for Kew Gardens or you know the naturist who went out and got all these samples to things like gynecology lots of medical knowledge we have about gynecology comes from plantation societies particularly developments in america so that was one of the stories that i was like this is going to ground people it's going to make them look at their everyday lives and the things they take for granted and the you know the theories we have that they see is siloed off from the slave trade or plantation societies and they'd be like oh i see how this entwines and there was another one we did on Welsh cloth, which was potentially, I don't know if you can have a favourite story about plantation societies, but it's about this cloth that we discovered in the 1700s in Wales.

There were these farming communities in sort of mid Wales, like Merrithinshire, which is now Powys. And they were producing this cloth. And it was this very thick, hard wool. And this cloth had another name. It was called Negro cloth because it was sent out to the plantations for the enslaved populations to wear. And we saw that these farming communities, for a brief time, the mortality rate of their children went down because their fortunes had increased a bit because of this cloth that was being sold by very ordinary Welsh labourers. of this cloth that was being sold by very ordinary Welsh labourers. And it really contradicted the mainstream impression of the slave trade as we just have these plantation owners and these elites

who benefit from the slave trade and all the money went into the banks, etc. And these beautiful buildings that we see in our cities. And that's what the slave trade is. But it wasn't. The slave trade went right down to the ordinary working people. It was a society. It was a plantation society. I find when i make programs and write about things i actually end up feeling like i know less than i did when i started it just makes me confused and clouded how did you feel going through this project i mean you start you go slavery is the most evil thing on earth and then when you read things like that how does it change your thinking does it reinforce your thinking where are you now where are you on this stuff

where am i it's a good question well we're still midway through seasons two and three so there's a lot more of this project to go but i think probably the overwhelming thing that i've discovered is maybe like nuance i don't know if that's quite the right word to apply because the slave trade was one of those barbaric things ever and the more i discover about it the scale of it was incredible. I did an episode recently on the Portuguese slave trade and the amount of slaves that were shipped to Brazil from Africa was the same amount of people who live in Scotland today.

So when you get scales like that, you're like, oh my goodness. But it reminded me that everything happens within its context and that we can never be complacent enough to assume that something that barbaric wouldn't happen again. Because if the context is there and if we create never be complacent enough to assume that something that barbaric wouldn't happen again. Because if the context is there, and if we create the conditions for it, and the profit motives, and we justify it in so many different ways, it can very easily happen. One of the things about the slave trade and this story about slavery is looking at the different empires that were involved in their own individual slave trade, such as the Portuguese, the British,

and the different ways they came up with justifying it. So the Portuguese empire, Catholicism was often used to sort of justify the slave trade. And it was almost like a salvation thing. Whereas in Britain, we obviously invented these racial codes and started codifying people as black or white. Blackness came into being and the idea of being white came into being through the slave trade, through things like the Barbados slave codes, the Virginia slave codes, race as a construct, which really we're talking about ethnicity, but they call it race. Race as a construct came into being through the slave trade. And I think what it's taught me is that we can justify anything if we try hard enough. And we can never, never be so arrogant as to think that we won't slip into those things again,

just because, you know, we're at a different time in history because history is not linear. History is very sort of choppy. And I think what it's taught me as well is that there's always another story to tell about something we assume we know. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about slavery.

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There are new episodes every week. One of the key lessons I always take from history is like, if you can see good Christian, even progressive people like Gladstone supporting the slave trade at the beginning of his career, then rather than condemning them, what that makes me think is, I turn that kind of spotlight on myself

and think, well, of course, because I'm the one driving a car around in the middle of a climate crisis. I'm the one buying from China when there's genocide going on in Western China. So actually, I think that's right. I think that's why history makes, well, it's always a conversation of the present, but that's what it makes me think.

Coming back to your work, we're in the middle of a national conversation at the moment about slavery. A lot of Brits get very upset when we're talking about slavery. You're making people feel less good about the history of this country and what do you say to that what's your kind of response because you're now part of this conversation well that's a very funny thing to think that i'm part of that conversation my response to that that people think that by talking about these histories they're making themselves feel less good about the country is we've got enough already that makes you feel less good about the history of britain even if you're just looking domestically if you just want

your focus you want to ignore the entire british empire you want to just look domestically there is so much in our history that's unsavory that doesn't make you feel good about being british we've got massacres you know you've got peterloo you've got all kinds of put downs of the population rising up against horrible leaders and you've got um henry the eighth burning down all the churches and you know our own versions of inquisitions so i think it's obviously much deeper than that when they're talking about this makes me feel less good about the history of britain what they're talking about i think is that they feel it's almost a foreign history that they feel it's not connected to to Britain because it happened far away as far as they're concerned.

It wasn't located on these shores and it involved millions of people who were black and people still other blackness in the UK and see it as almost a foreign thing. They don't see it as British history. That's the problem. That's what makes them feel less good about Britain. It's because they don't see it as British history,

but it is. That's one of the things we wanted to do with this podcast. And Renee, who is the CEO of Broccoli Content, who makes the podcast, and it was her vision to do this podcast, from the very beginning, she said, this has to be not just black British history. This is British history. And we were very strident on the fact we didn't want to put out during Black History Month, because otherwise people would just see it as a sort of token project as opposed to being a history project,

a history documentary series about all of our history. So yeah, speaking of which, like names, things we're all so familiar with. And statues, of course, we've got James II statues around the place, head of the Royal African Company. But I mean, let's take Lady Hawkins School that you talk about in Herefordshire. Was she Sir John Hawkins' wife or descendant? Yeah, so Lady Hawkins School is a school located in my home county of Herefordshire. Was she Sir John Hawkins's wife or descendant? Yeah, so Lady Hawkins School is a school located in my home county of Herefordshire. And when I was growing up, people were like, oh yeah, that's the slave school. That's the slave school. And I was like, what's that mean? And Lady Hawkins was the second wife of Sir John Hawkins, who's called the father of the English slave trade. He was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth.

His coat of arms was actually, by the end of his life, a bound enslaved African with clasped hands. So very, very savoury. And this school was the point where I wanted to start the podcast from. One, because it was so close to home, literally. And two, because it's located in a place where people would never really bring the slavery story home. And one of the key things is like, this is a hidden history and it affects every sort of inch of this country. And also what it did was it brought up the nuances when you're talking about slavery history people often think you just follow the money so for example lady hawkins bequeathed this school after her death with money left in her will and we have no way of knowing if that money is related to sir john hawkins we don't know if he left her like this amount of cash which i think

was something like quarter of a mil in today's currency. Quarter of a mil cash being like, you've got to sell the school once you're dead, because that probably didn't happen. But what it does is it bears his name through her because she took his name. It's now on that school. It's forever. And the school was very proud of their connections to Sir John Hawkins because the head of history wrote in, I think 2008, a big thing for the BBC about it being a school connected to slavery but then after the Black Lives Matter movement we started being like hmm maybe this isn't great that we've got all these places named after people connected to

slavery suddenly no no no no no we have no there was a big denial on the part of the school that it was connected in the same way as they'd previously affirmed and I feel that that's the wrong way to deal with things I think addressing history and confronting and looking at it in all its complexities is the only way to sort of come to terms with it rather than suppressing it which i know people have said that about you know we can't have statues or we shouldn't have schools named after it and i do think that things like statues which are a celebration are something that we should probably reconsider or recontextualize or put explainers on i think liverpool's doing this brilliant thing where they are putting little gnosis around the city with

ways you can go further into the history of street names that are named after people who were heavily involved in the slave trade so things like that recontextualizing reframing and giving more information is i think the key to coming to terms with history. So I'm not completely 100% on the renaming, but I'm also not completely, we shouldn't take down statues, we shouldn't rename things. It's weird for me, because I've got this little strange thing that I'll tell you, I guess I'm telling everybody now, which is that my kids are obsessed with Sir Francis Draco. I used to tell them about the first Englishman to sail around the world.

And we went to see the Golden Hind in London. They love going aboard and everything. And then when they can't sleep at night, what I tell them to do is just for some reason, we slipped into this weird thing. It started on a plane journey. I would tell my daughter the story of bizarrely Sir Francis Drake singing the King of Spain's Beard in Cadiz before the Spanish Armada. Anyway, she's bloodthirsty. She loves that story. And it made her go to sleep instantly. So now we have a joke. Whenever you can't go to sleep, you think about Sir Francis Drake sailing and the waves crashing over his bowels as they're going through the Pacific for the first time. And I'm realizing that I'm giving my kids this happy, safe memory of a guy who was instantly connected with the slave trade.

They're going to grow up and be like, my dad was a total psychopath. What is the answer to this problem we got here moya i'm coming to you i need help um well they can always listen to your podcast when they're ready so unless they already don't or do they do they certainly don't we can contextualize it and i can provide more context i guess i have a good friend who is um black british west african british and he went back to west africa to make a pro-bunner slave trade and he discovered his ancestors were people who sold slaves and it's interesting for you because you have this mixed heritage so you've got this like literally this contradiction lives within you right it's weird

well yeah I mean like I don't know for sure like exactly what my white ancestors were up to although on my Jamaican side I'm sure that when there was white mixed in there was probably up to no good but it's interesting i think also it does speak to again a lack of understanding about the mechanisms of the slave chain because there were plenty of black african people in west africa who were involved in the slave trade who sold slaves slavery is a very very old trade it was around before the transatlantic slave trade the transatlantic slave trade simply codified it into sort of majority white people enslaving black Africans and took it up a level. It scaled it up, basically, which is what all capitalism does. They invented capitalism with like, let's immediately expand.

So I think when you're dealing with these contradictions, all of history is a contradiction. There's so many contradictions in history. If you can't deal with contradictions throughout history, then you shouldn't be looking at history and studying history you have to be prepared for complexities you have to be prepared to be challenged you have to be prepared to put aside the narratives you think you know and you can still hold something like slavery was mostly perpetuated by white people and it was the most barbaric thing while still understanding that black africans were involved in the slave trade and very happily involved in the slave trade and especially elite black africans would sell other af other Africans you'd either be captured as part of war or if you're

poor sometimes you'd just be abducted and taken and that was something that happened and we have to learn to deal with that and not just codify it through a contemporary lens where we're like okay white is a fixed category and black is a fixed category and not understanding that those things are flexible and changed and race is a relatively recent invention as well but it's 400 years old. Before we finish talk to me about Cadbury's because obviously

the chocolate I mean where's the harm in Cadbury's but obviously that's just a great example of a brand such a prominent part of British life

that has got this hidden history. Yeah well Cadbury's I mean we know it's now owned by an American company so the actual problem in Cadbury's

is that they changed the formula it tastes shit now but Truth Truth the actual problem in Cadbury's is that they changed the formula. It tastes shit now. But the truth. No, the thing about Cadbury's was very interesting. So William Cadbury, they were all Quakers. They were opposed to the slave trade. However, for a period of about nine years, they kept getting their cocoa from Sao Tome,

which was a Portuguese plantation. Slavery, although it was technically abolished, hadn't really been abolished. It was very much still a slave plantation. You had people working there their entire lives, then it would pass on to their children. And the Capris were aware of this and opposed it. However, they didn't stop buying their beans from there until they could find a new supplier, which I think is a very succinct sort of demonstration of where priorities lie. You can have good intentions, but if the profits profits are threatened your good intentions will be put off until you've sorted that bit out first but cat breeze is really just a jumping off point to look at things like in general

chocolate because the history of chocolate is very deeply bound up with slavery sugar for example until that became shipped in in mass quantities and exported from slave colonies chocolate didn't become the chocolate we know. So it's all part and sugar, you know, I think Cuba was the premier, which was a huge slave colony, which the Irish were very involved in. A story that we're doing in the second season. So listen out for that. Yeah, sugar was a huge exportation from slave colonies. And it's all these things.

When you really deep it, when you look at the scope of it, you think everything is bound up in it because it was a society, a plantation society. It wasn't just this atomized thing that existed over there and then it stopped. It's like it built and shaped the society as we know it. And once you come to terms with that, the history starts threatening you a lot less once you realize that.

Yeah, I agree. I learned yesterday that the Saint-Domingue, which is a part of one Caribbean island, had the same value of trade just before the French Revolution as the USA. Unbelieve. That is also big news to me. But yeah, that's as much as it was worth. These places were profit makers and it impacted everything from our railways

to the way medicines run, like the way scientific development went. And digging into those histories has been so illuminating. And I hope people have found that that listen well hey how can more people listen how can more people listen you can listen I think most places you get your podcasts if you go to podfollow.com slash human resources it will take you to your favorite podcast app and we'll be there but otherwise Spotify Apple anywhere really you can also go to our website. Great one, dude. Thanks very much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial to that project. If you did

feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.