Dan Snow's History Hit - How the Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Historian Michael Taylor joined me on the podcast to discuss the resistance of the British establishment to the ending of the slave trade....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, hello, welcome to Dan Snow's History at this episode of the podcast. First broadcast on the 1st of February 2021.
Starting point is 00:00:46 We did January, everyone. We completed January. Congratulations. Always a big day. Always a big day. As a result, I've got a big podcast for you. I've got Michael Taylor. He's a historian, an academic, and he's written a big book.
Starting point is 00:01:00 A big book on how the establishment resisted the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. Don't forget, everybody, don't forget that in 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. Well done, then. Excellent. But for the next 25 years, 700,000 human beings remained in a state of enslavement in British colonies in the Caribbean. This injustice became the focus of another giant abolitionist campaign and that campaign was fiercely, fiercely resisted by the famous West India interest. Some of the most famous names of 19th century politics, Tories, very liberal Tories, and even liberals, people like Canning, Peel, Gladstone, they all believed that the institution of slavery
Starting point is 00:01:53 should endure. And it was that kind of ferocious rearguard action that ensured that when slavery was abolished in 1833, it came in the form of a giant compensation package to the slave owners of the British Empire. No money was passed to the formerly enslaved people themselves. In this podcast, Michael Taylor takes me through that extraordinary story, a remarkable and forgotten struggle of 19th century British politics and society. Don't forget, if you want to listen to all these episodes of the podcast without any adverts on them, or from before 2019, the only place you can do that is on our new history channel, History Hit TV.
Starting point is 00:02:39 It's got audio on there. It's got video on there. It's just been relaunched. It's looking beautiful. It's a whole new platform, everyone. Usability is much better. You can listen to podcasts much easier. You can skip ahead. You can go back. You can do all the kind of cool things you could do on any podcast player. And it's also got hundreds of hours of history documentaries and more and more going up all the time. It's a pretty sweet setup. So head over to History Hit TV, join the revolution. In the meantime, enjoy the excellent Michael Taylor. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Starting point is 00:03:15 Oh, thank you for having me. As we come to the end of the 18th century, how aware were people in Britain of slavery? Is it something like today we all know the destruction of the Amazon is a complete existential threat, but few of us actually can feel it, viscerally understand it, visualize it? I think in certain cities and certain communities, the realities of the slave trade and slavery are very present. Places like Bristol and Liverpool and Glasgow, which are port cities built on the Atlantic trade, I think everybody realises that they are dependent to a certain degree on slavery for their prosperity, and in London
Starting point is 00:03:50 as well. But the vast majority of Britons in the late 18th century will never leave their own parish, let alone visit Barbados. So whenever the abolitionists begin their campaign they have to begin with a campaign of information before persuasion. They need to really exemplify and illustrate how horrific conditions on slave ships and plantations are before they can persuade people to join a political movement. And you talk about the establishment and the interest in this book. As a lover of 18th century politics, I'm so fascinated by interest within Parliament. Give me a sense of what is the West India, the planter interest in Parliament? How powerful are they? Okay, it might be worth saying something first about interests in general, because in the late 18th, early 19th century, there aren't political parties as we know them. It's not really until
Starting point is 00:04:38 the middle of the 19th century that we develop the party system as we know it today. So what we have instead are loose coalitions of Whigs and Tories, the Tories being the broadly conservative friends of the established church and the landed interest, the Whigs being the relatively liberal, but they're certainly not radicals, friends of finance and dissenting religion. Interests are effectively political lobbies whose anxieties focus on a specific sector or issue. And these are really the formidable political unit of the age, because on the issues that matter to them, because their interests are so intimately connected with the politics that affect them,
Starting point is 00:05:18 they're able to crack a whip and get people to act en masse in Parliament whenever they need to. And the West India interest is really one of the most powerful political lobbies that Britain has ever seen by this point. The University College London have this Legacies of British Slave Ownership database, and there are upwards of 100 MPs in that during this period. So I'm sure they really do have an outsized influence over parliamentary politics. And today we talk about politicians being in hock to interests, but the interests have got to go to the trouble of actually finding politicians and then
Starting point is 00:05:53 buying them, lobbyists, right? Back in the 18th century, you could cut out the middleman. If you're a wealthy former, or indeed a serving, naval officer or a plantation owner, you could just go and get yourself a seat in parliament. Yeah, so before the before mac 1932 broad and burrows are rife old serum is you know the byword for electoral corruption and there are 14 electors none of which live in old serum because nobody does but the seat returns to mps there cornwall is particularly badly affected by this phenomenon there are places where seven voters return to MPs. And it's because of this, because the planters and the traders can control so many seats in Parliament simply by buying them,
Starting point is 00:06:34 that nothing really happens in Parliament to deal with slavery, to address slavery before Parliament itself is reformed. It's Thomas Pitt, isn't it, the sort of founder of the Pitt dynasty. He makes a ton of money, quote-unquote, finding a huge diamond in India and becomes one of the most dominant political figures in Cornwall with that cash, right? I mean, that is, I guess, a definition of a... And then Pitt, his son, thinks that Britain's blue water imperial strategy is central to national interest, because surprised by the central to their family interest. Yeah. And that's kind of a story that repeats with all of the major slaveholders in this era.
Starting point is 00:07:07 So Charles Rosellis, who becomes Baron Seaford, he's George Canning's best friend, which is quite a good start if you want to influence national politics. But at the age of 21, so he's barely old enough to vote, finishes Oxford, doesn't graduate, buys a seat, that's his career sorted. There's certainly no meritocracy in this. And by buying these seats, like Thomas Pitt, like Charles Rossellus, any number of Jamaican Barbadian planters begin to dominate affairs in the chamber. So that's those people that are directly involved in slave trading and the commodities production in the West Indies. What explains, though, the slave-owning adjacent politicians that you
Starting point is 00:07:45 outline in this book? So many of the leading lights of early 19th century Britain seem just as hell-bent on slavery as the actual slave owners themselves. Yes. So for this, it's worth considering the importance of the West Indies, really, because we just finished the Napoleonic Wars, America is beginning to assert itself in the global stage. The former Latin American colonies or Spanish colonies, that empire is crumbling. And there are enormous trading opportunities with Latin American republics in the 1810s and the 1820s. So everybody really wants, and when I say everybody, I mean conservative politicians, really want to maintain a British presence in the West Indies. politicians really want to maintain a British presence in the West Indies. And this means that they don't want to get away with slavery because there's this predominating theory of the time,
Starting point is 00:08:28 theory of political economy, that holds that if the enslaved persons on the plantation are freed, they will not work. And if they do not work, the plantation economy will collapse. And if the plantation economy collapsed, Britain will lose control over the region. So there is that strategic military and commercial concern. There's also something to be said about property. So whenever the abolitionists took on the slave trade earlier, and eventually succeeded in 1807 to get Parliament to pass an act to abolish it, they never once attempted to abolish slavery itself or even to address slavery. Wilberforce stood up in the House of Commons and said it would be madness to attempt to free the slaves because, in his opinion, they were unfit to receive freedom. And there are a couple of reasons for this, for leaving
Starting point is 00:09:13 slavery itself alone. One is biblical. So all the way through the Bible, there are verses which express, if not regulation or approval, let's say a tacit approval of slaveholding. The slave trade was very different because there's a phrase in Deuteronomy that's repeated in one of the books of Timothy, I think, called men stealing. And this is outlawed completely. So there was a theological and a biblical division between the slave trade and slavery. So that was left alone. The other is property. It's very easy or relatively easy to stop a fleet of merchant ships from participating in a certain trade. It's a discrete economic offence that goes from port to port.
Starting point is 00:09:50 And stopping that henceforth is much, much easier than attempting to confiscate legally held property, which is why a lot of parliamentarians and a lot of legal thinkers of the day regarded slaves. and a lot of legal thinkers of the day regarded slaves. So with that background, whenever we get into the 1820s, whenever the abolitionists are trying to at last ameliorate and then emancipate the slaves, they come up against this continual brick wall of property. They can spin out an argument here. Well, if you come for the slaves, then next,
Starting point is 00:10:21 are you going to come for my farm in Norfolk? Next, are you going to come for the factory that I've just built in Yorkshire? So it's because of these things, which is generally inherently conservative politicians who are willing to uphold the rights of property within a context, within a biblical context, where that's permissible. Right, and we should probably just cover the basic stuff that's going on said here. In 1807, Parliament outlawed that slave trade, as you say, but it would not be till the sort of early to mid 1830s that the abolition of slavery itself came along. So in the meantime, well, West Indian planters, they weren't able to import enslaved Africans, but people born in captivity would continue in a condition of slavery, I presume. people born in captivity would continue in a condition of slavery, I presume. Yeah, so it's one of the popular misconceptions, I think, in British history that after the abolition of the slave trade, slavery itself was abolished. That's absolute nonsense. So on New Year's Day 1808, whenever the last slave ship docks or is put to other uses,
Starting point is 00:11:18 there are still 700,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean. There are 300,000 in Jamaica alone, which is more than in any British city of the day except for London. And the abolition of the trade has absolutely no effect on their condition, on their daily lives. There was an assumption on the part of the abolitionists that because the planters could no longer import new African people into their plantations, that they would have to treat everybody better so their life expectancy would increase and that slavery by degrees would simply wither away. That doesn't happen. Between 1807 and the foundation of the anti-slavery society in 1823, the direction of travel generally is not towards abolition. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain seizes Trinidad and Demerara, so it
Starting point is 00:12:02 actually expands its slave empire. In 1816, whenever they propose a registry of slaves, which is the way the abolitionists wanted to, I guess, keep an eye on how many slaves were being ported illicitly into the Caribbean, this sparks a rebellion in Barbados. And the backlash is so furious that Wilberforce has to sign a pledge to the Prince Regent saying that, no, we are not going to attempt to abolish slavery. So in the meantime, the planters are relatively content, I would say, with a degree of political protection from abolitionism. And this continues for the first few years of the campaign itself. That's not to say that the interest is growing in strength necessarily, because these are difficult times economically and the value of the
Starting point is 00:12:45 plantations and the value of sugar and the price of sugar has been decreasing generally over the previous decades. But certainly whenever the abolitionists finally rise themselves in 1823, they do so because their hopes had been sorely disappointed and because the cause of abolitionism over the previous 16 years hadn't really gone anywhere. over the previous 16 years hadn't really gone anywhere. The late 1810s and 20s and 1830s were a time of extraordinary radical discontent and agitation in the UK. To what extent was slavery part of that? So you've got, you know, people like famously Henry Hunt, who was speaking at the meeting at Peterloo that turned to a massacre. On that progressive platform, was slavery important or was slavery over the horizon,
Starting point is 00:13:27 even for British radicals? So there is this perhaps unexpected relationship that develops between British radicals, who are focused on parliamentary reform and workers' rights, and the slaveholders. It's not with the abolitionists that they find common ground. And it's these working-class radicals, not necessarily Hunt, but people like Richard Carlisle or Sadler or Osor, and especially William Cobbett, who I know you've discussed before in the show. They despise the abolitionists and they cannot understand why the British Parliament and the government would not address themselves to the concerns of British workers before doing so for West Indian slaves. And in their arguments, there's an incipient nebulous form of the arguments against foreign aid. It's what Dickens goes on to describe as telescopic
Starting point is 00:14:11 philanthropy in Bleak House. And a lot of these people on their platforms, they say, well, I feel very badly for the people who are enslaved in the West Indies, but my priority is white slavery. And they want to sort out the factories. They want to sort out reform of parliament before they do anything else. That's a powerful combination of working class or certain artisanal British radicals, aristocratic, conservative interests. So how on earth did the abolitionists make any ground at all? Well, the simple answer is that for a very long time, the abolitionists just didn't make any progress at all. The campaign begins in 1823 when Thomas Ford Buxton opposes the amelioration and the gradual emancipation of colonial slaves. George Canning, who's the leader of the house at the time and the foreign secretary, stands up and
Starting point is 00:14:54 says these are very good ideas but we're not really going to do anything about it but we'll sign the commons up to a series of resolutions which are proposed by the planters, not by parliament, and then are communicated to the West Indies as recommendations, not as law. It's left up to the colonial legislatures to put into effect all of these recommendations. And this is a kind of game that Parliament and Lord Liverpool's Tory government plays for the rest of its four years. They make all the right signs, they write some dead letter pieces of legislation and recommendations, and they expect nothing to be done, and nothing is done. What then happens in 1827 is that Lord
Starting point is 00:15:31 Liverpool has a stroke and dies, Canning takes over, then he dies, Viscount Goodrich replaces him, and he can't form a government. So in the midst of this political chaos at Westminster, again, nothing gets done. I mean, nothing was done at all, let alone embark on serious legislation, even if they'd wanted to. Wellington then comes in in 1828. And Wellington's arguably the most pro-slavery politician of the day. It's the reason he's in the front cover of the book. And under Wellington and his colonial secretary, George Murray, there's a real act of resistance towards doing anything towards abolition. Historians have known for a very long time that Wellington stands four square behind the slaveholding interest. And the only reason eventually that the abolitionists get anywhere
Starting point is 00:16:12 is because of Ireland. Because in 1829, Daniel O'Connell and his liberal supporters eventually persuade Wellington and Peel to enact Catholic emancipation in Ireland for fear of really creating a civil war. And Wellington's military experience here tells him that as much as he abhors the idea of Catholic emancipation in Ireland for fear of really creating a civil war. And Wellington's military experience here tells him that as much as he abhors the idea of Catholic emancipation, that's better than trying to fight a civil war in Ireland. So whenever they do that, there's about 80 or so ultra-Tory MPs who regard Wellington appeal as betrayers of the Protestant national interest. So they effectively switch sides or go and sit on their own in the House.
Starting point is 00:16:43 And Wellington is suddenly left a fairly shaky ground. He wins a very, very slim majority in the next general election. But then because he gets up on the first or second night in the Lords in the new Parliament and says, I'm absolutely going to do nothing about parliamentary reform. It's absolutely disgraceful to think that we should do anything. Our constitution is perfect the way it is. Why would I change it? And this leads to a revolt in the House. The ultras and the Whigs band together. They defeat him over a measure that's really insignificant. It's about the civil list. But he sees the writing on the wall. He loses a motion of confidence in his government and suddenly the Whigs are brought in. So it's a Tory civil war that opens up the political
Starting point is 00:17:23 opportunity for the abolitionists and the opportunity is the Whigs coming into power. That's not to say, as I said previously, they're not radicals. They're not necessarily anti-slavery, but they're much more likely to entertain plans for emancipation. And then emancipation, when it does occur, how important is the ideology here and enlightenment in the imperial centre? And how important is the gigantic slave revolt in jamaica i mean how important are events dear boy enormously important if the first major slave revolt of this little decade that i study happens in demerara in 1823 and there is a really fierce backlash because it is thought that by mentioning freedom and slavery in Parliament,
Starting point is 00:18:07 and expulsion rumours make their way across the Atlantic and inspire this slave rebellion, it's thought that abolitionism will bring bloodshed. In 1831-32, however, when tens of thousands of enslaved people in Jamaica rebel over Christmas, under the leadership of a Baptist deacon known as Sam Sharp, it receives a very different welcome whenever the news reaches London and the Whigs in power at the time, and especially Viscount Goodrich, who's now colonial secretary, having somewhat resurrected his career under the Whigs and not the Tories, realises that if slavery persists, it's not abolitionism that will cause
Starting point is 00:18:40 this bloodshed, it's slavery itself, and that it would be madness and folly to continue to enslave so many people so far away. So I don't think that in the corridors of power, to use the phrase, there is this radical enlightenment and improvement of views and sense that we must do the right thing. It's fear, in the end, that encourages the Whigs in government to do something at last about slavery and emancipation. And we should just quickly, what is the thing that they do, and how conservative does that now feel? Yeah, so the proposal that was eventually brought forward, there were stops and there were starts, and it took a lot longer than the abolitionists hoped that it would.
Starting point is 00:19:17 But Stanley, who goes on to become Lord Derby and Prime Minister in the 1850s and 60s, he's the colonial secretary who puts forward a plan of emancipation. and prime minister in the 1850s and 60s. He's the colonial secretary who puts forward a plan of emancipation. There's a lack of a year. The slaveholders will receive 20 million pounds in compensation because, as I mentioned earlier, the enslaved people are regarded as property. And this is compensation for the confiscation of that property. At the same time, if that were not generous enough, there is a period of effectively slavery by another name known as the apprenticeship. So whenever slavery itself ends in 1834, there was planned a period of six years for some people, a little bit less for those who are younger, where the former slaves would work
Starting point is 00:19:58 on the same plantations, in the same jobs, for the same masters masters for no money. And this was a means of securing the labor system of the colonies for a while. And during this period, after fulfilling their statutory obligations under the apprenticeship, the former slaves could earn a little bit more money and perhaps buy their freedom a bit earlier. So these were two really significant currents that were shaken in the direction of the slaveholders. And the generosity of them was something that really appalled the abolitionists. And there was a house of cards that almost collapsed in the summer of 1833, because the abolitionists were fighting each other about whether or not to consent to these measures.
Starting point is 00:20:37 In the end, sense as they saw it prevailed, and they accepted the measures. Am I right in thinking that astonishing amount of money, how much were they going to spend this purchase? It was 20 million pounds in 1833, which was said to represent the value of the colonies and of the enslaved people themselves. And 20 million pounds in 1833, admittedly, there is a smaller state, but this is 40% of the government expenditure that year, which is a staggering sum. It's a staggering sum. Yeah, I mean, it's the largest sort of bailout of the government expenditure that year which is a staggering sum it's a staggering yeah i mean it's the largest sort of bailout of the 19th century effectively it's the largest
Starting point is 00:21:10 specific payout from the government to an interest group or to any real stakeholder in society until the 2008 bailout of the banks land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in rena Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by
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Starting point is 00:23:04 How should we think about this story? i was reading a book i was thinking like is this a story about the eventual like the unstoppable march of you know you can put obstacles up you can delay you can dig your feet in like liverpool but eventually this is a story of civilized values overcoming dark ones or Or is this in fact the opposite? Like, I can't make my mind up. Is this actually a story of just how corrupt and disastrous our politics can be? It was in the 19th century and can still be now. And really this only came about
Starting point is 00:23:35 because of a bizarre series of accidents on either side of the Atlantic. I think I would err slightly closer to that second, darker version of events. It's absolute nonsense to suggest that emancipating slaves in the colonies was inevitable or that this was the denouement of some sweeping and triumphant movement of a British sense of decency and justice. That's the story that we like to tell ourselves, but it doesn't really get borne out by any of the facts. There is contingency. There is corruption.
Starting point is 00:24:05 There are events, dear boy, as you said. And without those events, it's actually very hard to see how emancipation happens. Without that £20 million in compensation, without the apprenticeship, would the slaveholders have agreed? Probably not. Would they have made good on their promises to rebel and become the new state of the American Union? They might have done. They might have got beaten senselessly by the Royal Navy, and the British Army probably would have overpowered them.
Starting point is 00:24:31 But abolition is not a fait accompli. And it really is quite frustrating. And one of the reasons that I wrote the book, whenever we regard ourselves as, and I say we, I mean the British public, regard Britain as the leading light in terms of abolishing the slave trade and then emancipating colonial slaves, because much of the northern United States had done this before Britain had even attempted it. Haiti had abolished slavery in its constitution in the 1800s, and much of Latin America had abolished slavery as well. So Britain gets there eventually,
Starting point is 00:25:00 but it follows rebellions, it follows corrupt bargains. And I think if we want to get ourselves into this great civilising mission narrative, I think we should do some more reading. It also makes me profoundly nervous about whether it's tackling climate change today or any of the huge challenges that face us. The idea that if you simply win an argument, if you just write enough brilliant tweets, even actually if you convinced most of the people that what change occurs in actually the most confusing and Byzantine way through constitutions and legislatures and executive branches. So it's quite a difficult book to read if you believe that we are at the dawn of an era of sweeping political, economic and social change and environmental change today. There's something that prefaces pretty much every pro-slavery argument that's made during this time.
Starting point is 00:25:47 And it's a statement which runs something along the lines of, of course, I detest and despise slavery in the abstract. But, and after the but, there are economic concerns, there are religious concerns, there are legal concerns, political concerns. And these arguments, okay, they come in different shapes, and they're addressed towards different issues. But you mentioned climate change, I think almost everybody will say, yes, we really should do something about this. But, and sometimes it does take something to break through, something catastrophic, possibly,
Starting point is 00:26:22 to break through that veneer of apathy. In the case of slavery, it was the rebellion. Yeah, it's fascinating how often, whether it's the collapse of Romanov power and the collapse of Bourbon power in the late 18th century France, it's actually the strange defection of ultras rather than the success of progressive outsiders, it's actually a collapse of intra-establishment morale or functioning that leads to the ultimate crisis. Yeah, and within that there are still contingent events. If Louis XVI hadn't been so eager to support the American Revolution, would the French Revolution have occurred in the way that it did or when it did? Probably not. But whenever I talk about the interests in the establishment and the British political hierarchy more generally, the Pitt-type
Starting point is 00:27:09 conservative regime had been really pretty solid for quite a while. You can train, you know, arguably back to whenever Pitt first came into power in the 1780s. It's effectively the same system of government run by the same families and the same political interests for over 40 years. But whenever they fall out over religion, the whole thing falls apart. And that creates the opportunity for change. I'm trying to think of some other examples of where this might, well, Conservative Party politics in the 2010s might be a good place to start. Yeah, no, that's a great example. Had Jeremy Corbyn won that election, it would have been a great example of a completely intra-conservative squabble just blowing apart
Starting point is 00:27:52 their ascendancy. I was thinking more of, talking of harbingers of great change, the Tories losing their right wing or fearing the loss of their right wing and then making their manifesto commitment on the referendum. So maybe it isn't necessarily the collapse, but even the fear of collapse is enough to initiate these great changes. Yeah, there's an interesting comparative thought to be done there. Speaking of comparative history, do you find yourself whacking yourself on the head with giant books whenever you see people on the right in today's politics celebrating the British Empire's role in both abolishing the slave trade and then slavery itself? Yeah, if I can't find a really heavy book, I'll find something harder and heavier.
Starting point is 00:28:33 The people who celebrate these things and who celebrate empire, it always strikes me really quite amazingly how these would almost certainly have been the people resisting the abolition of slavery. They possess, I think, the same mindset and certainly the same position on the political spectrum, even though all things are relative. And what really annoyed me over the summer, following the toppling of Causton's statue and it being dumped into Bristol Harbour, the general narrative around, oh, we must preserve these statues because otherwise we are deleting history if we take them down. That's absolute nonsense. I had been of the opinion that the statues and the names should stay in place as reminders of the darker elements of British imperial history.
Starting point is 00:29:12 But it soon became clear that without the base level of knowledge about what actually happened, these reminders don't have any effect. In terms of statues generally, I think we struggle to communicate as historians that statues do not represent the past. They represent the positions and the opinions of the community at the time whenever they were erected. So whenever the statue of Cawson was put up in the 1890s, that doesn't represent the 17th century. Taking down the statue doesn't delete him from the history books. And we can say the same of Churchill or Canning or Wellington or Peel or any of these people.
Starting point is 00:29:47 Taking down the statue will not remove them from history. Rather, it will say what it represents is the people who take the statue down, saying that we should no longer celebrate and adulate and lionize these men because, well, I don't think people are going to say that we don't need heroes, but I think there should be a recognition that certain people in the British pantheon really should not be celebrated in the way that we do, or at least as eagerly as we do. I'm not sure, man. I'm not sure we do need heroes. I think the whole concept is really difficult. You know, I'm fascinated by Nelson's tactical brilliance in fleet actions. I don't need him as a hero. You know, I even like to wear a little Nelson hoodie occasionally. I don't need him as a hero.
Starting point is 00:30:24 You know, I even like to wear a little Nelson hoodie occasionally. Like, it's funny when my daughter walks past in a Nelson hoodie. But I don't encourage her to be like, like to adopt Nelson's worldview and outlook in all things. I think heroes are a funny problem, aren't they? And they are a problem. And certainly, I don't think that if, say, we decided to take the statue of Nelson down from the top of the column, would we end up
Starting point is 00:30:45 forgetting about Nelson? Would his victory at Trafalgar get forgotten? Would we start rewriting histories of the Napoleonic Wars to remove him? Of course we wouldn't. Historians are never going to forget people if there isn't a statue. There's just something about the role of these historical figures in society that is problematic. Do we want them to remind ourselves of a past, of glorious past that's now long gone? Are these statues the residue of imperial greatness that we're trying desperately to hang on to? I like Nelson's columns, folks.
Starting point is 00:31:15 Don't at me on Twitter. I'm not suggesting we pull it down. However, question. I wasn't suggesting that we take it down. No, I know you weren't either. But also, who does remember Nelson? Like, really, it's a pretty small group of us like we there are people who read about and think about nelson and then there's the rest of the population
Starting point is 00:31:30 and i think the former group is pretty small like i don't think the statues are working anyway right who actually knows about general havelock yeah a diminishingly small number of people i would say yeah so you know if why do we put them up in the first place? I mean, who are we going to erect a statue to in the next couple of years from the second half of the 20th century? Besides Thatcher getting one a couple of weeks ago. Is the very process or the phenomenon
Starting point is 00:31:58 of erecting statues dying out? I suspect it is. By the way, I should pick you up because I do feel nervous that you and I are busily slagging off people on the Republican Party, the Conservative Party in the UK, who would of course argue they despise the idea of slavery and they are genuinely proud of the abolitionist movements in the early 19th century. Why is it that we're being so rude out of hand about those people? Let's just clarify what we mean when we say those are the kind of people.
Starting point is 00:32:22 Do you mean those are the kind of people for whom economic security, geopolitical safety, revenue from sources, even if they're a little bit unethical, like fossil fuels, are more important than being whiter than white? No, I don't think so. I think what really we're getting, I'm getting at, is that conservatism can actually, despite its name, evolve so quickly to forget its previous positions, and it can quickly find new positions to adopt, that the conservatives who resisted abolishing slavery in the 1820s and the 1830s could, without hesitation, celebrate it as soon as emancipation was passed and as soon as emancipation was effected. Robert Peel was one of the most virulent pro-slavery figures of the 1820s and
Starting point is 00:33:05 1830s. And yet there are speeches given by him in Tamworth a couple of years later saying that emancipation was one of the brightest stars in the British firmament and one of the brightest pages in British history. And Tory MPs, Gladstone, for example, his maiden speech in Parliament was intended to defend slavery and he ran as an explicitly pro-slavery candidate in 1832. And yet he evolved this completely new political persona for himself as soon as emancipation was affected. So it's not, you know, I'm saying those people are Republicans or conservatives. I think there's just a very curious political position which is adopted where those individuals in history who were most resistant to change can suddenly celebrate the change as
Starting point is 00:33:45 if it were their own. Interesting stuff. So your brilliant book is called? The Interest, How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery. Get out to the bookshops, take an interest in the interest, everybody. And thank you so much for coming on this podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Hi, everybody. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast.
Starting point is 00:34:15 I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that, frankly, is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys in return I've got a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to wherever you get your podcasts if you could give it a five-star rating if you could share it if you could give it a review I really appreciate that then from the comfort of your own homes you'll be doing me a massive favor then more people listen to the podcast we can do more and
Starting point is 00:34:43 more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

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