Empire: World History - 68. The Long Death of Slavery

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Emancipations are never clean, they don't happen overnight. Instead, they are long, drawn-out, messy processes that leave many still oppressed. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Kris Manjapra to discuss the century of emancipations and their legacy. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnh. And me, William Derunpool. Now, you know what, I know we've had an astonishing response to some of the programs that we've done. And some of them are lovely and you're very, very kind. And some of them are a little cranky, which is fine.

You're allowed. But what I've been really touched by is the number of people who've sent emails that start off with what? And one of the what's... And one of the big what bags was about the slavery of people in England and, you know, ships coming up to Essex and Stetney and, you know, cornishment. And cool and great chunks of Ireland. Absolutely. Because so much of, you know, the conversation about slavery is... I mean, if you're in Britain, I think it depends where you live.

If you're in Britain, it's Wilberforce. Everything stems from Wilberforce. If you learn about slavery, it's almost always in the context of the Brits being the saviors. That's right. The white saviors coming in, swooping in, stopping this terrible practice. Absolutely. And you know, you've got, you know, I remember illustrations from children's books, you know, where you've got ships sweeping in and taking the slave ships and liberating the men who are under decks.

And there is a real security blanket of goodness and heroism, you know. And in America, that is all that the security blanket is Abraham Lincoln colored, you know, and Abraham Lincoln flavored, and it's the Civil War. And look, you know, this is a country that was divided and folded in on itself because the concept of slavery is so abhorrent to the winners. This book that we are going to talk about today, and we are really very delighted that the author of this book is with us today, has challenged so many of the things I thought to be true, and I was comforted. I knew very, very little of what I read in this book. I was horrified by my own ignorance reading it. Yeah. Also, I have to say I was just astonished by the beauty of the prose and how moving it was, how personal it was.

I wasn't expecting to be as moved or as charmed as I was, despite the fact it tells some very, very difficult truths. I know. It basically fed both of our hungers. Meeper, God, didn't know that. And you for, well, weeping. I think we've established, you're a weeper. But listen, without further ado, Let me tell you who we've got with us.

We have Chris Majapro with us. He's a professor of history at Tufts University, author of Black Ghost of Empire, The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. And maybe for some of you, there's a little tinkle going on going, I recognize the name, I recognize the name. That is because, do you remember the news story that came out? Well, it was huge.

It was huge. Suddenly it was disclosed that only in 2015 did Britain pay off the interest of the debt it took on to pay. the slave owners from slavery. Not the slaves. We're talking about reparations. There were reparations, but they were to the slave owners. The man behind that research was you, Chris, wasn't it? That's right. I mean, first of all, blimey. And second, how did you do that? Let's start with the thing that people will know about you. Yeah, well,

as well, it's great to be with you and, you know, I think the work of the historian is a little bit like, you know, stumbling around sometimes through archives, of something sometimes on the web. And this was a question of stumbling around actually on the web. And it was in 2018, actually. I was just reading some government reports through HM Treasury. And in one of kind of the footnotes, I noticed that there was a mention of the Compensation Act that was finally paid off in 2015. And I thought, that's not possible. They can't mean the one that ended slavery, not that compensation act. And in fact, it was that. And, you know, the number of Freedom of Information Act requests were filed. I filed them. And through

that we basically uncovered what happened, which is exactly this 180 years that British citizens were paying through their taxes for that act of 1835. For compensating slave owners, yeah. For compensating slave owners, that's right. I do remember at the time thinking, you know, but all of the mood music in Britain at the time was move on, just move on, get over it, move on, this is in the past.

And I thought, HM Treasury's not moving on. Well, you know, we're still paying that debt. Yeah. And what's interesting is at the time, Prime Minister Cameron had just been in 2015 in Jamaica and had in a public speech said, it's time to move on from this ugly history. But that came some months after this final payoff had happened.

And so whether that was coordinated or not, you know, it is the case that the moving on really had not happened until 2015, at least if we want to look at, you know, debt legacies, that that was a continuing outpay of, of the British state for this compensation act to slave owners, like William just emphasized, which was decided on and begun in 1835. Well, shall we go back to brass tax here?

Because your book, it talks about ghost lines, rather than red lines in history, ghost lines, and the fact that there are things that you can't move on from because they haven't ever been addressed. Let's start with the very etymology of the word emancipation, because I was really fascinated by that, and how politically, loaded a word can be? Sure. Emancipation, of course, comes from Roman law, and so its roots are in

Latin, and it basically means to free from the hand. But who, whose hand? And it's the hand of the slave owner. And basically emancipation laws, even back in Roman times, where, of course, we can talk about ancient slavery, were laws designed in favor of the slave owner in order to allow them, of their own will, if you like, to free from their hand their enslaved people. And so emancipation laws, and it's actually baked into the word itself, are created for the slave owners, but not for the enslaved. And that's precisely, you know, what started happening from the 1780s onwards when emancipation laws began to spread across the earth. So, Chris, in the series that we've had already, we've had a variety of different kinds of slaveryes already. We've been

talking about ancient slaveries. We've talked about different kinds of slavery in the Islamic world, even in India. But what was different about the Middle Passage? What was different about the industrialized export vast numbers of black Africans to the Caribbean and the new world? Yeah. You know, in answering that question, I think it's good to first take a step back and pause to recognize that we're dealing with slavery, systems of slavery that are, In fact, in terms of their scale, relatively equivalent. So what I mean by that is about 12 to 15 million people who were transported against their will across the Atlantic.

There, in fact, were about 12 to 15 million people who were transported against their will across the Indian Ocean over the course of, you know, early modern and modern history. Then we could talk about the slavery across the Pacific Ocean, of which that's a huge story as well. Just, sorry, I'm just taking in that figure. You're talking about black African slaves sent as slaves to India. This would be, yes, black African slaves sent to... This is like what they call the Hubshis here in India.

Absolutely. Working for the Deccan Sultanates, taking Ethiopians, and selling them in the Concan coast, the west coast of India. It's that scale. It's that scale. It's a comparable scale. It's of that scale, very much organized by the Omani Empire, organized across the transit points of Zanzibar. Very much a history that we need to focus on more and we need to know more about. This is Tipu Tip and... And the slave owners of Zanzibar and the...

And what era? Just remind people what era is. Ending only in the 1890s, right? And the beginning of the 2020 century. And even more extraordinary. I understand that slavery was only banned in Oman in 1970 after Sergeant Pepper. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct.

In our own lifetime. In our own lifetime. So we're dealing with some really long trajectories here. And we're dealing with slaveries which, you know, we don't want to, you know, argue that one is worse than the other because in fact we're dealing with coercion we're dealing with human misery human misery you know grave oppression but to answer the question of you know why focus on one of these systems um and and create you know kind of a explain the difference with the others the western slavery what i'm going to call you know what we call atlantic slavery that had a couple

unique features number one um even more than what happened across the indian ocean we have the the obliteration of family ties. We have the destruction of the abilities of people to connect or to return to their roots. And that very much is what the new world experience of enslavement has been. It has been the obliteration of those family ties. Beyond that, we have an economic system that is distinctive.

And we can talk about capitalism and we can talk about racial capitalism and industrial levels of enslavement. And so the means by which people were enslaved, the purposes that they were being put to use, the sugar plantation operated very differently, for example, than a spice plantation, just in the extremeness of the oppression, the amount of time that people had to work. So all of, it's really a question of the degree of slavery and also of this obliteration of family ties. Could you go into that? What would the difference between,

say, growing, growing pepper and harvesting pepper vines somewhere in... Oh, and sugar and cotton, which is... What is different to our sugar? Why is it so much more? We could maybe boil it down to say that the production of sugar operated by an industrial clock. And that was not by the modern clock, you know. And in fact, in Barbados, they started putting up clocks on plantations and, you know, punishing and torturing slaves if they did not produce a certain amount of yield by the time that the plantation

owner had requested. So this kind of time-based exploitation was unique to slave, to sugar production. And another dimension that I would say is, you know, the ways that families who were enslaved, their children were often treated as, well, slaves were treated as property, first of all, but then the children were treated as property. And when children are treated as property, it means that they can be divided as property can be divided and sold off. to new owners in ways that tore the families of enslaved people apart. And that, you know, kind of property ownership of enslaved people is very extreme in the West. And that breeding programs.

Yeah, the way that enslaved people were seen as property and were seen as alienable property, chattel property. And therefore, it was part of slavery to alienate children from their parents, you know, children from their mothers. And that happened much more in the Atlantic system. than it did in any other system in the world. One of the thing, I mean, a lovely thing about the book, and it's not lovely. It's the wrong word at all.

But a very powerful thing is how you talk about these great concepts and then you will focus in on a particular story. And I was deeply touched by the story of James Mars, who seems to exemplify this level of, I just, it's a cruelty that I can't even fathom how human beings can imagine it to begin with. Can you remind us about the James, or tell us about the James Mars story?

Yeah, James Mars was, a young man who was enslaved in 1790s in Connecticut, so Connecticut being New England, the northeast coast of the United States. And this was during the time of the emancipation in Connecticut. And, you know, part of the book, what the point of the book is to show that emancipations were a lot messier than just an end to enslavement. And so as emancipation was happening, James Mars was technically freed. but what freedom meant at that time was that he had to in fact stay as a bonded laborer

for all of his youth. And he was a child. And he was a child. So his parents were slaves. And we'll talk about this in more detail. But emancipation meant that his parents because they were already slaves, they couldn't be freed.

And he could in theory, but not yet. So that's absolutely right. So his parents could not be freed. He was freed, but he had to wait. you know, more than 10 years. He would have had to wait more than 10 years to obtain his freedom at age 18. And so his,

he was removed from his parents. He tried to run away as this indentured labor. He was an indentured labor. He tried to return to his parents. And they move closer to him. I mean, they're so powerless. They try at least to be close to the child that they love.

That's right. That's right. And throughout all of this, you know, he basically suffered whippings, imprisonment, torture, until he finally reached the age under the Emancipation Act in which he became a free black person. And then he spent the rest of his life, you know, as a black abolitionist writing. He wrote a biography, his own autobiography, but then he became a very important spokesperson against the American system of slavery. And I think that for me was

really powerful about researching my book, which is the ways in which we don't focus on the black abolitionists, the people who experienced slavery. Yes, they did figure it at all. Hardly. Yeah. Right? Because we, we have the narratives that are very kind of in some ways iconic, but they happen to be familiar and comfortable stories. And to come to one of the deep themes in the book, black abolitionists did not only ask for their freedom, they always asked for a reparation. They always ask for repair. And the question then becomes, did they get it? Now, you mentioned this was in Connecticut, and this is during the emancipation period.

And this was so shock to me that because we always have this theory. Well, emancipation happened. A light was switched on. People realized they were being dreadful and that this could not go on and everything got better. But first of all, that's not the case anywhere, and particularly not in America. So the first place to... I mean, that is literally, you're not exaggerating in those movies, like the World War I was. with Bend it Cumberbatch, there's great cheering in the House of Commons, Bing, everything will be fine.

But it is not the case. And in America, you really beautifully map out how and where it starts. And it does seem to start in Philadelphia. We're talking sort of 1780s, the germination of this idea of emancipation. And it wasn't a ping even then, was it? What were they talking about? It was, it's the not yet. And it's a line from Hamilton, you know. You've seen Hamilton? Have you both seen Hamilton? So you've got, you know, sort of Washington, John Lawrence is saying, you know, he's led the first sort of black regiment. And he's saying, can we have freedom now? And he says, not yet. And not yet is at the heart even of this Philadelphia experiment.

Tell us about that. Yeah. We go back to Philadelphia, you know, not far from Pennsylvania, not far from Connecticut. That's where we get to what I would call the crown zero of abolition. And in fact, we can trace how something detonated in 1780. in the Pennsylvania legislature and then really kind of expanded to other parts, not just of the Americas, but of the earth. Specifically, what what began there was a form of freeing enslaved people that was not really about their liberation, but was about the continuation of bondage by other means.

And how did they do that? I mean, you know, it's a, if you, you imagine that once you say, okay, you're free, that's it. Go, go forth. Yeah. Be happy. Why was not that the case? Yeah. So here it was about creating laws that ensured that people who were freed, technically freed in terms of law, had to nevertheless serve as unpaid laborers,

as bonded laborers for long periods of time. So we're here. We were talking about the children again. So black children were freed after 1780 in terms of the letter of the law. But the letter of the law also said that they had to wait until a particular age, age 18, age 25, age 27, it depended according to the state, until they could truly be free people. And until then, they had to work. Correct.

So what was the difference between slavery and that? So here there is no difference, right? I mean, here, what we're really saying is enslavement continued after legal freedom. And that's how these laws were constructed. Chris, tell me about the motivation for the act being passed in, in, when you're I've read about Wilberforce, I've always understood that it had a lot to do with evangelical Christianity and the evangelical understanding that an enslaved person couldn't choose Christ freely. And therefore you were doing it not in the sense as a human rights thing, but as a Christian missionary thing.

Is that also the case in the States or not? There is definitely a story about religion and religious thought here. And, you know, it's a complex story. So in other words, since the 1600s Quakers who were very much in power, socially in Pennsylvania and specifically in Philadelphia, they were some of the early abolitionists. And some of that early abolitionism was coming from their belief that all human beings are created people under God. So, you know, so to a certain extent, there was this really inspiring kind of early abolitionists, a moral compass that people were equally. Some of the biggest saving families

in Bristol and the early British saving stories were the fries and those families that were involved in chocolate trade and so on. See that. Again, that's shocking to me that they're involved in slavery because they always seem to be the good guys. You know, when we look at how, you know, people work and how people work in history, often motivations are very mixed and two things can be true at the same time. So there can, there was definitely an inspiration of the moral.

They were inspired by a moral compass, but at the same time, they were economic interests that were involved. There were interests by slave owners, Quaker slave owners, to if emancipate, if freedom were to happen, how to in fact ensure that they maintained the upper hand. And that many of the folks who were on that Pennsylvania legislature in 1780 were also Quaker and were inspired by these Quaker ideals. But that did not mean that their motivations were pure. And I should also say the key here, and this is one of the keys that. comes to came up throughout the research for the book is that when you don't have the people who are subjected to the oppression i.e. the enslaved people as part of the decision-making group commenting on

whether this actually looked like freedom or not, then you really are skewing the debate so that it's going to be in the interest of those who have the power. Is fear part of this too? I mean, you've got slave revolts taking place most famously the haiti one, which William Blake reads about and is very excited about in London and writes great poems and draws pictures of it. Is fear of slave revolts a big issue here or not? I think it definitely is. It's really interesting to look at this moment, 1750s, 1760s. Two things are going on. Number one, we actually have imperial competitions that are taking place to unprecedented extent. So the Caribbean region of which slavery plantations, you know, this is their epicenter in the world. This is also the time where we have the Spanish, the French, and the British

fighting, you know, a kind of 18th century world war. And swapping islands. And swapping islands. So that's happening, creating a lot of anxiety. St. Lucia goes from the French to the English, back to the French. That's right. Exactly. And at the same time, we have the beginning of some very intense slave revolt. So the Maccandal revolt that takes place in Haiti in the 1750s, the tacky rebellion. We have the maroon wars. We have in the 1790s the outbreak of what would become the Haitian revolution. And these are special because there's not some sort of white abolitionists is coming in saying, I give you your freedom, I release my hand. But this is people saying, this is ours by right and we're taking it. Exactly. Exactly. And so what-

And doing so violently in a way that frightens people. And doing so violently. And so this is creating, however much we may want to talk about Wilberforce. Wilberforce is coming in the I don't want to call it the wake. It's really he's, he is coming amidst the storm of these revolutionary attempts. And what we have are states, you know, governments, imperial governments, who are trying to answer the question, how do we try to survive the storm? And the survival of the storm is emancipations, you know, trying to relieve the pressure that's taking place in the colonies as in the enslaved revolting. It's the kind of free market thing going as well, that free people can work harder or, uh, the slaves is there an argument made on that basis or that's a beautiful point and of course that's the

great eric williams thesis um you know in one part of his argument uh who was an economist uh and also became the prime minister of trinidad was that you actually see an economic logic to moving from slavery which is actually very economically inefficient to moving to wage labor if the slaves are dying in in large numbers through mistreatment that's right and particularly when we add to that kind of the ecological story, which is that the sugar plantations were becoming less productive over time. The soil was being, you know, leached of its nutrients and production was diminishing in the West Indies. And we have sugar production that's beginning to rise in the east. And so there's also a move of capital towards the east.

And so slavery is not as good a business. So it was a good time to get out of slavery. But also this middle ground that they're trying to find. to please everybody and keep everybody quiet and stop everything erupting. The essence of the freedom that they're granting, I mean, I'm looking back at that, what was free about it?

You didn't have land, you didn't know where to go, you were sometimes working for 10 years or without any kind of money, you had no vote, you had no say. I mean, what exactly was the argument from the abolitionists to say, you know, your life is now better, well done,

congratulations us. Yeah, well, that's such a profound question because the direct answer to the question is for the abolitionists who are in charge, the empowered abolitionists who are creating these problematic forms of quote unquote freedom, emancipation meant you are no longer to work without pay, even though that, as we're saying, was very complicated because people were still forced to work without pay. But your question is pointing to a deeper meaning of what freedom is, which is having

relationship to land, that you have an autonomous relationship to your land, having a relationship to your family that you can be in charge of. That simply is a crucial thing, being able to have family ties. Having family ties. I mean, we can call this sovereignty, right? That's fundamentally what sovereignty is, is being able to control your story, your culture, your relationship to your relatives. To just love, to love and not have your love interrupted.

Simple, simple, simple things. And when you look at what, again, the black abolitionists of the 1780s and 1790s were asking for, yes, it was freedom, but freedom was the start. It was the first request. And after that came the true request, which is give us land, give us the ability to reconnect with our families. So there was already a demand there by a number of freed people to be able to return to their families in Africa.

Many of them knew their families, you know, just in their youth before being transferred on slave ship. So they wanted to return home. And, you know, and so these are some of the deeper meanings of what, for freedom meant in addition to asking for compensation, right? Asking for an actual financial compensation for what had been taken from them. And then, of course, you know, when we look at, for example, some of the abolitionists writing in London, black abolitionists from the 1790s, they're also asking for an apology, you know, for an apology from Slater.

That's right. We obviously, Anita and I both come out of Britain so very familiar with Equiano. Yeah. Are there many equivalents of him in the Caribbean? Well, you know, there is a kind of a group of folks at the time. So we think of Olada Echiano. I also want to mention Otoba Coguano, who was also writing from London at the time. And he was a colleague with Echiano.

Ekeano was in Essex, in Cambridge. That's right. That's right. Into his grave, I remember. That's right. Absolutely. Just like Cambridge, I think. And they both, you know, and Othoba, Coguano actually in his writing, uses the word reparation.

that what is what is required now is a reparation in the aftermath of slavery. But then there's another interesting figure, and there are many, as we can mention, but I want to mention the name of Robert Wedderburn, who was born in Jamaica, came to London, was born of a slave owner and an enslaved African- Jamaican woman, and was this firebrand, you know, in the early 1800s in London, writing back to Jamaica saying, it's time to start the revolt. and then in terms of the black community in London, trying to organize the community for social justice.

We're going to have to take a break here, but when we come back from the break, I'd like us to talk about a little bit later on because I think some people are aware of, you know, what is it, 40 acres and an immuval, or this idea that there was a gifting for certain reasons later on after emancipation. And just what does it mean now?

Move on, nothing to see here. Join us after the break. Welcome back. We are here with Chris Majapra, who is, I mean, frankly, blowing our minds, blowing a lot of myths out the water. Can we talk about how, even after so-called emancipation, this carrot is sometimes dangled in front of black people that, you know what, okay, you don't have land, you may not have land, but if you do something for us, we might give you something. The book, when you look at the book, you'll see that there are kind of these five types of emancipation. that we can discern over the course of a whole century of emancipations taking place. We've talked already about one of them in great detail, gradual emancipation in Philadelphia, but another major type is what we can call war emancipation,

the kinds of emancipations that happened in the aftermath of a war that was being fought. In fact, when we start talking about the Civil War, that was a big war emancipation in the 1860s, but the precedent was in the 1780s, in the 1790s. It was in the context, for example, of the American War of Independence, we had emancipations taking place. The British promised that if enslaved people would fight on their side as their compensation, they would receive their freedom. The Americans promised the same thing. And so we had large, significant numbers of enslaved people not just fighting the opponent, but fighting for their freedom through their role in the infantry.

And so we have, you know, these war emancipations in the 1780s. So we should say the corridor is really important. And I think, you know, Chris does it really well. So these people who do, I mean, they come good somewhat. They dump a whole bunch of people and they say, right, go Nova Scotia. Go be free, be happy. But there's no land. There's no money to build anything on the land.

There are already people in Nova Scotia who don't like these newcomers. That's right. And therefore, that's when these people decide. Life can be better. Tell us what happens after that when life has made so unpleasant for them in the promised Literally the promised land what do they do so this is in the early 1790s so the Brits have have lost the war of Independence you've got a lot of people moving northwards that's right we have the British colony of Nova Scotia We have previously enslaved people who had fought on the British side who as their compensation are being sent to Nova Scotia and from Nova Scotia as you were just saying finding that

There's hard scrabble there there's there's there's there There isn't a life to be had also experiencing the racism of the settlers who were already there. And then being moved or being offered to depart for Freetown, Sierra Leone, which became the first emancipation colony on earth. You know. Seagia, you move the black African freed slaves back to Africa. You move them back to Africa, not to anywhere close to where they came from. where their families are. But to a new colony, the British had established a new colony there, which would be a place for them to potentially create their own life.

Now, the problem here is, of course, that the way that these emancipation colonies worked is you had this first group of the freed people who came, who kind of actually died quite quickly because they were not given the support needed. There were health issues. There were infections. So that moment did not produce a stable kind of colony. But because you had this emancipation colony idea, the British now by 1806 declare the abolition of the slave trade, what was called it abolition of the slave trade. In other words, the actual shipping of enslaved people was to be abolished.

And through that, you had slave ships that were captured being taken to this new emancipation colony in Sierra Leone. But interestingly, here we come back to this idea of how messed up emancipations were. Because once the enslaved were led off the slave ships into this quote-unquote emancipation colony, they had to still serve 14 years as bonded laborers, you know, basically continuing their life as enslaved people before they could be, quote-unquote, trained up or prepared for their freedom. And so this idea that black freedom was in fact only possible through black debt by black people paying a debt is the only way that they could be freed from slavery. That deep idea, which is actually one of the deep logics of racism, which it still exists today, defined what happened in Sierra Leone. And it actually began to spread.

So there were many other, you know, St. Helena, parts of the Caribbean, Bahamas. Liberia later. Liberia later became. these kind of emancipation colonies. Chris, you mentioned a century of emancipations. Can you just give us a brief sort of chronology of what you mean by that? Yes, if I can provide a bird's eye view,

it would be we talked about the 1780s, which is the Philadelphia moment, gradual emancipations. By the time that we get to the turn of the century, so the 1800s, we have the opening up of these emancipation colonies, for example, in Sierra Leone, but we also have very importantly a new kind of emancipation process, the retroactive emancipation, I call it, that took place in Haiti, whereby Haiti fought its own liberation war,

but then in order to be recognized in international law, had to pay a massive reparations to the French imperial state. So that was a new mode of emancipation. And they paid. And they were forced to pay, and it took them until the 1940s to complete that payment. So it was the beginning of third world debt, really, that we're seeing there. The 1940s? The 1940s. The 1940s. All of these debt payments that we're talking about have very, very long kind of

I mean, I stand the imperial history. There's so much of this I didn't know. And I'm sure that people listening will know. And can I just say that and isn't it the case that this is making the point that our present is connected to our past? You know, if we just want to look at in terms of financial terms, these debt legacies

connect us to this past. So we have the Haitian moment. Then we move to almost, you know, the classic moment of compensated emancipation. The British Empire invents this. And it becomes, the model, the gold standard, if you like, for compensated emancipations between the 1833 and 1838 in the British Empire. Many other empires, the French, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Danish, they all then

in some ways copy what the British do, which is to do two things. They first pay financial compensation, a money payment to enslavers. And on the other hand, they require that enslaved people pay through free labor for a period of time through indentureship. So they're providing enslavers a double compensation. What sort of length of time are we talking here? Anywhere between four and 12 years and even in some cases a little longer. So for example, the Dutch have a 10 year indentureship. The British wanted a 12 year indentureship, but through political mobilization it was reduced to four years. Yeah, but only after a while, I thought it was like 12 and 8. It wasn't done willingly or easily. That's right. And And you know, in four extra years of having to pay through bonded labor is four extra years of oppression.

And, you know, and there's a lot of torture that was being used. And we could talk about these new torture techniques like the treadmill that were introduced precisely at that time. So we move from that compensated emancipation moment and its invention in the 1830s to what I call the war emancipations of the Civil War, the American Civil War. And the war emancipations already, they have a precedent that they were following. And these war emancipations were marked by freeing enslaved people who fought on the side of the victor. So we know that, you know, of the 400,000 insulate people across the South, a vast number of them were the reason why the Civil War was won. Because in a variety of ways, whether through active mobilization or through civil disobedience, they were part of the reason why the North won the war. They received their freedom, but war emancipations did not pay a compensation to those who were emancipated.

They were simply given their freedom, but in some ways they were, you know, hung out and expected to get on with their lives. To get on with their lives without any real, with no reparations that followed. And the American case then in some ways descends into a very sad story of Jim Crow and, you know, that trajectory that begins from the end of Reconstruction. explain that for those who don't understand what Jim Crow means. Jim Crow is is a kind of what I think of as a dirty war against black families that was fought through legal and extra legal means. So think of the lynching campaigns, but also think of the... When do they begin? I mean, in my head that, you know, this is sort of Martin Luther King territory.

You're talking about in earlier period, presumably. Yeah. And, you know, what historians show us is that the lynching campaigns began right in the aftermath of the Civil War. So from the end of the 1860s onwards, in places like Mississippi and Alabama, we have these, quote, unquote, extra legal vigilante projects or programs to disenfranchise black people. And when does Ku Klux Klan appear again? This is the cinematic sort of vision that we have of, you know, bonfires and white hoods and so on. So we're seeing that emerge really in the 1870s. As early as that.

As early as that. And really consolidating from the 1890s onwards. Yeah, but I mean, you know, the, the, you're astonished by how. early it was, I cannot believe how late this has been a thing. So one of the most moving things I've ever seen was in the African American Museum in Washington. They have moving footage in the 1920s of an entire sea of white hoods marching on Washington, marching up to the White House. It fills the screen for a good two minutes you'll see these hoods going past. So this is not so long ago. I mean, if we think, you know, the rise of Hitler is pretty contemporary, this isn't

much earlier than that. Yeah, that's absolutely right. William, I'm telling you, the whole place filled with marches. And, you know, I know this was, for our American audience, this is going to raise the blood temperature of some of the viewers, but when we so easily demonize, and of course, we should, the Ku Klux Klan and American white supremacists, but ultimately what they are saying is, we want our property back. It's framed in terms of property, you know, that there was a property that was stolen from them. In this case, it's a property of people, of enslaved people.

And here we have, you know, the big ongoing wound in the United States, that there are groups of people who feel that something was done to them or done against them because their property in other human beings was taken away. So, you know, that's the war emancipation of the 1860s. in the United States. And then that leads to the final main type of emancipation that actually begins almost simultaneously with this, which I call the conquest emancipations. And the conquest emancipations really take us back to Africa. So here we have the British and the French, the Belgians, the Portuguese, other groups, other imperial powers who now because emancipations

have expanded across the Americas, claim a kind of moral high ground. and say that they are going to bring emancipation to the Africans by conquering them, by conquering their states. And so it's a very- And breaking up sort of tippo-tips slave thing in Zanzibar and so on. Correct. So it's a cynical move. I mean, it's a mixed move. There is some, there is of course some good that's coming from their interventions, but it's coming along with a lot of devastation. And Livingston is taking on these sort of, these Arabian slaving groups operating in East Africa, isn't it?

And in fact, Christian missionaries in justifying their expansion in Africa are often doing it in terms of abolitionism, right? But here again, that abolitionism was done very much to African communities and not with African communities. And that makes, again, all the difference. I'm going to say to you what people are maybe shouting, some people shouting at their radios, stop making me feel bad. this is a long time ago,

what do you want me to do about it, why do you keep going on about it, and if you want reparations, whom I meant to pay? Great, yeah. I mean, this is the crux. Why talk about all of this? Is it a big guilt-tripping exercise?

You know, is there something perverse about wanting to keep going back to these histories? Why can't we just move on? And I think the answer is that we actually transform our future together by transforming our relationship to our past together. And the fact is that this is a shared past, right, that all of us are in fact affected by. When we transform our relationship, I'm going to call it heal now, when we heal our relationship to that past, which involves

not suppressing, repressing, forgetting, pretending that various things did not happen, but when we invite it into conversation and then we wonder about what our relationship to our past is, that actually helps us to come up with some new, more productive, more peaceable ways of thinking about our future together. Truth and reconciliation committee in a sense.

Well, maybe that's kind of what it is. I kind of feel like we keep re-fighting the same battles because we don't retell the history that we share, you know. And so that's really the crux of why we need to revise our history because we're in a rut currently. But revising history and truth and reconciliation don't come with a price tag. Is it important to have the price tag attached to this? That there should be some financial recompense,

or is that not as important or important at all? It is important. it is important. To whom does that recompense go? Since the financial benefits of slavery and then the financial benefits of the abolition of slavery went to enslavers, it is the case that what reparations involves

is the reversing of that, the addressing, the redressing of that. And I think, you know, money is symbolic. Money is material, but money is symbolic. And there is an argument to me made that there needs to be a compensation for to the families of enslaved people, to the descendants of enslaved people, both for material and for symbolic purposes. But I would also add that that can only be one part of what a larger discussion around reparations is.

Okay, so the other thing that often comes up when this subject is raised, is that, okay, why are you looking only to the white people for reparations and only for the guilt? And you will have heard this, without the King de Hoaghan. of this world who captured people and sold them to white slave owners who then took them across the middle passage None of this would have been possible. Why aren't you looking to to his lot and you know you you you must have heard all these things, you know all these big forts on the West Africa Yeah. In Ghana and so on you know this could not have happened without complicity you know

Europeans so why why just blame us and make us feel bad what I find really interesting and um inspirational is that when we look at grassroots activists in Africa today, you know, I'm thinking about grassroots folks who I'm in touch with in Ghana, they're actually looking to their social elites for reparations as well. So it's, I don't think it's happening. Absolutely. And I think these are interconnected. Because in fact, you know, the oppressions that we see of the people in post-colonial nation states in Africa and the continuities of political oppression by social elites, that is directly related historically to the origins and then the continuation of slavery.

It is a question of social elites and how they connect across, you know, imperial, national, you know, racial boundaries. And that's what we need to be addressing. And one other defensive reaction to this that you'll often hear in a British context is, so should we start suing the Italians for the Romans crucifying Bodhisia or destroy, or go back to France and punish them for the Normans.

And, you know, yeah, there's all of that that comes up. Well, you know, it's, the question is how far back do we need to go? I guess I would ask a question in response. Do we honestly feel that we've moved on from this history? I mean, when we look at the fact that, you know, I look at my own family, my third great grandmother was enslaved. You know, that's not that long ago. slavery and its implications for the future for our contemporary society is very clear.

You know, we look at the, when we want to talk about land, we look at, you know, African, either African American or African Britons, their access, their relationship to land is gravely unequal to other groups, or we look at representation in the media, or we look at health outcomes, you know, along all of these different, you know, the social. determinants of health, as we call it, we see that new world African people, I'm talking of the Americas and black people in Britain, are still suffering. And that is what we need to understand in a historical perspective. And that's where the reparations discussion is. I think the true reparations discussion is not about how much money do we cut a check for. It's about how do we

address social disrepair. And I think they're really exciting and inspirational ways to do that. I think it's an inspiring discussion. I don't see it as a disheartening discussion. I can't think of a more appropriate place to leave this. Chris Majapra, thank you so very much for being with us. There is only one episode of Empire this week. So do join us again next Tuesday. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.