Empire: World History - 70. The Haitian Revolution, Dutch royals, and what happened to the Caribs?

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

What happened to the Caribs, the indigenous people of the Caribbean? Why did indentured labour become so prominent? What is the current Dutch monarchy's approach to slavery? Did Native Americans keep slaves? Listen as William and Anita answer your questions. 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 podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire, a special Q&A episode. My name's Anita Arnd. I had to think about that for a minute. I know. Did you notice?

All these years I've known you, I never knew that, I'm eating it. My name is James Fonds. I'm so full of surprise. I was like, what happened there? You'd never know what's going to happen on the show. No, I know. Normally something ludicrous. Anyway, who are you then?

They know that? That's just the environment. Get a hold with it. He's William Dowranpo. Actually, he's William Fancy Pants, Dallronport. Before we get to the questions, I want to talk about your recent public appearance. So, we all know. Well, not that public.

It was, yeah. Can we definitely call it fancy schmancy? Because it was fancy schmancy, because it was fancy schmancy. It was also fascinating. This was, I was called in at the Foreign Office. To be guilty. Sorry, yes. Why do they let you anywhere?

No such luck. I need to have no such luck. Why? Why do they want you? Not even a mild slap on the rest, have you know. No, because they, I think, have realised that they, like everybody else in this country, they don't know enough about collectivism. And so they started a series of lectures, and I was the first yesterday, and it was in the Durbar Hall, which used to be the main meeting point in the center of the India office.

And it's the most fascinating story, because basically after the East India Company is abolished in 1857, the government has to take over the administration of India, but they haven't got anywhere in Whitehall for them to administer from. So for the first 10, 15 years, they carry on in the old East India Company building in Ledenhall Street in the middle of the city, surrounded by bankers and city folk. But they then, I think, sort of sees a great chunk of Whitehall behind Downing Street, demolish the residential buildings that had been there since the rebuilding after the fire of London, and they build this enormous complex of four linked buildings. One is the home office, one is the foreign office, one is the India office, and the fourth is the colonial office. So this

administers the British Empire at its height from immediately behind Downing Street. I have questions. I have so many questions. So I have questions. So I've moved offices. Just to bring it all back to me for a second. Hi, Anita. This is far more important. No, but when I've moved offices before, right, you basically stuff all of your stuff in a box and you carry it up the road. Or a bin bag.

Or, you know, down the road, depending on where you're going to be to a better or worse building. I mean, do they have the old Ledenhall Post-it notes, photocopier's phones that don't work? I mean, what happens? Well, that is what I think would be a surprise to most people. And I'd seen it before. I have been in there before, but it hadn't actually quite clear. One of the two main buildings where the foreign office now is. So they have got now as the foreign office the bit that used to be the foreign office plus the bit that used to be the indoor office.

And so one of them is this built at the same time is where cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, lives. James Cleverley to me. Cleverly to you. Some public school. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah.

And then you've got the main Indyro office building itself. And that is still full of everything that was loaded out of Ledenhall Street. Like Kim Caboodle. So what kind of stuff have they got? So in these meeting rooms where, you know, presumably they're discussing Brexit or, you know, arming Ukraine or whatever it is that the foreign office is doing that morning. It's the old India office chairs with India office logos on. Really? Yeah, literally.

It's sitting. And then the people on the wall. who no one of course recognises anymore because no one's taught this stuff. But there are all the people that we've all been meeting on this podcast for the last. Oh, like who? Like who is looking at you? Stringer Lawrence, who fought at Calodden, then taught Clive how to fight and turned Clive into the ruthless rapacious 18th century warrior that he became, who conquered

great chunks of India. There is Irkut, who we haven't mentioned on this show, but who's another of these 18th century India office generals with this sort of face like an Aberdeen Granite. Ear Coot. How do you say it? A, E-Y-R-E. Oh, okay.

Or E-E-R-E, E-R-E, I think it's ear. Okay, no, no, not what I was imagining. Okay, ear-cute, uh-huh. And, I mean, all my old friends, I mean, you know, slavers, rapacious, sort of conquerors, people, and then lined up in the Derbar Hall are all these guys who were responsible for the massacres in 1857, some of the big sort of genocides of our time. So John Nicholson, Colin Campbell. who made the mutineers lick up the blood of the women in the BB gars, sewed them up in pig skins.

Yeah. And it's all there still. It's the centre of the foreign office. So this is so interesting. And you walk in. Yeah. And our old friend Clive, you know, we've talked before about the statue of Clive between the Downing Street and the fore office. You walk in.

And you go through all the kind of scanners and stuff at the reception. And immediately you come out of the reception. There's a Plythe is there again in front of you. You can't avoid coming in except Bar Clive. This time dressed up as a Roman legionary with his sort of nobly knees showing beneath the cure. I've seen that picture. Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah.

And that used to be in the India house of East India Company headquarters, then was in the India office and is now there in the foreign office. And then finally you walk into the Durba Hall and there is a third time alongside Warren Hastings and everyone else than ever. So you and I, and we mustn't name names because they're not here to defend themselves all. or say anything about this. But we do know former diplomats from India and Pakistan. And they always talk about having a visceral reaction walking into the Foreign Office, walking past Clive and having Clive look down upon them.

I mean, that's a thing, isn't it? And so I didn't realise that they actually, if they walk into some of these briefing rooms, it gets even worse. Distinction there, because I said there's two buildings. There's the building which is the Old Indy Office and then there's a building to the old front office. And as we said, cleverly, the minister,

if you're going to present your credentials, actually is in the old foreign office. So they don't have to see all of that. They don't sit in those rooms. Okay. Look, I have more questions. I have two other questions. Okay.

That was the most fascinating afternoon. Are you allowed to tell us or will you have to kill each and every one of us what you were talking about? No, as I said, I was lecturing on the anarchy, and it's the first of a series of lectures on colonialism. Okay. And I'm glad to say that everyone in the foreign office, or not everyone in the front office, but they want to turn up the lecture, are listeners to Empire. Oh, good. Yay. All right.

Second question. No, important. important question. The old chairs from Ledenhall Street, are they comfy? Did you have a comfy wash of? I just want to know. I didn't quite risk. I didn't quite risk losing my invitation by sitting on them. But I did photograph them and they're beautiful things. They're absolutely gorgeous with this lion, East India Company lion and a little randall at the top. And I mean, You know, it's a very interesting question. Is this, you know, the front office, we're organizing these lectures specifically because

everyone needs to know more about this stuff and, you know, are very well aware of all the issues that this entails. But it is, you know, it's odd to see this room, which is just stuffed with, this, not this room, this entire packlist, which is stuffed with all the old East India company stuff. I mean, I had a complete ball. I was with all my old friends and enemies. Did you take a teaspoon? No, it's all right.

I don't ask you. I did not take a teaspoon. I did not take T-Streasper. I did take lots of photographs, though. Okay, well, that's fine. Listen, shall we? So we're just chatting amongst ourselves here, although I think this is fabulous.

Come to order, order, order, order. This is basically the final week of our slavery series. As always, when we get to the end of a series, we like to take your questions, not just chat amongst ourselves. I know it's hard to believe. We do know you're there as well. Rain, we know that you're there.

But look, I want us to just, first of all, I mean, before we get to questions from you, our wonderful listeners, and we adore you. So never forget that, even though sometimes we forget you're there, apparently. A favourite episode. So good job, you're better behaved on your official BBC duty to be. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? On PM, finally the last five minutes getting to the headlines.

For me, can I just say, this is like my Reggie Perrin moment running into the sea. This is what I do. Let me tell me, come on Emper. Woohoo! Okay, look, we're going to talk. I want to know, and I will share also, the favourite episodes in this that have opened your eyes the most. I'm going to go first.

I absolutely was blown away by our Francis Barber episode. I love that so much. Really? Was that your... Well, I absolutely was thinking about this, because I knew that we, you know, we chat about it. This is the black servant of Dr. Johnson. Oh, Dr. Johnson. Because, first of all, because, you know, as a student of literature,

you know about Samuel Johnson. knew about Samuel Johnson. And as you pointed out when we did the podcast, you know, he's Robbie Coltrane. He looms large. If you watch Blackadder, that's a reference to that. But, you know, in the consciousness, in the cultural richness, you know, that any thought of the dictionary is immediately linked to Johnson. But I didn't know about Barber. And I didn't know about this affectionate, you know, relationship, a parental relationship where this, you know, enslaved human becomes an heir to perhaps the greatest man of letters that England has ever known. And I just, I loved that story because it brought so many of the big issues that we were talking about at the day. What it go, you know, what a young person goes

through when they are ripped from their homeland, what people feel along the lines, the differential feelings that people have, those who sort of take them on the ship and feel nothing for these people, who betray them, who treat them so badly as we find out in the Lauda Equiano in his own words episode. But then the tenderness and this sort of nascent abolitionist sensitivity that I think Johnson embodies, which is, you know, this is wrong. This is a young boy and I care about him. And I thought that was all, I mean, to me it felt like an epic. I loved it.

And, you know, I loved our guest. It was Peter Moore, wasn't it, on that one? He's so articulate. Look, that was my favourite. What about you? I mean, what sticks out in your head? Well, I have to say that unlike the India series and unlike the Ottoman series, both of which are things I've studied and written about, I am ashamed to say, I knew very, very little about any of this before embarking on the series. So it's been a quite different experience than the other two because it's been mugging up every week on something completely new to me. And I was ashamed to say I knew very, very little about any of it. even things I thought I knew about, like the Royal African Company, because it's a contemporary

of the near-contemporary of the East India Company, and it's the sort of thing I've been studying for half my life. And yet, when you get into the detail of it, it's just all new. And so it was just eye-opening from the beginning. I loved those early episodes about ancient Egypt, Syria, David Wengrove's fantastic archaeology lessons about what was happening, whether the Stonehenge was built by slaves or not, and the idea of these big sort of barbecues they had in wheelchair in 3,000 BC. Isn't that fantastic?

Yeah, it was. But if I had to take one episode, I mean, I loved the Merry Beard episode, Spartacus. I loved Cat Jarman's episode, The Viking. But I think the story which thrilled me most was Toussanduverture. Oh, good, because I also found that, you know, and I've perhaps I've read a bit more than you had about, you know, enslaved people and the whole politics of it. But I still, every week was completely stunned and shocked. Did you know about Tousand de Vatour before? I did.

I knew about his name because of, because if you are in the news and you cover Black Lives Matter, you know that he's a huge figure in that movement. But what I did not know was that Napoleon was such a git, can we say? Yes, the re-enslavement of all these free slaves. So I found that really, that for me, was an absolute gasp moment. I always thought sort of, you know, child of the revolution, that he represented the opposite of that. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a struggle for freedom, not capitalist, colonialist ideals. But also that, you know, the betrayal, again, it's these sort of singular stories that catch my imagination.

But, you know, Leverturb believed in the French ideal. He believed in the revolution. He believed in all of those things and sold it to his people. And was reading like so many of the people in the revolution, he was reading the Enlightenment philosophers, is reading Montescue and so on. Exactly that. So I thought that clash. And also, you know, sort of one of the times that Napoleon is, you know, sent running.

I thought that, I learned so much. You know, in those moments when your brain suddenly goes, that happened all the way through that one. Oh, good, very great. And top book recommendation again, Sudhir Hazar Singh, Black Spartacus. I think probably the book I enjoyed most in the reading for this series. Yeah, no, it is absolutely exceptional. Okay, so anything that really,

gave you that head moment. In every episode is the short answer, and I'm ashamed how little I knew of this before. Again, like every British person, all I knew was the story of emancipation. I knew about Will Perforce, I knew about how we liberated the slaves in inverted commas, but I didn't know how we'd saved them in the first place.

And the scale of it, 12 million people shipped across Atlanta. Maybe I'd sort of read the line, but never really appreciated it before. But the end of the slave trade was not the same as the end of the practice of slavery. And that really struck me that, you know, that I thought I found that an absolute gasp of a thing, that, you know, you thought that actually the day after the world is a better place, but it isn't, it takes years. And that's what happens, of course, in the movie, in the amazing grace, where, you know, they end the slave trade and everyone's cheering and the slaves fetters are coming off. But they didn't come off. Those that were enslaved remained enslaved. Anyway, shall we take a break at this point and come back with some questions?

I was like in our special UNA HNA episode I'm looking forward I'm looking forward to the new Anita Anand PM where we get to the headlines in the last 30 seconds

of the hour long show Oh dear I know I'm going to have a word with myself over this break I'll be a cup of tea We'll be back Welcome back

You're listening to Empire with me Anita Arnan And me William Durenpool I just thought we Rambled so much In the first half People might have forgotten

Why we're here who we are and what we're doing. Your questions, so look, William Durham-Paul, these questions actually have multiple people have sent them on these subjects. So we've kind of picked the ones that most of you have been talking about. Although there have been so many questions. But Akela Mahendron and Deepak Samson sort of sum up the questions from, you know, scores of people. Why were indentured labour Indians taken to the Caribbean is what Akela wants to know.

And Deepak wants to develop that theme and say how different was indentured labour? to slavery. So let me start with a bog standard kind of definition as far as I understand it. Slaves have no choice, no choices at all. They have no choices for themselves. They have no choices for their children. If they have children or their grandchildren, they are all born into a system from which there is no escape. There is no payment. There is no guarantee of treatment being of any kind of standard. It is at the whim of the owner. You are owned. You are property. An indentured labourer is, even though the circumstances of their lives may be wretched and sometimes as appalling as those who work on plantations, but they are employees of sorts.

So they borrow money to get these jobs. They agree to work off this debt and perhaps a little more. But they can get out. There are ways of getting out. You either pay off the debt or die trying, but your children are not automatically enslaved. I mean, is that a fair kind of definition? would you say? I think as in all these things, probably it's less of a grey area on the ground.

I think I suspect when you're chopping down sugar in a plantation in the Caribbean in Trinidad or Tobago, wherever it is, there's probably actually on the ground very little difference. I don't know whether there's any less brutality or a foreman less likely to whip and punish indentured labours and slaves. I don't know. Didn't we? I mean, we sort of crossed paths with this question when we did the Tucson Lovitcher, which we've just been, you know, going on about quite a lot of. on the first half. But, you know, when he does free Sander Mang, he has to keep the plantations open. Otherwise, there will be no economy for this country. He knows that his newly born free state

is going to sink into the ocean. So he does sort of set up an indentured labor system, where people are still having to work very, very long hours. They are paid a pittance. I mean, they're not having to take on a debt to work here, but they're not going to be able to eat unless they do work here. The hours are just as punishing. And that is why, for a while, his authority wobbles because people are expecting at the end of slavery like, you know, okay, life gets better, but it doesn't. So look, those are the differences. But why Indians taken? I mean, that's one of the questions that's implied here as well, William. So why are Indians taken? That's very interesting. So what happens, I think, is that when the slave trade is banned, which is the first stage, at that point, they start these apprenticeships when basically slavery continues, but under a different name. And then when that ends, they still need to keep. these plantations going because and let's not forget this the Haiti alone had a larger economy than all of what is now the United States of America and Haiti

was though it was the largest was was only just ahead of Jamaica and Cuba so all these islands are vastly profitable and they're generating huge profits for the different countries which run them whether it's Britain Spain Portugal in the case of Brazil and Portugal is something we haven't talked enough about I hope we've got a question coming up I think on on Portugal because The Portuguese were the largest slaves. They were larger. They shipped more slaves.

Okay, well, I don't know it's on the list. I know you know it's on the list. I'll have a little sneak preview. It's unlike you. But if we take one particular country, let's zoom in on one country. Let's take Trinidad, for example. So 1845, the immigration of indentured workers from India begins. And as William says, you know, slavery has ended, so, you know, they need something else to replace it.

Huge numbers of people were migrated. I'm going to say were migrated rather than chose to migrate because there were some question as to what people thought they were signing up for or what they actually got in the end. There's a very good fictional spin on this if you want a very well-informed fictional version of people signing up for something other than what they actually got, which was harsh indentured labour. in Amitav Ghosh is the first volume of his opium trilogy, which is the Sea of Puppies, and he has a lot of his characters who are basically conned into signing their lives away in indentured labour. We're so missing a trick, not doing fiction as well.

You know what? We've got to think about that for the series going on forward. And one other, when I'm talking about books, another crucial book, the great book on indentured labour, if anyone wants to read more about this, a wonderful writer called Gautra Bahadur, and we had her at the Chiipa Literature Festival a few years back

and she spoke about a book called Cooley Woman, The Odyssey of Indenture. And she has got some fantastically deep dive personal accounts of what it meant to indenture yourself, be an indentured labour and what went through. And she particularly focuses on her own homeland of Guyana, which was one of these, I think it was a Spanish colony that then the British took over.

That sounds right. And it had huge numbers. of Indians were shipped there by the British in quite later on in the 1860s and 70s. And a lot of these indentured families, of course, end up generations later with very different profiles. So the V.S. Nypal's family were famously indentured laborers from UP, Brahmin but Paul, who signed up for this, and ended up spending their lives in Chiguanas and Trinidad. I mean, I just want to go back to Trinidad because I think the numbers are really, really important. So you understand just the scale of this. I mean, again, when we put numbers to

the slave trade as well, it's just mind-boggling. But just staying with Trinidad for a moment, as early as 1871 fourth of the total population of Trinidad were Indo-Trinidadians. That's a quarter of people on this one place. I don't know the figures in front of me, but I think it's higher for Guyana. I think Guyana has this vast population of former indentured laborers who are of Indian origin, including, I think, the current premier of Guyana. Right. I might even have to do a quick trip to the borderline just to check this.

Yeah, no, you, while you check the bodily, and I mean, one of the sort of, I suppose, legacies of this, and we'll talk about legacies a lot in this. I know you're all interested in that. You have a system then on these Caribbean islands where you have a system even today of colorism, where, you know, if you are of mixed race and you are a lighter shade, you know, there is a new kind of racism that friends of mine who are from places like Trinidad talk about, where, you know, the lighter your skin, the better off you're deemed to be. So if that's one sort of wretched and unexpected legacy of these sort of poor indentured labourers who are carried across the sea,

sometimes not knowing why they're going, where they're going, or how long they're going to be there, beaten on voyages, you know, sort of treated terribly and all of the things that go hand in hand with being shipped as human cargo. That is the legacy in the Caribbean that exists today. So here, I'm back from the Bodilin. Quick. That's quick, yeah. Indogani's are the largest ethnic group in Guyana, identified by the official census. About 40% of the population today are former indentured labours. And they're largely taken from very interesting, from Avad, from Bodhpur, their labourers, Bojpuri and Avadi labourers taken from what's now UP, to Pradesh, in the aftermath of the

catastrophe of 1857, which led to massive massacres across the main population centres in Lucknow and Kanpur and so on. And many get thrown off their land and end up in Guyana, about 40% of the current population. Isn't that extraordinary? It is extraordinary. Okay, William. Native Americans, question from Scott Inglton. Was slavery a part of Native American culture or was it introduced with the arrival of Europeans? Let us go back to your favorite man at the moment, David Wengrove, who talks about, you know, the choices that were made by Native Americans. David Wengroes writes a great deal about this, doesn't he? Exactly. So in the dawn of everything, Wengrove writes that there are a whole variety of different attitudes to slavery. Yes,

there are tribes and moments in North America when Native Americans do enslave people captured in war. And that happens a lot. There are also tribes who have it and reject it. And there are tribes that never take it up. So it's not an easy, straightforward answer. But you will find this discussed in great detail in David Wengro's book. I was slightly surprised to find it there because I was sort of expecting to read about, you know, the pyramids and Stonehenge. And quite a lot of the book is set in Florida and California.

Yes, that's right. Yes, but this is all underpinned by archaeological research, by the way, which makes it all the more compelling. And it's kind of, when the book came out, it was seismic because it really suggested that people could choose. Even way back when people could choose whether to be monstrous to their fellow man or not. And some did and some didn't. And he has this whole extraordinary story of various educated French-speaking Native American chiefs who travel to France and are very critical of the inequalities of French society. And they meet the Enlightenment philosophers. And this idea of, is it Voltaire, I think, who first goes out with the idea of the

noble savage. This is inspired specifically by coming face to face the people from the Americas. Well, one particular, very highly educated, highly critical Native American chief who goes around 18th century France talking to philosophers and arguing that. the European system is unjust and not at all the best way to run society. And this is the opening point for David Wengera's book. Min Mystery asks a related question. He wants to know what happened to the indigenous Americans. Because when we talked about enslaved people, we sort of didn't talk about them. I mean, just in a real nutshell, after the USA was founded at the end of the 18th century, the USA started to spread across the country systematically wiping out Native Americans'

way of life. So Buffalo were killed, disease spread from, you know, places where they had no immunity. Hoseau walls, massacres. Yeah, massacres. And, you know, this idea of driving Native Americans onto reservations. So this all revolves around something called, you know, the manifest destiny, which is this idea that America was divinely destined to take over the whole continent and spread Christianity wherever it went. You know, just, just an incalculable damage to people who were native to that. I think we've got at some point to do America as an empire. And there's that wonderful book by Daniel Imowal, How to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States. Yeah, I'm not for that. How to Hide an empire. Well, listen, hey, hey, we're still deciding where we're going to go next.

So, look, let's swap it all on the table. Let's chat. Okay, shall we move on to the next question? So this is, again, asked by many people. But Abinav Roy says, can you please talk about the Dutch Empire apologising about slavery? And you know what? We have a lot. We have a lot. We have a lot. We have I haven't really talked about the Dutch Empire at all here. So, okay, let's deal with this. So the Dutch were fairly low down the pecking order in terms of colonial slavers. I've got the hierarchy in front of me. The largest shippers were the Portuguese and the Brazilians, then came the English, then came the French, then come the Dutch, and finally the Spaniards and North Americans at the bottom of the table. And what happens?

though is that the Dutch are very early in on the game, just like I think the Portuguese begin it, but the Dutch are there early on. And they also take not just from Africa, but they enslave many of their enemies or the indigenous inhabitants in the spice islands. And I've met descendants of Indonesian royalty who were moved en masse to South Africa, I think. Because initially the Dutch just traded with the slave islands and the canoes were. would come out full of spices and the Dutch would buy it and then they'd sell home. But they then realized that they were militarily powerful enough just to dispense with buying the stuff and they opened fire one day on the people coming to sell them things and they

burn down their houses. Then the leaders and the dominant clans, they enslave and pack off to South Africa where their descendants remain as a distinct ethnic group. I mean, there's been a study. The Dutch have been very much opening their record books and their consciences and thinking about Holland's role or the Netherlands role in the slave trade, there was a study that was out just last month. And it said the House of Orange profited to the equivalent of about $600 million in today's money from slavery in Dutch colonies. That's between a very short period, well, 100 years, 1675 to 1770, and the profits from the shares in the Dutch East India Company were, you know,

it was different to the British one, which was run by the Duke of York in effect. Personally. But personally, with his horrible brand, let's keep reminding you, that DOY that was branded into people's skin. But this was, you know, it was sort of slightly one step removed. But these things were given to the Dutch royal family as gifts. And I just want to tell you, like, there was a really surprising thing that happened at the end of last year. The Kingdom of the Netherlands issued an apology for its role in the enslavement and trafficking of Africans to the Americas to the 17th to the 19th century. But actually what they wanted was like a formal kind of ceremony, which only happened in July this year.

And they've been looking and opening all of their records and actually really drilling down into what this apology means. People have been a bit critical of the apology saying, you know what, it was a long time coming. And the Dutch raw family has actually led the way and hopefully others may follow in on this. But the criticism comes from those they say, you know, it was a one-hand clapping that they didn't actually. talk to the people who are descendants from that whole slave trade and they weren't involved in any of that kind of announcement or the sensitivities around it. But looking at Holland, in the Western province of Holland, it's estimated that 40% of economic growth between 1738 and 1780 can be linked to slavery. And that's the kind of thing that a body called the Dutch Research Council

has been looking into and producing for people in a country who really don't look at themselves like this. So if you go to Holland, you know, or you have done, if late, it's a country that talks about its ease with multiculturalism. It has a large Surinamese population. And it's, you know, kind of laid back is the kind of image that is presented. So all of this, and this report in particular in 2021, Chains of the past, it was a real wake-up call. It was like a real seismic tremor in the country where people, for the first time, were forced to confront what had happened in the country and what the country was built on. So I thought that was very interesting.

As far as sort of apologies are concerned, there has not, I don't think there's been another sort of national apology. You had Tony Blair in 2007 issue a statement of regret. Do you remember that, the statement of regret on the 200th anniversary of the abolition? We had also the then-Prince Charles now, King Charles, when Barbados got its independence last year. he made a long speech about the horrors of slavery. But again, I don't think it was a formal national apology.

But this one was an actual formal apology on the 1st of July, which was also, it happened to be the 160th anniversary of the country's abolition of slavery. So, interesting. And at the trade's height, I think, I'm just looking at some of these findings from this body that's been opening the records and combing through them. But the numbers are really very different. I think, you know, just to get an idea of the millions who were enslaved and taken from Africa, West Africa, to other parts, at the trade's height, and we're talking about sugar here, between the 17th and 18th century, they estimate more than a thousand enslaved people were taken to Suriname, to every year to work on plantations. So, yeah, 90% of the population in what was then a South American colony was enslaved. Conditions were so harsh that the number of births, never outpaced the number of deaths. That tells you something, doesn't it?

Certainly does. Certainly does. So the next question is about the Caribbean, why the Caribbean and what happened to the Caribbs. And the Caribbean, I think, was considered suitable because it was climatically perfect for growing the kind of cash crops that the colonial system wanted produced, namely tobacco, sugar, particularly sugar, and in other places, rights. And the problem was that for the colonials trying to establish these plantations, was that the native Caribs and Arrawaks were extremely warlike and would not allow themselves to be enslaved and fought and fought,

with the result that wars of extermination were waged against them. And today, the few surviving members of the Caribs are known as the Kalanago. And apparently there are today 3,000 Kalanago left in an enclave called the Kalinago Territory in northeast Dominica, of whom only 70 consider themselves to be absolutely pure blood. Otherwise, the entire Carib and Arawak nations were exterminated and wiped out to make way for the plantations. And you have this long history of Carib wars, which are fought in the Caribbean, because the Caribs who retreat to the mountains, and so on, raid the plantations and attack the colonial settlements. And eventually they are literally hunted to extinction in a very organized fashion. It's a story very like the horrors, successive

kinds of horrors suffered by the Incas and the Aztecs after the arrival of the Europeans. It's not just that they're wiped out by the colonials, they're wiped out by colonial diseases. And there are terrible smallpox epidemics that wipe out great chunks of the carry population. there are volcanoes that go off, wiping out part of the caribs in La Soufriere. And after the eruption, apparently 1812, 130 yellow caribs and 59 black caribs only were left alive on St. Vincent. In 1830, the entire Carib population numbered less than 100. So it's a tragic story where this race is attacked, marginalized, shoved into the corners ravaged by disease, and ultimately white turd.

So will you, will you forgive my ignorance? But I mean, do caribs have, I mean, ethnographically, how do you describe caribs? They're cousins of the people in Central and South America. Okay. So their languages are related to language groups that survive in, particularly in places like Columbia, parts of Mexico, northern Latin America. And they look like South Americans, Columbia. Columbia, okay.

Panama. And how are they treated now, caribs? Are they a protected class? I mean, do we know that? I mean, I say they're virtually non-existent. And there are few mixed villages in places like Trinidad and Tobago. And mostly they have been hunted to extinction. And then that was why then the Middle Passage, slave route was opened up to replace them and take the land and to replace with black Africans who, as we discussed in earlier episodes, were malaria. Hardy, they had the DNA which allowed them to survive in these tropical conditions and were physically strong. And so they were, and so this system begun by the Portuguese and the Spanish of shipping black Africans from initially West Africa to the newly cleared and ethnically cleansed islands of the Caribbean. So, I mean, I suppose another simpler question is, is a simpler answer maybe, that slavery followed climate and fertility. I mean, that's, that's also a thing, isn't it? So, you know, Sanderbank is such a successful colony because it is, it is moist,

the earth is fertile, it is sheltered with, with mountains. And maybe that's another reason why slavery is so prevalent in the south of America as well, because it's just hotter, wetter, damper, humid, you know, it is conducive to growing the kind of crops that make money. cotton, you know, sugar, tobacco, cotton. But the north, you can't grow this stuff there. So, you know, the ideology of the north is very different to the south. I don't know which chicken and egg because the climate of the north and the south is very different. I mean, that's something to discuss, isn't it?

But this is a sort of sinister way in which, you know, one ethnic group who happened to occupy this land are not considered suitable for plantation slavery that too warlike. Yeah. And so you just wipe them out and replace them with other people who will work And this happens on this vast scale. We've done it again. We've gone on and on and on.

So I think we need a second episode of Q&A because we've got more questions than we've given answers. So listen, join us again on Thursday for the second Q&A episode from us. Until then, it's goodbye for me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg.