Slavery and Liverpool

[Waterways]

Originally it was the Portuguese, Spannish, Dutch, French and English who "rounded them up". Seeing the example and how one could trade human flesh for desired goods, guns, powder, knives, pots, pans, etc., Africans joined in the profitable practice and sold thier fellows (usually captives from enemy tribes) for gain. Not unlike the practice of North American First Nation warriors taking European scalps, which was, originally, a practice instituted by the Dutch in North America. The authorities placed a bounty on the lives of "Indians" and to stop the fraud, of claimind killings that didn't happen, by the Dutch settlers, demanded proof of the killing. The ever so civilized Dutch settlers decided to take scalps because a scalp was light and easy to transport. And because the stipend was on a sliding scale from children through women to men, the scalp could prove what the age and gender of the murdered native was.

The Africans were already into slavery before the Europeans turned up. The Portugese were the first Europeans to enslave Africans in the modern sense. Although Romans did it before..

Africans are still enslaving people even today.

Shall we demand that Africans apologize for not driving the Europeans from thier shores? Africans armed with stones, spears, bow & arrows and protected by skin shields against muscat, balls, cannon, knives and cutlasses.

This comes across as incomprehensible. What do you mean?

Waterways, might I suggest some reading to you? Try reading 'Guns, Germs & Steel' by Jared Diamond.?

[snappel]

Yeah, native Africans were selling slaves themselves... usually kidnapped from other tribes...

[Waterways]

Yeah, native Africans were selling slaves themselves... usually kidnapped from other tribes...

Yet, western, and world, media portrays this as something only Europeans did to Africans. I wonder if the new slavery museum will tell the real story.

[scouserdave]

Never heard of Captain Crow until I read Marky's thread. Just done a google

Liverpool's Heart of Darkness

News: It was strictly business: The city's era of prosperity rested on the profits of the transatlantic slave trade. Today its idle docks are home to the memories of an ancestral crime.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

July/August 2002 Issue

On the 27th of July, 1807, a ship named the Kitty's Amelia sailed from Liverpool, England, under the command of Captain Hugh Crow, a one-eyed Manxman turning 42. Earlier that year, Parliament had abolished the British slave trade, but the Kitty's Amelia had received legal clearance before the first of May, when abolition took effect. Though she left port almost three months after the slave trade officially ended in Great Britain, the Kitty's Amelia sailed legally, as legally, that is, as a slave trader -- the last of the English slave traders -- could sail. The ship carried 300 tons burden and 18 guns, a concession not only to England's war with France but also to conditions on the Guinea coast of Africa, where Captain Crow -- called "Mind-Your-Eye Crow" -- was bound.

I have no idea whether the Kitty's Amelia was finally dismasted, her timbers knocked apart, her ship's furniture salvaged or burned. The ship may have ended its days benignly. It might have become a prison hulk, like the ones in Great Expectations, or been wrecked at sea. There's no knowing precisely where Captain Crow's human cargo finally ended up after being sold in the West Indies or where and in what circumstances they lived and died, apart from those captives, that is, who died of disease aboard ship during the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World.

As for Captain Crow, his days ended in 1829, and he was buried on the Isle of Man. In his autobiography, Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool, he does his best to make a slave's voyage aboard the Kitty's Amelia sound almost pleasant. "I always took great pains to promote the health and comfort of all on board, by proper diet, regularity, exercise, and cleanliness, for I considered that on keeping the ship clean and orderly, which was always my hobby, the success of our voyage mainly depended." How you interpret this passage depends entirely on the meaning you give the word "success."

I recently stood at the edge of the Mersey River, trying to imagine the July day 195 years ago when the Kitty's Amelia worked her way into the tide. The thought of that day brought with it a sense of the irrevocable, of lives lost, fortunes gathered and dispersed, the peculiar distortions of human and economic justice we like to call history. Perhaps someone in Liverpool, watching the Kitty's Amelia work her way downstream in 1807, had the sense of an era ending. But human flesh was just one among many cargoes, and a risky one because slaves found it so easy to die aboard ship. The end of the slave trade in Great Britain ratified the outrage of the abolitionists -- people who, as Captain Crow saw it, knew little or nothing about the subject of slavery -- but it also confirmed the shifting of markets and the growing importance of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. When Captain Crow arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, he found the harbor crowded with slave ships, their human wares going unsold.

Today, Liverpool stands where it always has, rising above the Mersey and above a chain of now disused docks. From the river's edge, you can look across the water and see the Wirral, a spur of land that divides the Dee River from the Mersey and, in a sense, England from Wales. Standing on the embankment, watching the tidal chop on the Mersey's brown water, which empties into a sea framed by Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and northern England, you get none of the land's-end feeling you get at the westernmost tip of Cornwall, where the waves breaking against the headlands seem to have come direct from America. The Mersey these days could be almost any large river flowing past the engineered edge of almost any city. Except that between 1760 and 1807 Liverpool built and the Mersey floated the largest fleet of slave ships in the history of the trade. Between 1795 and 1804 alone, Liverpool authorities cleared nearly 1,100 ships for the triangular traffic that carried manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa, slaves to the West Indies, and sugar, tobacco, and rum to England.

To most of late 18th-century Liverpool, to almost everyone except the ships' captains and their crews, slavery was an economic abstraction, a matter of so much return on so much investment. It was an exercise in the convertibility of capital. A successful voyage -- one in which the majority of slaves survived and reached the sales block in good health -- performed the miracle of turning Manchester cloth or Sheffield steel into human beings. The human beings were then turned into several kinds of sugar, coffee, cotton, and bills of exchange, which, in Liverpool, were converted once again into the opulence of an increasingly opulent city. The trade fed the increasing girth of its merchants; it supported their luxuries and charities alike. The enormous prosperity of this three-sided trade did more to justify the practice of slavery than any of the philosophical arguments that a man like Captain Crow might make, who argued that "the traffic in negroes was permitted by that Providence that rules over all, as a necessary evil," and that English slavers had a regard for human life that other nations, which continued slave trading after 1807, did not share. That the solid flesh of slaves might melt away mattered vastly less than the very solid returns that materialized when a ship like the Kitty's Amelia completed her round- trip. No apology like a dividend.

In a sense, the convertibility of capital converted Liverpool. The city that had once competed with Bristol and London for the slave trade dominated it completely by the time it was abolished. However you measure the relative profits of slave trading in Liverpool, the West Indian traffic that breasted the Mersey River year after year laid the foundation for a nautical and mercantile prosperity in Liverpool that reached right through the 19th century. Prosperity may selectively preserve some elements of the past -- its finery, especially -- but it quite thoroughly wipes the past away too. A visitor to Liverpool now sees a fundamentally Victorian city, a fraying monument to a latter-day prosperity. That Victorian city, one of the greatest ports of Europe, was founded in part on the profits of the slave trade. As the city has dwindled, the fabric of Victorian Liverpool, much of it now labeled with signs saying "To Let," seems to have grown larger and larger, the ghostly reminder of richer times.

Were Captain Crow to make one last passage up the Mersey and into harbor at Liverpool, it's hard to say what would surprise him most. Some of the street names and their layouts would remain as he knew them. He would find unexpected structures like the Custom House, the Cunard Building, and the Royal Liver Building looming over the river, constructions of a magnificence, a commercial pomposity he could scarcely have imagined. But what would surely have surprised him most, like anyone who knew the Liverpool waterfront before World War II, are the docks themselves. The forest of ships' masts and spars is long gone, the crowds of men loading and unloading, the merchants and ships' owners striding among them. All the waterfront cacophony is gone, replaced by quiet rectangular pools of water whose river gates, where ships entered, were opened for good more than 20 years ago. The shipping has gone, and the warehouses have been turned into office space, into restaurants and wine bars and museums, including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, with a gallery devoted to transatlantic slavery, which opened in 1994. The opening of that gallery began a process that culminated last year in an official apology by the City Council for Liverpool's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Like all such apologies, this one was made from descendant to descendant, from the distant political heirs of the slavers to the distant blood heirs of the slaves. And though the gesture -- including a purification ceremony by African chiefs flown in for the occasion -- is emotionally and symbolically significant, it has, in Liverpool's case at least, the strange effect of ratifying the grander apology that time itself has made. The same dispassionate economic logic that made slaves part of the currency of Liverpool's transatlantic trade also brought Liverpool's shipping -- the economic and emotional heartbeat of the city -- to an end in the second half of the 20th century. The thing that would have seemed inconceivable in the late 1700s, the extinction of Liverpool as a nautical force, has come to be. The very first person I met on my recent trip to England was a cab driver whose father had been a Liverpool dockworker back in the days, only a generation ago, when there were still ships for Liverpool dockworkers to work.

Where the shipping went is another story, a tale of containerization, labor struggles, Margaret Thatcher, and, ultimately, the loss of empire. The deep-water pools that are Liverpool's docks have quietly silted in since then. Some days, down at the Albert Dock, the most nautical sights are a propeller from the Lusitania and a Yellow Submarine, commemorating the Beatles, that seems to have surfaced in the lawn just across from the entrance to the Albert Dock. A small sailboat rests at berth in the pool where merchantmen once docked, its owner pressure-scrubbing its deck while gulls scream overhead, their cries echoing off the warehouse walls. The more portentous sign of the shift in Liverpool's fate, more portentous by far than Victorian grandiosities with unoccupied floors, is the modern building that once housed the Transport and General Workers Union -- the dockworkers union -- which is also empty and posted "To Let."

The loss of a city's way of life is no atonement for an ancestral crime. It does nothing to redeem the loss of all those African lives, the slow execution of whole peoples. The shift of seagoing traffic away from Liverpool does nothing to expropriate the wealth of those whose fortunes were built, in part, on the slave trade.

In the end, the City Council's apology for Liverpool's history of slave trading, like all such apologies, requires an act of instructed imagination, an effort to understand the dimensions of the crime, without which contrition and gesture are meaningless. In that sense, few museum exhibitions are more aptly sited than the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. At the center of the gallery is a reconstruction of the hold of a slave ship, the sullen chamber in which Africans would have found themselves chained during the long transit from the Guinea coast to the West Indies. What a visitor can discern from such a reconstruction is only a sense of rough proportion, at best. Building codes prevented the gallery designers from making the ceiling as low as it would have been in a real slave ship. In other words, a legally mandated concern for the proper headroom of modern visitors prevented the museum from showing how little headroom the Africans who had been snatched illegally from their lives would really have had.

The very structures of the present forbid us from seeing the past with any ease. Only a few of the visitors to the museum can ever have experienced the rolling of a ship under sail in the mid-Atlantic. Fewer still can ever have been kidnapped or shackled or whipped or forcibly separated from their families, much less have known that they were being sold into a life of worse-than-penal servitude. It's no criticism of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, which is a moving experience in and of itself, to say that it cannot impart to its visitors the intensity of grief and suffering that would have prevailed in the hold of the Kitty's Amelia. To do so would of course be intolerable and prohibited.

By most modern standards of museum craft, the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery is an educational success. But, like most museums, including museums of conscience, it's also a reminder that our efforts to understand the past, experientially, are always aesthetic. A visit to the slave ship's hold is just one of the attractions of the Albert Dock, after all. It coexists with a branch of the Tate Museum, the Museum of Liverpool Life, and an underground exhibition devoted to the Beatles' story. You can go straight from viewing the iron shackles any slaver would have carried to a cozy English tea with a view of Liverpool Cathedral in the distance. It takes just a short walk along the Mersey.

[Howie]

History of the Slave Trade
05 March 2007
Roscoe Lecture, 5pm Wednesday 7 March

As the UK celebrates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, LJMU will host a lecture by Adam Hochschild, acclaimed author of Bury the Chains, which traces the movement to end Slavery in the British Empire.

Professor Hochschild will deliver a Roscoe Lecture entitled 'History of the Slave Trade' on Wednesday 7 March 2007, starting at 5pm in the Adelphi Hotel.

There are still a few tickets remaining for this Lecture. To reserve yours, please contact Barbara Mace, ext 3852, b.mace@ljmu.ac.uk

During his lecture, Professor Hochschild will show how a small group of committed citizens managed to change the world thanks to their campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Writing in Mother Jones, the most widely read progressive publication in the United States, which he co-founded in the 1970s, Professor Hochschild said:

"Though born in the age of swords, wigs and stagecoaches, the British anti-slavery movement leaves us an extraordinary legacy. Every day activists use the tools it helped pioneer - consumer boycotts, newsletters, petitions, political posters and buttons, national campaigns with local committees, and much more.

"Far more important is the boldness of its vision. Look at the problems that confront the world today: global warming, the vast gap between rich and poor nations, the habit of war. To solve any one of these, a realist might say, is surely the work of centuries, to think otherwise is naïve.

"But many a hard-headed realist could, and did, say the same thing to those who first proposed to end slavery. Was it not in one form or another woven into the economy of most of the world? Was it not older, even than money and the written word? But the realists turned out to be wrong."

Professor David Alton, who chairs LJMU's Foundation for Citizenship, which hosts the Roscoe Lecture series, added that while it is right to commemorate emancipation, we should also remember that contemporary forms of slavery still persist on a vast scale.

"Over the last 200 years, many human rights campaigns have been modelled on the successful actions of William Roscoe, William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equanio, Thomas Clarkson and other abolitionists.

"What, however, is abundantly clear is that if were merely to indulge in some rather smug self-congratulations, we will have entirely missed the point. As many as 27 million people are still thought to be enslaved today, and slavery and trafficking generate billions of pounds worldwide. Perhaps compared to 1807, slavery tip-toes in carpet slippers but it remains a pernicious and all too real contemporary reality."

Source: LJMU News Update

[taffy]

History of the Slave Trade
05 March 2007
Roscoe Lecture, 5pm Wednesday 7 March

As the UK celebrates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, LJMU will host a lecture by Adam Hochschild, acclaimed author of Bury the Chains, which traces the movement to end Slavery in the British Empire.

Professor Hochschild will deliver a Roscoe Lecture entitled 'History of the Slave Trade' on Wednesday 7 March 2007, starting at 5pm in the Adelphi Hotel.

Long after slavery was supposedly abolished in the British empire( Jamaica etc ca 1835), slavery continued on the sugar planatations in Queensland, Australia. These poor souls from the south Pacific Islands were not traded for trinkets etc by their black slave masters as happened in Africa, but rather were truly kidnapped and taken to Queensland. I wonder if Prof Hochschild's talk will feature this aspect of our past

[PhilipG]

Barnardo's sent children to Canada well into the mid 20th Century to work on farms.
Slavery in all but name.

[ChrisGeorge]

Liverpool should not be castigated for its slavery past but also praised for having produced one of the great abolitionists, humanitarians, art collectors and man of letters, the great William Roscoe (1753-1831). The Liverpool-born M.P., poet and children's author fought slavery in Parliament, as an ally of William Wilberforce. He also wrote a great book-long poem, The Wrongs of Africa, talking of what was done to the Africans. He was a man of courage who made himself unpopular among his peers in Liverpool due to his stand against the slave trade.

Above image of the Roscoe Memorial in the Cloisters, Ullet Road Unitarian church is courtesy of http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk. For more on William Roscoe, see http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/citizen/71798.htm

Chris

[wsteve55]

Sorry Kev,
but no slaves were actually brought to liverpool(of any real consequence!)the ships sailed from liverpool loaded with money,trinkets,etc, to north african ports,where slaves, who had already been rounded up by other african or arab slave traders, were then sold/exchanged. Then, they were transported to america,and sold. The ships returned to liverpool with cargo's of cotton,tobacco,etc.As for the museum,i'd feel better about the idea if i knew they would explain, that this trade in human cargo, was already in existence,(and to some degree,still is!) from time immemorial,the european traders just tapping into, and massively developing,what was a human resource,literally!!! The street names i think, should stay, it's our past,like it or not!

[Ged]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/F27...&phrase=London

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/F27...rase=Leicester

A couple of BBC message board threads on the subject.

[scouserdave]

Just reading the London thread, Ged. I think the people who have the biggest problem are the Whites. Most Black/Asian people I know just want to get on with their lives and do what's best for their kids.

[Ged]

Yes, not least the liberal white p.c. brigade who love to beat themselves up over it. It shouldn't be forgotten but never a year seems to go by when a programme isn't made about it, a museum exhibition opened or added to, an apology sought or street name changing idea. It would appear that no one is seeking appeasement and how could this generation's apology do so anyway. Time to draw a line under it I think and as you say, just move on.

[scouserdave]

Yes, not least the liberal white p.c. brigade who love to beat themselves up over it.

They're the ones Ged.

[snappel]

Time to draw a line under it I think and as you say, just move on.

Yeah and all these idiots like Kanye West crying their eyes out about it. Today's blacks living in the USA enjoy the best quality of life of any black community on the planet. So it wasn't all in vain... things have come a long way since the slave trade.

[scouserdave]

Kanye West is so up his own backside. I luv people like that, because they make my laugh

Wikipedia
"In January 2006, West again sparked controversy when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in the image of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. Later that month, he suggested in Playboy that if a bible were written in the present day, he is famous and important enough to be included in it. "I throw up historical subjects in a way that makes kids want to learn about them." West claimed, "[I'm] definitely in the history books already.""