Slavery and Liverpool

[Howie]

I agree with much of what has been said but we do need to learn lessons from our past.

[stan]

I think we have.But we don't constantly need to be told we have to apologize.I didn't do anything.Shall we ask the Italians to apologize for the Romans invading most of Europe?

[Sloyne]

Shall we ask the Italians to apologize for the Romans invading most of Europe?

But didn't the Romans bring civilisation to the areas they conquered and occupied? Also, the habitants of those lands conquered, were made full citizens of Rome with all that that entailed. A citizen in Helsby was as much a Roman as was a citizen in Herculaneum.

No doubt Romans exploited the conquered lands and peoples but I would suggest that Roman conquest was far less brutal (a 1000 years + difference in sensibilities) than European conquest of Africa, the Americas and the far east islands of Indonesia and Philipines. And although the natives of these lands were called Dutch, British, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., none had full rights with representation in the "Motherland".

Some will disagree, i'm sure.

[Ged]

Yes, it was far less brutal throwing the peasants to the lions and all that - couldn't we do that now. Young white kids working up chimneys, down mines and in mills was slavery - so was the Egyptian Pyramid building. There's human trafficking going on right now and the Chinese cockle pickers were exploited in Morecambe by, you guess it, Chinese gang masters. Off out now to pick someone up, see what Roger Phillip's listeners have got to moan abo....sorry, say.

[Sloyne]

Yes, it was far less brutal throwing the peasants to the lions and all tha- couldn't we do that now. Young white kids working up chimneys, down mines and in mills was slavery - so was the Egyptian Pyramid building. There's human trafficking going on right now and the Chinese cockle pickers were exploited in Morecambe by, you guess it, Chinese gang masters. Off out now to pick someone up, see what Roger Phillip's listeners have got to moan abo....sorry, say.

What is it they say about sarcasm? You obviously missed my reference to the fact that more than a thousand years had passed, with times "civilising" effect, between lions gorging on humans, for sport and/or punishment, and trading in human beings or, it was lost on you. And of course your reference to nineteen and twentieth century excessives of capitalism wasn't lost on me. However, those same "white kids" became "black, brown, yellow and red kids" in colonial locations.

[Howie]

History of the Slave Trade, Roscoe Lecture
09 March 2007

Adam Hochschild: "Though born in the age of swords, wigs and stagecoaches, the British anti-slavery movement leaves us an extraordinary legacy."



Adam Hochschild delivered a fascinating Roscoe Lecture on the history of the slave trade to an audience of around 800 people on 7 March 2007.

The acclaimed author of 'Bury the Chains', which traces the movement to end slavery in the British Empire, began by reminding the audience that in the late 18th century, when early abolitionists first began to campaign against the slave trade, around three-quarters of the people on earth were in bondage of one form or another, be it as outright slaves or as bonded labourers and serfs.

During his lecture, Hochschild attempted to redress the historical imbalance which he believes over emphasises the role of Wilberforce. Instead he highlighted the work of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, who actively campaigned to end slavery between 1785 and 1838. During his campaign, Clarkson travelled over 35,000 miles on horseback around the UK and survived numerous attempts on his life. He also helped to secure over 60,000 signatures, many more people that where entitled to vote at the time, on a petition asking for the abolition or reform of the slave trade.

Hochschild also stressed how the actions of slaves themselves helped weaken the pro-slavery case, through slave revolts and rebellions in the West Indies and beyond, and through the actions of former slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano, who went on a five year book tour of the British Isles promoting his best-selling autobiography, a vivid account of his life in slavery and freedom.

The British anti-slavery movement has, said Hochschild, left us an extraordinary legacy. Not only did it pioneer approaches such as consumer boycotts, newsletters, petitions, political posters and much more, but more importantly it proved that ordinary people could secure wide-reaching political and social change.

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. He said: "Over the last 200 years, many human rights campaigns have been modelled on the successful actions of Roscoe, Wilberforce, Equanio, 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."

Picture: Dr Roon Noon, who teaches on the abolition of slavery as part of LJMU's social science programmes, Adam Hochschild and Professor David Alton.

Source: LJMU News Update

[Howie]

Star of anti-slavery film in city
Mar 12 2007
by Caroline Innes, Liverpool Daily Post



ONE of Hollywood’s hottest properties is coming to Liverpool to promote his new film, which explores one man’s struggle to end slavery in Britain.

Fresh from playing Mr Fantastic in blockbuster Fantastic Four, Black Hawk Down star Ioan Gruffudd takes on the role of anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce in the historical epic Amazing Grace.

The Welsh actor chose the city for a special preview screening where he will introduce the film with acclaimed director Michael Apted.

Liverpool surpassed both London and Bristol to become Europe’s number one slave port by the 1740s.

Story continues...

[ChrisGeorge]

I just picked up on this Associated Press story that ran worldwide in newspapers on March 14, 2007.

Anniversary revives images of slavery
English bicentennial of abolition recalls Liverpool’s role in trade
By ROBERT BARR

LIVERPOOL, England – Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place “in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies.” But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.

The street in Liverpool, hometown of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages which took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.

Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking until the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. Their ships carried millions of human beings from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas in a triangular trade which also brought profitable cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum to England.

Liverpool’s rise, says local historian Ray Costello, is summed up in the carving on a bank facade: two Black children supporting Liverpool as Neptune.

”What it really means is that this bank was founded on the slave trade,” Costello said.

It resonates all the more with the approach of the March 25 anniversary of the British parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in Britain’s colonies 200 years ago – though not slavery itself. Liverpool’s problem is its “hidden history – nobody wants to talk about it,” said Eric Lynch, a Black Liverpudlian who leads walking tours in the west coast city.

However, the past has not gone unacknowledged.

The city council formally apologized in 1999, expressing “shame and remorse for the city’s role in this trade in human misery.”

It has commissioned statues titled “Reconciliation,” two abstract bronze figures embracing, which will be dedicated this year in Richmond, Va., and Benin, a West African port of call for Liverpool’s slave ships.

On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the slave uprising in French-ruled Haiti in 1791, Liverpool will open the International Slavery Museum. Part of its mission is recovering Liverpool’s history, which remains a fraught issue.

Lynch, the tour guide, finds the echoes in the streets named for slave traders – Bamber, Banastre, Cunliffe, Gascoyne, Oldham, Seel, Tarleton; in a balcony railing made of chains by one of the businesses which depended on the trade; in the face of an African woman in the frieze around the ornate Town Hall.

Liverpool council member Barbara Mace last year proposed renaming streets associated with slavery, and was surprised to learn that Penny Lane was among them. After a lively controversy the proposal was withdrawn.

Liverpool was once the home of John Newton, the slave ship captain who became an ardent abolitionist and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Liverpool in 1787, collecting horrifying stories from sailors and buying tools of the trade: chains, manacles, iron collars and branding irons which made effective publicity for William Wilberforce’s 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the trade.

”By the end of the 19 th century, a lot of rich families were trying to sanitize their wealth, and every trace of slavery they got rid of,” said Costello, who has been researching the history of fellow Blacks in his city for nearly half a century.

What Liverpool needs to do, Costello says, is “take off its shades and see the Blacks,” who have been in the city since the 18 th century but still find themselves mistaken for recent immigrants.

Blacks now represent 7 percent of the work force in the city of 450,000.

Because the slaves sailed direct from Africa to the New World, Liverpool saw little of the trade at close quarters. Richard Benjamin, director of the new museum, said that only 11 slaves are known to have been sold in the city. Some slaves who were given their freedom for fighting against the American Revolution made their way to Liverpool, while others came as crewmen on ships, Costello said.

The abolition act in 1807 was a milestone, but Britain waited another 26 years to outlaw slavery in the colonies; the United States followed in 1865 and Brazil in 1888.

Anti-Slavery International, founded by the leaders of Britain’s abolition movement, estimates that 12 million people are in some form of slavery today, as bonded laborers or in the sex trade.

Slavery is now illegal everywhere, said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International, but “laws today are not being implemented.”

”We have to not just reflect on the reality and horrors of the slave trade but to see that people power had a very important role in overthrowing the trade, and that people today still have a role to play,” she said.

Liverpool joined the slave trade in 1699 when a ship named Liverpool Merchant put to sea, carrying 220 slaves from West Africa to Barbados. Sir Thomas Johnson, a part-owner of the ship, is known as the founder of modern Liverpool; Sir Thomas Street is named for him.

By 1750, Liverpool had surpassed London and Bristol as a slave-trading port; 45 years later it controlled 80 percent of the British slave trade, representing two-fifths of the European total. In the peak year of 1798, 149 ships set off from Liverpool for Africa, officially with the capacity to carry 53,000 slaves.

By one accounting, Liverpool’s traders transported 1,364,930 Africans in 5,249 voyages between 1699 and 1807.

Africans, often the captives of local chiefs, were paid for with cloth, kitchen pots and pans, muskets, gunpowder, flints, hats, mirrors, candles, beads and brandy.

A page displayed at the trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool details the profits of the voyage of the Enterprize in 1794. The ship sold 356 slaves and cleared a profit of 10,000 pounds – equivalent to about $2 million today.

It was a brutal trade, killing untold numbers of Africans in slave raids, by disease, shipwreck and mistreatment. Women captives were raped. Ship crews suffered heavy death rates from disease.

Alexander Falconbridge, a Bristol ship captain who became an abolitionist, said slaves on some ships were forced to lie on each other in crowded holds during a voyage of at least six weeks. Writing in 1788, he said, “the floor of their rooms was so covered with blood and mucus ... that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful and disgusting.”

Some denied it. Robert Norris, a former slave ship captain who was one of Liverpool’s lobbyists in Parliament, claimed that after dinner the slaves aboard ship were given pipes, tobacco and musical instruments, “and when tired of music and dancing, they then go to games of chance.”

Penny, another Liverpool lobbyist, told legislators that slaves slept aboard their ships “better than the gentlemen do on shore.”

One of the worst atrocities was aboard the Liverpool slave ship Zong, which was wracked with disease; Capt. Luke Collingwood ordered the crew to throw 133 sick slaves overboard, then tried to claim against insurance for “loss of merchandise.” The abolitionist Granville Sharp demanded a murder prosecution, but the government’s attorney responded: “It is madness; the Blacks were property.”

The Zong incident was one among many that fired the zeal of abolitionists – a mass movement built on networks of Quakers, with Sharp, Wilberforce and Clarkson in prominent leadership roles.

Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery pioneer, made an engraving of a kneeling slave in chains with the words “am I not a man and a brother?” Reproduced in the thousands on medallions, hatpins and brooches, it was worn by fashionable supporters of the cause.

In retrospect, the attitudes of some abolitionists now appear puzzling. Newton made two slave voyages even after being converted by the “amazing grace ... that saved a wretch like me.”

”During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me,” Newton wrote.

However, he added, “I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts and shackles.” – (AP)

[Howie]

Stamp release marks delivery from slave trade
Mar 23 2007
by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo

ANTI-slave trade campaigners have been honoured on a new set of stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of its abolition this weekend.

The Royal Mail chose Liverpool to unveil the six stamps - the second time the city has hosted a national stamp launch this year.

Tony Tibbles, keeper of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, was commissioned to write the presentation pack for the special stamps, and was one of several experts Royal Mail consulted for the issue.

He is part of the team developing the new International Slavery Museum.

The stamps combine contemporary portraits of key individuals set against backgrounds linked to their work.

Source: icLiverpool

[Silverbuttons]

Long time no post.

Kev asked me yesterday to post about me attending the prem of Amazing Grace last week, I've written a very long post in my Live Journal and it's quicker if I direct you there. I will warn you now that I am a fangirl of Ioan's (for about 8 years or so) and that the post contains gushing. You have been warned!!!

Click here to go to my LiveJournal post.

I also have pictures from the night. All of them are clickable thumbnails. I didn't take the pictures, my friend took them. My camera conked out on me.



That's Ioan over my shoulder with some woman from Radio Merseyside and someone from the Echo/Daily Post.



Ioan signing a card that I was sent from a friend that she'd got attending the showing of the film at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.



Ioan and me. GUH!



I don't know what I'm saying. Maybe "Phowar" hehehehe

[Kev]

, thanks Ceri, much appreciated . I bet you were made up to say the least....

I'm gonna read your journal now...

[Kev]

^^The face on that woman, how jealous is she?!!^^

Why was Dean Gaffney there?

[Silverbuttons]

^^The face on that woman, how jealous is she?!!^^

Ha I know! What a cow!

Why was Dean Gaffney there?

Oh Ioan's much more handsome than Dean.

[Kev]

Oh Ioan's much more handsome than Dean.

LOL - I thought you were gonna strike me down for that one , glad u had a good night. Any others u are planning to go to?

[Silverbuttons]

I attended the Cardiff premiere of Ioan's film, King Arthur 2 years ago. If there's one for Fantastic4 2 in Cardiff and I'm not in work then I might HAVE to go!

Not that I'm a stalker or anything!