Should Britain give formal apology for its role in slave trade?

[Andy9o8 0]

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Maybe they should apologise for the revolutionary war as well. I had ancesters that were killed by the red coats and I want an apology.

Or even reparations. Fuckers. Let's dump their tea into the harbor.

[freethefly 6]

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I voted no. Why should we appologise for something that happened before anyone in this country was even born? This is just PC BS at its finest.

I fully agree. I much rather you folks apoligize for more recent atrocities such as Boy George and the Culture Club, The Spice Girls and the Mini Cooper and I will thank you for Monty Python, Benny Hill and all the kickass music during the British Invasion in the 1960's. Is it a deal?

Oh, and I must add that I love my Norton 750 but had to put some good old American muscle into her and stroke it out to 1000cc

"...And once you're gone, you can't come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black."
Neil Young

[sour 0]

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The whole island was given independence in 1922 when the Irish Free State was created. A number of provinces decided they did not want to be part of a unified Ireland and asked instead to join the UK. So that's what they did - of their own volition.

you would want to study your history a little better!!! the whole island was not given its independance.... if you could call it that... there was always going to be partition of the island and no one chose to stay as part of the UK...

there are a number of reasons why 6 counties of the nine counties of the province of ulster (not several provinces) remained part of the UK... true the majority of the population were and still are loyalist but there were also economic (greed) reasons as to why they remained part of uk..... ship yards, textile factories etc etc

when you are going to post on a public forum about politics make sure you know what you are talking about please...........

[sour 0]

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Today only 22% of Northern Ireland wants unification against 59% who want to stay part of the UK as they actively chose to do back in '22. This small minority has tried to use to use violence, terrorism and bombing to enforce their views over the rest of the population rather than engage in a democratic process.

don't you mean a small minority of this minority?

[mr2mk1g 10]

Yes I mean counties not provinces but I'm attempting to translate here for the ease of our American cousins who will mostly read this.

And as for the whole Island not being given its independence??? What on earth would you call the affect of the 1922 Anglo-Irish treaty? It was a treaty between the Irish Republic and the UK giving virtual total autonomy to the whole of Ireland; being entirely analogous to the legislation which created Canada, Australia or NZ. Yes there were provisions that those counties that wished to opt out of the treaty could do so, but that's what the majority of the residents of those counties wanted.

As for the county's motives for the opt-out, I made no comments whatsoever - merely noting that the counties acted of their own volition.

[rs2kmk5 0]

Jeez this shit really fucks me off - and brings out the tourettes in me

Fuck no, we shouldnt apologise, and fuck no nor should our so called representative government!

Get over it slaves / descendants of slaves and pc crusaders, you fucking timewasters. Look, its like this - shit happens, and if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time - errr shit happens.

You dont have to go that far back to uncover some real shitty things that people did to each other, face it, as people we do shitty things to people all day long, and always will. Go back 300 years and if you said the wrong thing, you'd be burnt at the stake or drowned - should the decendants of these lawmen etc say sorry - fuck no!!!

So we benefited from slaves - and ??? Period.

Who exactly would benefit from the apology, and why the @@@@ should anyone alive feel bad that we had slaves. If I wanted a slave now, I could buy a place in SA or several places in the far east and treat them as slaves. No one needs to apologise for shit as far as this subject goes!

Out of 10,000 feet of fall, always remember that the last half inch hurts the most — Captain Charles W. Purcell, 1932

[Royd 0]

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Get over it slaves / descendants of slaves and pc crusaders, you fucking timewasters. Look, its like this - shit happens, and if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time - errr shit happens.

I put race baiting blacks and those poor, sensitive Muslims in the same boat.

Once they are able to get someone walking on eggshells, they'll milk it for everything that they can get.

[sour 0]

it was a treaty between the UK and the then irish delagation (didn't become a republic until 1937)

Yes there were provisions that those counties that wished to opt out of the treaty could do so, but that's what the majority of the residents of those counties wanted.***

no.. the treaty gave 26 counties of "southern" ireland "home rule" in the form of the irish free state not independance.. the six counties of northern ireland were never part of the signed treaty.... the citizens of the 26 counties had a vote on the anglo-irish treaty and accepted it... the six counties of northern ireland never voted on the treaty.

[happythoughts 0]

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As for where do we draw the line? When no one on either side is alive any longer sounds like common sense to me.

The Jews had their stuff stolen from the Germans and were put into barbed-wire camps. They want reparations.

Then, the Europeans gave the Jews the Palestinians stuff and put the Palestinians into barbed-wire camps. They aren't happy. They'd like their stuff back.

Winners write the history books, but politicians dredge up what is convenient to their interest.

[Erroll 49]

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If I wanted a slave now, I could buy a place in SA .......and treat them as slaves.

Please elaborate.

[rs2kmk5 0]

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If I wanted a slave now, I could buy a place in SA .......and treat them as slaves.

Please elaborate.

Here you go...

http://www.iabolish.com/slavery_today/country_reports/bj.html

Out of 10,000 feet of fall, always remember that the last half inch hurts the most — Captain Charles W. Purcell, 1932

[Skyrad 0]

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I voted no. Why should we appologise for something that happened before anyone in this country was even born? This is just PC BS at its finest.

I fully agree. I much rather you folks apoligize for more recent atrocities such as Boy George and the Culture Club, The Spice Girls and the Mini Cooper and I will thank you for Monty Python, Benny Hill and all the kickass music during the British Invasion in the 1960's. Is it a deal?

Oh, and I must add that I love my Norton 750 but had to put some good old American muscle into her and stroke it out to 1000cc

Strike the Mini Cooper from the list and we have a deal.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[Skyrad 0]

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Today only 22% of Northern Ireland wants unification against 59% who want to stay part of the UK as they actively chose to do back in '22. This small minority has tried to use to use violence, terrorism and bombing to enforce their views over the rest of the population rather than engage in a democratic process.

don't you mean a small minority of this minority?

Well said.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[Skyrad 0]

We still have slaves in the UK as well. Girls are trafficked into the country from the far east and eastern Europe for use as prostitutes and others for cheap slave labour by Chineese triad gangs, But like in South Africa this is illegal by law and you'll be in big doo doo if you are caught. To cliam that you can just rck up in South Africa and get yourself a slave is simply not true or representative any more than you could do the same in the US or UK.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[mr2mk1g 10]

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the six counties of northern ireland were never part of the signed treaty

I think you're best off pulling up a copy of the Treaty on line and reading it, specifically paragraphs 11 and 12.

The Treaty provided for a 32 county state encompassing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, jointly to be called the Irish Free State. This state was to have the same constitutional status and powers as the other Commonwealth Nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Canada in fact, was the model.

It further gave the counties of Northern Ireland one month to decide whether it wanted to remain part of the Irish Free State or if they wanted to withdraw from the newly created nation.

If the latter, the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which was to remain in governance for one month only, was required to pass a resolution in favor of withdrawing from the Irish Free State.

If no such resolution was passed by both Houses within that one month then the powers of the Parliament of Northern Ireland would cease and full control of the six counties would be handed to the Government of the Irish Free State.

The democratically elected Parliament of Northern Ireland did indeed pass such a motion and duly withdrew from the Irish Free State into which they had been placed by the Treaty.

This left just the 26 counties to which you refer.

[christelsabine 1]

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If I wanted a slave now, I could buy a place in SA .......and treat them as slaves.

Please elaborate.

Here you go...

http://www.iabolish.com/slavery_today/country_reports/bj.html

That's not SA.

dudeist skydiver # 3105

[Erroll 49]

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If I wanted a slave now, I could buy a place in SA .......and treat them as slaves.

Please elaborate.

Here you go...

http://www.iabolish.com/slavery_today/country_reports/bj.html

That's not SA.

He won't be the first nor the last to think that Africa is one big country.

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I see you are from South Africa. I once knew a guy called Mike. He lived in Blantyre. Do you know him?

[rs2kmk5 0]

My bad , but as we're talking about being able to purchase slaves, the geographic location is really just a minor point, no?

Out of 10,000 feet of fall, always remember that the last half inch hurts the most — Captain Charles W. Purcell, 1932

[Skyrad 0]

Actually to be fair to you it does actually mention South Africa as a destination for the slaves of Benin. However Benin is 3150 miles from South Africa which is about the same distance from New York to Spain.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[rs2kmk5 0]

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We still have slaves in the UK as well... To cliam that you can just rck up in South Africa and get yourself a slave is simply not true or representative any more than you could do the same in the US or UK.

My point is that if I were to live there!!, I could have (use of) a slave . It's not for me to justify that that in itself is right or wrong, as I dont live there and I dont have a slave , but it doesn't detract from the fact.

Believe me, I have no interest in smuggling or otherwise bringing an illegal into this country - I work in Leyton, east London - there are enough illegals round here already

Out of 10,000 feet of fall, always remember that the last half inch hurts the most — Captain Charles W. Purcell, 1932

[Skyrad 0]

The point is you couldn't have a slave in South Africa any more than you could in the UK or in the USA. To think you can is simply incorrect.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[orribolollie 0]

Do you even know where Africa is?

[freethefly 6]

Maybe, someone in Africa should be doing the apologizing, for their ancestors sold/traded their own people.

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplicistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own kins.
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, they retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling their own kins. (To be precise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war, and Muslims were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the Christians of Europe nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were selling their own kins).
Then the Muslim trade of African slaves came to a stop when Arab domination was reduced by the Crusades. (Note: Arabs continued to capture and sell slaves, but only in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates that 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of northern Africa. The USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli in 1801 precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though. The first ones were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, and often using Italian venture capital, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440s to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply purchased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of black Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of race.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps). It is not a coincidence that slavery was abolished at a time when millions of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites practiced slavery: in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or about 1.4% of the white population (there were 27 million whites in the USA). That percentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of the 27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery). Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery was widespread even before Lincoln, and throughout Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is slowly being eradicated only in our time. One can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all those African kingdoms became colonies of western European countries that (for one reason or another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s, those African colonies regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery resurfaced. And countless African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner look like a saint. Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans before it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites and not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the moment they could, why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say, Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave trade with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europeans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The USA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today, no such criticism is allowed within the Arab world).
Today it is politically correct to blame some European empires and the USA for slavery (forgetting that it was practiced by everybody since prehistoric times). But I rarely read the other side of the story: that the nations who were the first to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precisely those countries (especially Britain and the USA). As Dinesh D'Souza wrote, "What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery".
(That does not mean that western slave traders were justified in what they did, but placing all the blame on them is a way to absolve all the others).
To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African slave trade was an USA aberration, not their own invention.

By the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slaves in Africa (black slaves of black owners) than in the Americas.

"...And once you're gone, you can't come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black."
Neil Young

[kallend 1,643]

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Maybe, someone in Africa should be doing the apologizing, for their ancestors sold/traded their own people.

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. .

That was by Act of Parliament. However, the High Court's decision in James Somerset's case in 1772 was widely understood as freeing slaves in England by virtue of common law. In Scotland there was no right to own another person (although indentured servitude certainly existed as a matter of FACT, rather than LAW).

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[ExAFO 0]

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Maybe, someone in Africa should be doing the apologizing, for their ancestors sold/traded their own people.

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. .

That was by Act of Parliament. However, the High Court's decision in James Somerset's case in 1772 was widely understood as freeing slaves in England by virtue of common law. In Scotland there was no right to own another person (although indentured servitude certainly existed as a matter of FACT, rather than LAW).

Did this apply to the tailless Manx Cats on the Isle of Man??

Illinois needs a CCW Law. NOW.