Nouslife: Slavery, culpability and responsible global citizenship

02 April 2007

Slavery, culpability and responsible global citizenship

Priyamvada Gopal writes in the Guardian today something that we were discussing in my Lent group last week. There we decided that it is difficult to say that we, today, are responsible for past slavery but that we can learn the lessons and try to make a difference today in the all-but-slaveries of unfair trade and TNC exploitation. We also noted that it was a bit of a mismatch to celebrate and feel proud of our nation's contributions to civilisations while trying not to accrue the negative kudos of the underbelly of empire.

Here are some quotes.

Atonement-speak obscures the distinction between "guilt" - a private, often religious emotion connected to personal wrongdoing - and a more demanding and necessary move: acknowledging that our lives are shaped by historical processes through which we have accrued benefits at the expense of others. As the service itself demonstrated, the atonement mode of acknowledging the past comes complete with built-in absolution, a rhetorical clean chit that you can give yourself without further consideration of how the past lives on in the present, and how you might redress material inequities inherited from that time.

And that is of course, exactly the danger: we will just let the thing become past without actually thinking about the way that our present prosperity has been built on exploitation and the time-forward entail of that is structural inequalities which serve to continue and even widen the gap further. We may not be personally responsible for the genesis of those inequalities, but we are for their continuance, to some degree. But we also have to face the full truth of the past which includes this:

We know that government and politicians stop short of a full apology because they are aware of legal implications that would strengthen the case for reparations. Moreover, reparations themselves would force us to face up to the fact that the horrors of the past were not merely momentary lapses of moral judgment that can be redeemed through public enactments of remorse. They were systematic projects of national self-enrichment at the expense of other societies. ... A real apology would involve not only the cancellation of so-called "third world debt", itself the consequence of colonial depredation, but also some form of reparations (including relabelling "aid" as such).

That is a very interesting project to undertake. It may not change much what we are doing now, at our debt-relief and aid-giving best, but it would change the psychology from largesse to doing our duty. And there are good and bad aspects to that.
And as an ongoing dimension of recognition of past wrong, is to start to name present wrong and respond accordingly.

Given that slavery and indentured labour were part of a philosophy of exploitative profit-making which the writer Barry Unsworth critically calls "sacred hunger", we might also use this commemorative year to ask ourselves to what extent our lifestyles continue to appease this appetite. Profiting from cheap labour is far from a thing of the past: witness the continuing movement of large corporations to poor countries where they can pay low wages in abusive working conditions.

And, this will please some of those in our Lent group, we give it a 360 degree dimension.

Such self-critical reflections apply to descendants of the enslaved and the colonised as well. The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid reminds her fellow descendants of slaves to reflect on "who captured and delivered [their ancestors] to the European master"

. I suspect that this would involve certain Muslim nations too.

Much to reflect on and we have not got to the final conclusion yet, but the debate continues and I commend some of the comments on this article. such as

And in the end, it is all woven so finely into the fabric of history that the 'good' and the 'evil' cannot be pulled out and made distinct, except by tendentious selection. There never was a society colonised by Empire, that did not have its own faults and did not practise its own oppressions. Is the one large 'crime' of Empire so much worse than the thousand small crimes of, for example, the Iroquois torture-stake, or Indian sati, or Aztec sacrifice, or the Barbary slavers, or, or, or.....?

it is obvious that having the Romans invade everywhere, take over and then forcefully teaching us all about order, government, engineering and civilised behaviour was in 'net' terms a very good thing for the world. The same is equally obvious of the British Empire, the French Empire, the 'cultural' American Empire and arguably the Soviet Empire.

However the boot on the other foot of course, (or is it the other side of the same coin?) is that Dr Gopal works at an institution that charges students from the same third world countries almost seven times what it charges the sons and daughters of wealthy natives.

And then.

Is it all Europeans who are to blame?

I thought that women were oppressed, marginalised, and not given any political voice during those years - so it can't be their fault.

And about 70% of the male population didn't actually have a vote until Universal Male Suffrage kicked in, so you can't really hold them to account.

In fact, slavery served only to undercut and unemploy the average working man, so if anything he suffered a net loss because of it. Bridges and roads were built by private businesses, which the state paid for, so if the country is to be held to account for a collective public purse, well, it has already been paid for. Chase the descendants of the people who were paid for this, if blame wants to be laid somewhere - after all, they're the true recipients of the benefit, not an entire nation-state.

When the Emancipation of Slavery act kicked in in 1833, the government paid considerable recompense to the slave owners - I remember there was a Bishop of Leeds or something who owned 633 slaves, and received a not inconsiderable sum for his trouble.

And ...

Yes, slavery was part of the British empire as it was part of the Roman empire, the Chinese empire, the Aztecs, the moghuls, the Ottomans, the Arabs, the Sokoto sultanate etc. Everyone.

Britain's uniqueness comes through its moral change. NO other state before Britain deliberately gave up slavery. Before that everyone thought it was normal. If Britain had chosen differently we may still have slaves today.

And how about:

It's very odd to think that people could still be 'proud' or 'ashamed' of the British Empire, as if empire-building was a team sport. It was the endeavour of a social, commericial and political elite, that was trans-national - our London capitalists colluded with the Virginia slave-masters, the Ghanian traders, etc. The idea that 'we' as a nation should examine our past in the framework of what 'we' did seems sub-GCSE.