h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While they /are/ exploited, they are not slaves because they are not property that is bought, sold, and devoid of rights.

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I think you'll find the Atlantic slave trade was started by the Portugese.

<<While they /are/ exploited, they are not slaves because they are not property that is bought, sold, and devoid of rights.

If there´s exploitation there´s slavery. And exploitation happens when your rights are wiped away.



Modern slavery is not only about buying and selling people, like for instance, the goods that become women and children in the prostitution business.


In the following link you´ll read a report of Christian Aid on modern slavery.
Those people are not sold, but, because of the dogmatic believes of the World Bank and the IMF that impose unfair trade rules,
those folks who could live on their farming activities are now working all day at quaries for little money.

That´s slavery, I can´t find a better word. And it´s also neo-colonialism, because... who is getting the benefits on selling africans tomatoes grown outside Africa?

http://www.christianaid.org.uk/whatwedo/eyewitness/africa/tradeslaves.aspx

I take your point, SoRB.

But you'll also acknowledge, I'm sure, that the European slavery was orders of magnitude larger from the indigenous slave trade that it built on. Its scale was such that it ruined economies in its hinterland, such was our demand for labour in the New World.

That is not to justify the pre-existing slave trade nor to deny that some Africans were complicit in supplying the trade. I'm simply suggesting that what amounts to 'They were just as bad anyway' is misleading.

European presence in Africa was not incidental to the immense scale and horrors of the slave trade and the lasting damage it did. It was down Europeans. Even if we don't go in for apologetic self-loathing (which who even mentioned? ), that can't be argued away.

Slavery still exist and child slaves are still used to harvest cocoa in West Africa and clothing and carpet sweat-shops in South Asia.

For the record the trans-Atlantic slave trade was started by the Portuguese as an extension of the coastal slave trading they had started to exploit the pre-existing West African slave trade.

Up until the early 19th Century all cultures had practiced some form of slavery, it is worth remembering that Britain and France fought the longest military campaign in modern history in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific to end slavery

Mr X:

>>Incidentally, that revival was, to my knowledge, the first time that racist overtones were ever applied to slavery. Before then it was an equal opportunity business.

Have you read Howard Zinn's 'The People's History of the United States' on the manufature of racism?

The boss class had to maintain a clear separation between European and African Labour. It was bad enough when the Africans kept revolting and joining up with the Native Americans, but when the indentured labour joined in you had nobody left to fight them.

@tuc:

We also have a fair amount of slave labour in Europe, including Britain. Book recommendation:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Whispers-Behind-Britains-Hidden/dp/0141035684

That was recommended to me by a Chinese translator who assures me that it reflects reality.

And then there's brothels...

"child slaves are still used to harvest cocoa in West Africa "

Hmm. I used to have some professional interest in that accusation, but no longer. However - what is true is that there are children doing unpaid work in the cultivation of cocoa in West Africa. However, the impression you might get of rows of children miserably tilling the earth or whatever isn't particularly accurate.

One chocolate company in the UK processes about fifty to sixty *thousand* tonnes of bean per year. The average farm in Ghana produces about one tonne per year. It's not a process that lends itself to large scale industralised automation. What it does lend itself to is co-cultivation with other crops on small, family-run farms. And sure, on these farms, the children work, and aren't paid a salary. And maybe next door's children muck in too.

Now, that fact has been, in the past, reported as "child slavery". Just sayin' - it's not always as clear cut as it seems.

African tribal rulers in west Africa were fully complicit in the slave trade and fought wars with each other to capture slaves to sell. The image of white sailors chasing down African villagers is a myth that comes from the TV series Roots - European stayed off shore usually on island fortresses because they were terrified of the diseases present in tropical Africa.
West African rulers had used prisoners of war, criminals and debtors as slaves, which is little different from the Dutch and British doing the same thing (using European slaves and indentured labour) in their penal colonies in the Caribbean and Virginia
I won't repeat some of the things West Africans told me about their attitude to the slave trade or to African Americans but it was a mixture of bemusement and contempt.
In most of the rest of Africa the slave trade was run by Arab slave traders
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was an appalling crime which did impact the economies of many parts of West Africa and came about as the result of an even worse crime the holocaust unleashed on the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the Spanish Colonies - many of whom were worked to death as slaves in mines and plantations.

>the impression you might get of rows of children miserably tilling the earth or whatever isn't particularly accurate.<

..whereas the truth is children 330, 000 working on cocoa plantaions many being trafficed and used to harvest cocao with machetes and handling dangerous pesticide like Lindane

This is all true.

What happened is, as elsewhere in the world, the European slavers allied themselves with power. They built on existing structures and moulded them to the purpose of supplying a much expanded slave trade. You can say that some African leaders were willing participants - although once the trade reached a certain critical mass it was fed by civil warfare - enslave or be enslaved. Certainly the whole thing was demand led. There would have been no supply of slaves into Île de Gorée if there were no ships waiting to take them to America to use their labour to grow cotton to ship to Lancashire to weave into cloth to sell into India...

So, yes...African leaders share some of the guilt. But they were not driving the economic system. 'It's not personal. It's just business.'

To use an analogy: who is responsible for the prevalance of crack cocaine in Washington DC? Is it wholly down to Bolivian Coca farmers?

Returning to the OP - it is worth noting the importance of the two world wars on the end of the British Empire.
The imperial hierarchy was based on people in Britain "knowing their place (reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists gives a good insight into the deferential attitude of Edwardian workers to their "betters"), and secondly on the myth of European superiority and invincibility.
The First World War devastated the "ruling class" as young men of that class were expected to be junior officers and lead from the front, more importantly it ended the deference of the working and middle classes to their Norman rulers, the Second War was the peoples war which brought about a Labour Government and changes in to society and attitudes to Empire.
The myth of European invincibility was shattered by the Japanese victories of 1941/42. Large numbers of Indian and African troops (including many Mau Mau leaders) fought in Burma and saw white troops who had been beaten and humiliated by Asians this had a profound effect of independence movements.
Similarly the same events led to the end of Dutch rule in Indonesia and French rule in Indochina (North Africa troops who saw the French humiliated in Vietnam went onto start the Algerian independence movement)

I'd be interested in knowing who fought where. I know that a lot of British African troops fought in Italy.

And I'm feel another viewing of 'The Battle of Algiers' coming on. (stunning film!). It would be great if it were released with the Asian Dub Foundation soundtrack.

The independence movements had quite venerable roots, mind.

Meanwhile, the western hemisphere from 1492 to the War of 1812
was a constant battleground between four European empires -
Spain, France, the Dutch and Britain.

Commodities like gold, silver, copper, sugar, tobacco, cotton and
indigo were extracted by slave labour and fought over by fleets
of privateers and the whole business was policed by national
(imperial) navies and armies.

Just when it looked like Britain had pretty much taken over on all
fronts because of superior naval technologies (including specific
designed slave ships and devastatingly effective weaponry) they
started fighting among themselves (the American Revolution).

Not to be outdone by the upstart American rebels, the British
began transplanting most of the agricultural successes to other
parts of their empire - and India, Malaysia, Africa, the far east
and Polynesia. Rubber for example was originally a product of
the Amazon river systems but was re-established in Indonesia.
The 'Chinese' opium trade came from British occupied India and
'Pakistan' (Afghanistan).

What is interesting and little understood is that the USofA was/(is)
still using military power to continue policies of colonial control
over similar commodities (pineapples, bananas, coconuts, coffee
and cocaine) in Central and South America and across the Pacific
islands.

See Sarah Vowell's 'Unfamiliar Fishes' for the sad story of the US
invasion and conquest of the Hawaiian Islands. And don't overlook
the Spanish/American war and the United Fruit Company. 'American
Imperialism' is not a modern catchphrase, it begins in earnest in
the 1880s and flowered under the likes of Teddy Roosevelt who
understood the power of a large imperial navy (Pearl Harbour).


~jwf~

A bit late joining the party, so I'll just jump right in, eh?

<> swl

Ok, so it's the guardian, but still....

" Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities?INTCMP=SRCH

Ok, so it's from someone who has read the book

"The massive fault in the book is the remorselessly left-wing bias that Elkins applies to all her research and the resulting blatantly self-contradictory statements. At one point comparing the detention camps in their mistreatment to Japanese POW camps and then noting that a parliamentary inspection committee of MPs, including three Labour MPs, criticised the toilet facilities and the lack of blankets is hardly self-consistent. To quote the back of a fag-packet calculation of camp deaths made by a left-wing Asian lawyer in Kenya as a substantive fact is also not worthy of her extensive research and wide ranging interviews.
Elkins must know that to quote the 'Daily Worker' of the 1950s is not a safe practice. And so it goes on with interminable details of individual cases of maltreatment in the camps followed by massive and unsubstantiated extrapolation. At all times, apart from two incidents, Mau Mau violence is ignored and reactive colonial response made to look inexplicable. This is poor, one-sided, history" http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/1844135489/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Nothing to deny systematic rape, abuse and torture then? Ok, I was wrong

in' *amazon* reveiew!? You're almost a historian!

A left wing paper quotes a left wing account of a period in British history left wingers loathe - excuse me if I suspect hysteria and hyperbole.

<Just when it looked like Britain had pretty much taken over on all
fronts because of superior naval technologies (including specific
designed slave ships and devastatingly effective weaponry) they
started fighting among themselves (the American Revolution).<

Firstly the British lost the US War of Indepedence because of a French naval victory which cut off their forces in North America, British undisputed naval superiority didn't come about until 1805 - and was a result of iron discipline rather than weapons.

Secondly it is ironic that the supposed "revolutionaries" were motivated to a large extent by a desire to prepetuate the slave trade (which Britain abolished in 1802 - 30 years before the USA), and by a lust for empiral expansion - the UK had set a western limit to colonization at a time when George Washington and his chums was illegally speculating on Iraquis land.

But I thought left and right were irrelevant now?