watching the second part off the program about slavery

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Yes, I posted only yesterday on one of the landed gentry who received the equivalent of £3,000,000 today for the loss of 'his' slaves.

Twas ever thus and still is.
 
I suppose that at that time slavery was perfectly legal and, and paying compensation for loss would be seen as quite acceptable.
Attitudes change a lot over the best part of two centuries.
 
yes i understand the fact it was "legal" at the time
but off course it shows you how morally corrupt or how superior morally or intellectually they think they are
laws where made by these people for there own ends and interest with the common man having little or no influence in the system with women as mere material possessions to the man have no say what so ever in the same way as a slave
 
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big-all said:
it shows you how morally corrupt or how superior morally or intellectually they think they are
laws where made by these people for there own ends and interest with the common man having little or no influence in the system
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A bit like our present day governments, then!
 
I've been travelling around Africa for 30 years now and the more I see of Africans the more I find myself almost becoming an apologist for colonialism. Of course it's morally wrong to enslave another human but slavery is a fact of life in Africa; it still happens widely there and elsewhere in the world. When sophisticated Europeans landed in Africa in the 1600s and onwards they found a land bursting with untouched resources including human labour and it was African Emirs, Chiefs, Obas and Kings who colluded readily with slavers and enriched themselves. Nobody would agree that this was right but I can understand how it happened and continues to happen; an African's first loyalty is to his family then his tribe then his religion and lastly his country. Life is so short, so dangerous and so uncertain that an African would be foolish to miss any opportunity to make quick cash, even if it's at the expense of fellow citizens or his nation.
 
http://tinyurl.com/avqro23 Quote :-
"...
The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.

A total of £10m went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain. The biggest single payout went to James Blair (no relation to Orwell), an MP who had homes in Marylebone, central London, and Scotland. He was awarded £83,530, the equivalent of £65m today, for 1,598 slaves he owned on the plantation he had inherited in British Guyana..."


-0-
 
I think it was quite right to pay compensation. Do you think slavery would not have been abolished without it? And if you think it was wrong (and it was) bear in mind that if you ran a plantation with free labourers, you would not have been able to compete, and would have gone out of business. I'm not excusing slavery, but times change.

Incidentally, it is interesting to read the life story of Mississippi John Hurt, a blues musician who worked on cotton plantations. He was paid in tokens, which he had to spend in the employer's shop, and oddly enough verything was expensive. So he got robbed. He gives many tales of how the white people robbed him, and other 'free' African Americans.

RigidRaider said:
I've been travelling around Africa for 30 years now and the more I see of Africans the more I find myself almost becoming an apologist for colonialism. Of course it's morally wrong to enslave another human but slavery is a fact of life in Africa; it still happens widely there and elsewhere in the world. When sophisticated Europeans landed in Africa in the 1600s and onwards they found a land bursting with untouched resources including human labour and it was African Emirs, Chiefs, Obas and Kings who colluded readily with slavers and enriched themselves. Nobody would agree that this was right but I can understand how it happened and continues to happen; an African's first loyalty is to his family then his tribe then his religion and lastly his country. Life is so short, so dangerous and so uncertain that an African would be foolish to miss any opportunity to make quick cash, even if it's at the expense of fellow citizens or his nation.
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Indeed.

Perhaps in 200 years time people will look back and see how uncivilised we were. Or perhaps society as we know it will have collapsed. Empires do disappear.
 
WalksWithTurkeys said:
Empires do disappear.
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Indeed. Ours has been rapidly disappearing since the Second World War and has now completely gone.
Never fear, though, new empires take the place of the old, and we can now rejoice in being part of the new EU empire!
 
JBR said:
WalksWithTurkeys said:
Empires do disappear.
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Indeed. Ours has been rapidly disappearing since the Second World War and has now completely gone.
Never fear, though, new empires take the place of the old, and we can now rejoice in being part of the new EU empire!
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Yes, but I was not referring to the British Empire, which as you say has gone but to the current world empire, Global Capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. It is currently holding the world 'together' in the sense that we have large nations with social stability. When the Romans left Britain, the so-called dark ages arrived, with lots of small competing groups. It would in my view be all too easy for something to destroy our society. It is very unstable, as it largely depends on the supply of fossil fuels. Doesn't Doo-dah Rees, the Astronomer Royal, give us low odds on our survival?
 
I believe the biggest thread to our society, on a world scale, is population increase.

If we look at the natural world, when any living organism becomes too prevalent nature takes a hand and does something about it.

I believe the same will happen with humans. At the moment, food is plentiful in the civilised world but lacking in many parts of the third world. If the people in many third world countries continue to bang away and pop out sprogs ten to the dozen things will become even worse for them.

Not to worry, though. Saint Bob Geldof and the do-gooders will continue to 'feed the world' and ensure their population will be free to increase. Then he'll want more handouts from Western countries and the third world population will increase further, then...
well, you can see what will happen. Eventually, we'll become short of food as well.
Yes, I think that is the biggest threat to mankind at the moment.
 
JBR said:
bang away and pop out sprogs ten to the dozen
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:)

If you look at the UK, we do not have the ability to feed ourselves without importing food. Our survival depends on a) importing food and b) using oil based fertilisers to grow the food we do grow. The UK could collapse and starve in weeks.
 
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