Wealth from slavery powered colonialism
MIKE Jackman (7 July) tells us that Black Lives Matter (BLM) are “a radical neo-Marxist political movement”, parroting word-forword a Daily Telegraph comment headline, and that these aims are similar to those of Extinction Rebellion.
Letters such as Mike Jackman’s seldom even mention, let alone acknowledge, the basic issues which are the subject of these protests – racial inequality and the climate crisis. Instead they seek to discredit the organisations by suggesting they are primarily motivated by an underlying desire to destroy our political structures and economic systems.
Whether or not the organisers of these protests have deeper political motives or whether they simply believe that extensive political change is needed to achieve their declared aims, the vast majority of their supporters have no political motives beyond improving the plight of black and ethnic minority populations and addressing climate change.
And when protesters deface and tear down statues they are not attempting to “eradicate history” as Mike Jackman puts it, they are drawing attention to it.
Many of the grand mansions and stately homes in this country owe their existence to family fortunes made in the Caribbean off the backs of slave labourers. When slavery was abolished in 1833, these and many other less prominent families received compensation for the loss of freed slaves, sometimes amounting to several million pounds in today’s money.
Anybody interested to see if their ancestors received such funds can easily find out by entering their family name into the search facility of the Legacies of British Slaveownership website (https://www. ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search/).
Mike Jackman might like to speculate as to whether he is closely related to any of the eight Jackmans listed, who received the princely total of £4786 three shillings and seven pence (equivalent to about £573,500 in today’s money) for the 186 slaves they had to free in Barbados and British Guiana.
And before we complain about statues of people like Edward Colston being torn down, the rest of us should contemplate how the wealth and prosperity of our country benefitted from an economy so dependant upon slavery, and how this wealth powered colonialism and the British Empire as a whole. Francis Kirkham Nymet Rowland
Mid Devon