Slavery casts a long shadow

Colin Bullen seems to have missed an obvious point in his latest letter relating to the British Empire.

His opening comment being that ‘more organisations seem to be jumping on the bandwagon to demonise our history in particular the British Empire’.

I assume that the organisations that he is principally referring to are British and consist of the ‘woke elite’ that cause Colin nightmares. It is not helpful to start from a point of asking which Empire in the last 2,000 years was the worst (they all were).

The concern of many people in this country about the British Empire is precisely because we are British; we are the descendants of those who ran the Empire or were affected by it. The British Empire lasted 400 years until 1997, when the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese was the actual end of Empire. At one time the Empire held sway over 412 million people and covered 24% of the Earth’s total land area. Looking back from our current time, the question arises, was it right for Britain to control other nations, particularly because this sometimes required extreme violence by our troops to silence dissent in those nations?

Slavery was of course a significant issue in the Empire’s history and profited some, including the Royal Family.

It is estimated that British slave ships made around 10,000 voyages across the Atlantic, transporting 3.4 million people of whom only 2.6 million survived the journey.

Britain was the second highest trader overall but, in the 18th, century made it to the top (or bottom) by transporting 2.5 million.

When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, the British Government paid a total of £20 million in compensation to British slave owners (approximately £2.2 billion in current value).

The amount borrowed by the government was finally paid-off by the British taxpayer in 2015.

Notably, the slaves got £0. So, one reason the British Empire is still an issue for some British people is the awfulness of much of what happened during its existence and the long shadow it continues to cast over this country.

Brian Parsons