An interesting piece written by Richard Palmer in Philadelphia and taken from Facebook

Why are statues coming down across Britain and America? We’re told it’s because of slavery. Slavery was racist and abhorrent, so statues of anyone that profited from it must come down.

But is that the real reason?

Slavery has certainly been one of the great evils of world history. But it has also been one of the most common. Just about every major civilization in the history of the world has had slavery.

The oldest known law tablet, from ancient Sumer, has laws on slavery. The ancient Greeks boasted about their love of freedom, while owning slaves. The Roman Empire was built upon the backs of millions of them.

In the Dark Ages, slave trade was rife. At the turn of the millennium a.d. 1000, about half a million slaves were being traded between Europe and Asia each year.

Slavery started to die out in Europe, but then received a massive boost with the discovery of the Americas. Growing sugar in the tropical islands became big business. So was mining in South America. But it was hard work in a climate few could survive in for long. It soon became hard to find enough laborers.

And so, the Atlantic slave trade developed. Britain became a major participant, transporting around 3 million Africans. But it wasn’t the only nation involved in the slave trade. Portugal is estimated to have transported about 5.8 million slaves. The French transported around 2 million. The Dutch and the Spanish each transported about half a million.

And those sailing the boats weren’t the only ones involved. The slaves were usually bought from African rulers. One, King Gezo, who reigned from 1818 to 1858, said, “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.”

And these slaves didn’t travel only to America and British Caribbean colonies. Brazil, for example, received more slaves than any other nation.

Something doesn’t become less evil because everybody’s doing it. But the mass participation does raise the question: Why are only Britain’s and America’s statues under attack?

The truth is that Britain and America do have a unique relationship with slavery—and it has everything to do with the reason these statues are coming down. The slave trade was incredibly profitable. A slave in the Americas would sell for about eight times the price he cost in Africa. And in 1805, Britain became the undisputed master of the world’s oceans after winning the Battle of Trafalgar. The stage seemed set for it to profit more than ever from this evil trade.

Instead, the opposite happened. In March 1807, Britain outlawed the slave trade. In his book Empire, Niall Ferguson called it “an astonishing volte-face.”

He writes: “Towards the end of the 18th century, something changed dramatically; it was almost as if a switch was flicked in the British psyche. It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people,” he continues. “It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable.” Instead, Britain had a “collective change of heart.”

But making sure Britain no longer participated in this trade was not enough. Britain used its diplomatic clout to ensure other nations ended slavery. The British Army was protecting Portugal from Napoleonic invasion, at the time, so Portugal was convinced to sign a treaty limiting the slave trade in 1810. In 1813, Sweden signed. The 1814 Treaty of Paris that ended the Napoleonic Wars (until Napoleon Bonaparte’s escape one year later) forced France to renounce it. The Netherlands soon signed its own treaty, followed by Spain in 1817.

No other nation was going around the world cajoling other nations to end the slave trade. But America was moving in the same direction. The United States adopted its Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807, at almost the same time Britain outlawed the trade.

But abolishing the slave trade didn’t free the slaves already at work. Britain’s anti-slavery campaigners pushed on. In 1833, the United Kingdom passed the Slavery Abolition Act, abolishing slavery in British colonies: 800,000 slaves were freed once the law came into effect.

To get it through Parliament, it had to be “compensated emancipation”, meaning slave owners were paid for the slaves they had to free. Many on the left criticize that today. But the fact is, uncompensated emancipation would have taken much longer. The reformers chose to be pragmatic and freed the slaves as soon as they could. Britain paid a huge price for this: £20 million, billions in today’s money. Britain had to take out a loan so big that it just finished paying it off in 2015.

But that wasn’t the only cost. The economic effects of emancipation were “devastating” wrote Jan Morris in her book Heaven’s Command. “Planters were ruined from Antigua to Mauritius. Middlemen of Ashanti, slave captains of Merseyside, overseers of Nassau, found themselves without an occupation. Most of the sugar colonies never really recovered.” One Jamaican estate that had been making £11,000 a year in the 1820s was sold in the 1840s for just £1,650.

But for Britain, it wasn’t enough to outlaw the slave trade; it wanted to make sure it actually stopped.

The UK, alone in all nations of the world, put forth a huge effort to shut this trade down. In 1808, during the Napoleonic War, with the nation still fighting for survival, Britain set up the West Africa Squadron. It patrolled the seas of Africa’s west coast, looking for slave ships.

Britain’s naval dominance was now assured, and so “for the first 30 years of Victoria’s reign, the Royal Navy’s chief task was the interception of slavers.” In theory, Britain was leading a multinational effort; but in practice, no one else made any significant contributions.

It was a tough job. Slaver ships were often built for speed and could outrun the slower Navy warships. Even when they did overrun them, stopping and searching ships belonging to other nations was a legal and bureaucratic nightmare. But Britain persevered, pouring a lot of money into the endeavor. The Navy captured 1,600 slave ships between 1808 and 1870, with 150,000 Africans freed.

But still this was not enough. It was clear that overhauling boats on the high seas would not end the trade. So, Navy commanders looked for ways to go on shore and shut them down.

This took men with what the left today calls “toxic masculinity”. One such man was Cmdr. Joseph Denman.

Denman commanded HMS Wanderer. They had been trying to capture slave ships off the coast of the Gallinas. But the Gallinas were an independent territory, and Britain was not at war with it. He could blockade its estuary but couldn’t land. Then the leader of Gallinas kidnapped a British subject from Sierra Leone and Denman was ordered to sort it out. This was the excuse he needed. He freed the kidnapped subject and much more. He took over the largest island in the Gallinas estuary, freed over a thousand slaves, and burned the slavers’ warehouses. The chief of the Gallinas was forced to sign a treaty renouncing the slave trade and promising to expel all traders.

The commander of a single boat forced an entire tribe to renounce the slave trade.
This pursuit of abolition led Britain to become more active around the world.

With America out of the slave trade - officially, at least - Brazil was the top destination for African slaves. Brazil had signed a treaty with Britain agreeing to outlaw the slave trade in 1826. But it didn’t enforce it. By 1850, Britain decided to enforce it for Brazil. The Royal Navy entered Brazil’s inland waters and ports and shut the trade down.

Meanwhile, the issue of slavery was heating up in the U.S. The American Civil War was about more than slavery, but slavery was at its heart. Thousands upon thousands of Americans fought and died because they believed that all men - including black - were created equal and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That war ended with about 4 million slaves freed.

That war also unified America against the slave trade and led it to help Britain in the international effort against slavery. The Atlantic slave trade was dead.

But it still wasn’t enough. The renowned Victorian explorer, Dr. David Livingstone, shone a light on another slave trade - the East African-Arab slave trade. His dramatic disappearance, discovery and then death gave a huge amount of publicity to the Eastern slave trade.

The Royal Navy got to work. In 1890, Britain did a deal with Germany, swapping Heligoland in the North Sea for Zanzibar. What used to be a major slave trading station became the center of Britain’s anti-slavery work in East Africa.

Jan Morris writes:“The first monuments of Queen Victoria’s empire were monuments of liberty. The fight against slavery at its source would continue throughout the Victorian era, being a prime motive as we shall see of the great mid-century explorations.”

No other powers have this kind of history, which makes Black Lives Matters’ (and others’) targeting of them so crazy.One of the first casualties of their attack has been the Elizabethan naval commander Sir John Hawkins. Plymouth had a square dedicated to Hawkins, which it has now decided to rename.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls Hawkins “the chief architect of the Elizabethan navy.” He, along with men like Sir Francis Drake, were instrumental in establishing England as a naval power. Adm. Horatio Nelson has also come under attack, with activists throwing paint at his statue. He led the Royal Navy to victory in the Napoleonic Wars.

Yes, Drake and Hawkins challenged the Spanish monopoly on the slave trade by making a few voyages in slave ships. But these men also helped defeat empires that engaged in slavery and tyranny on a far larger scale. Drake and Hawkins confronted the Spanish Armada, Nelson the French and its allies. What if these men had been wiped from history? The Spanish or French empires would have dominated the world. There’s no evidence either would have had any interest in eliminating slavery.

If it weren’t for these men, and others, slavery would probably still be around as an institution today.

Of course, slavery in practice still exists today. Thanks to the British Empire, it is almost universally outlawed. But according to the International Labor Organization, around 45 million people are enslaved today.

To the Victorians, outlawing slavery wasn’t enough. They had to follow it up, with military force if necessary, to ensure people were actually free. Out of sight wasn’t out of mind; they traveled to the ends of the Earth to wipe it out.

Not so today. The 45 million slaves don’t weigh heavily on the world’s conscience. We denounce the Victorians as slave traders - yet they cared far more about ending slavery than we do today.