“Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.”

“One of the side effects of a society that claims not to see race, is that anyone whose appearance is an excessive reminder of difference needs to conform. Failing to do so is frequently perceived as an act of radical politics.”

“I'm not sure which of these states of affairs, the 1960s attitude which was to ignore it, or today's attitude which is to marginalise it as 'black history', is more dishonest. Maybe they're as bad as each other.”

“It's no exaggeration to say that the wealth of the royal family, much like the wealth of the nation itself, was built on the back of slavery and related trade investment and industry.”


What I should have been taught in school and definitely wasn't:
• of the 12million slaves (conservative estimate) abducted from Africa, 40% were transported on British ships
• well over 1 million were put to work (and often to death) in British colonies
• Britain made more profit from its slave trading investments, and extracted more wealth from the Caribbean, than any other European slave-owning nation
• The scales were tipped towards abolition when Parliament’s stance was influenced by rapidly declining sugar prices, due to over-production in the West Indies
• The 800,000 slaves we ‘owned’ at the point of British abolition were valued at £47 million. I already knew that £20 million was paid by taxpayers and went to compensate the slave owners for their ‘loss of goods’. We only stopped paying this in 2015. What I didn’t know, however, was that the remaining £27 million was paid off by the slaves themselves…by working for free for 4 years. They were then left illiterate, unskilled, psychologically traumatised and cut off from their African homelands.
• Post-British abolition, the lack of new slaves from Britain led to worsening conditions for existing slaves. Overseers were given bonuses for each female slave they impregnated – essentially funding rape.
• for those profiting from the trade of Africans, the greatest returns from slavery came after Britain’s abolition. By 1840 there were more slaves crossing than the Atlantic than there had been before. British investors and businesses were among those profiting.
• There was nothing to stop traders investing in the ownership of slaves in nations where slavery was still legal. British businesses set up partnerships with those Cuba (abolished 1870) and Brazil (abolished 1888).
• Brits still profiting in other ways: 80% of the goods used to exchange for men, women and children off the coast of West Africa were British - fuelling our economic boom throughout the Victorian era (including our industrial revolution).
• Slavery deprived huge swathes of Africa of millions of its working age people (often the strongest and most able) for over 400yrs. (something obviously known but never consciously thought about in terms of what this did to Africa's progress).
• Recent survey showed that the majority of Brits thought the empire was something to be proud of - 3x more than those who thought it was something to be ashamed of.
• Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the only people to give Black activist, Claude McKay, a platform in her left-wing publication, The Worker’s Dreadnaught. Her beliefs were that female suffrage and racial equality went hand-in-hand - unlike other members of her family. As well as giving a platform to Black voices, she was also a patron of the International African Service Bureau, who fought for complete national independence from white domination.