Coming back to this debate after a couple of days. I endorse entirely O L Leigh’s summary of his position in post
123.
Whilst now appreciating that the proposed research is not solely concentrated on the UK but has an international aspect, one of the conclusions I draw from the posts is that it is considered by some that the subject of slavery and the slave trade has been ignored or played down in UK historical research and that the popular historical narrative of British, or more specifically, English, history is inaccurate.
’Twas ever thus…
In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli wrote, in
Sybil, or the Two Nations, about the history of England:
Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about us about as profitable to an Englishman as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia of More.
One has to be careful to separate the popular memory of events with the accuracy and detail expected in works of scholarship. Much ‘memory’, individual or collective, is fiction, and no less powerful for that; historical academic research has a different purpose. It enables one to look at the present and explain why things are as they are because of an event, or many events, in the past.
The problem, which is reflected by posts in this thread, is that much scholarship is hidden from the public gaze in the pages of learned journals and scholarly monographs and articles and as a result is often ignored.
My contention is that the slave trade and its economic, social and personal impact, both in Britain and aboard, has already been the subject of volumes of academic research. It is inaccurate and ill informed to suggest that little has been done as opening any serious text book about English, British, French or Spanish history will show.
The pity is that history is no longer taught as a narrative - my son for example was taught at school about the Tudors, Nazi Germany and the Russian Revolution with no material showing how, or why, these things were linked together. Nominally the course was intended to teach the students how to look for and interpret the documents available but as one of the major points of school education is - or should be - to teach people to think critically, this was disingenuous and lazy.
Much information is already available, it only has to be looked for.
Added in Edit:
One final point - or this will be TLDR...
Any analysis has to be complete. For example the role of compensation payments made by the Act of 1837 (mentioned above) in the supply of
capital to the railways in their infancy should also consider the effects of the Railway Mania less than ten years later which wiped out much of the invested capital. The effects of the cotton trade on the
income of some railway and canal companies had a different effect - but the American Civil War put paid to slavery by 1865 and changed the cost and quantity of the raw materials.
But the biggest winner of the American Civil War was Egypt which stepped in to supply cotton as hostilities stopped the supply.
As soon as the Civil War broke out, around the world farmers with suitable climates planted some cotton as prices had risen by up to 150 percent. As soon as it became clear that Britain wouldn’t enter the war on the side of the Confederacy, many of these farmers concentrated on cotton.
No one, however, seized on the opportunity quite like the Egyptians. Between 1861 and 1863, Egypt had more than doubled its cotton exports and by the end of the 19th century, it derived 93% of its export revenues from cotton.
So, did Egypt benefit from slavery because slavery assisted in creating a market for cotton - or did it benefit from the Abolition because it became a major supplier?
