[Music] racism emerges really in the 16th and 17th particularly the 17th century Europeans were enslaving and had for some centuries been enslaving people both of Africa and of the new old history of racism in the Western world is broadly associated with slavery as the early form of colonialism and sin that context that something called race is created which essentially means that certain people who defined as non Europeans find themselves ruled and governed by Europeans for people in America in the 17th and the 18th century race was a fact of life and I think that racism is something that comes out of that interaction of necessity this isn't people cooking up racism in their laboratory or in that study and then going out into the world to applier in a sense white people and blacks and Indians worked at their ideas of race in proximity with each other on the hoof the British don't become slave traders and slavers because they are racist the Veeam races because they use slaves a great profit in the Americas and devised a set of attitudes towards black people that justifies what they've done the real engine behind the slave system is economics Africans are items are trained they're things that are bought that are sold are to beak weed that are inherited the lack of the items have trade and once you've got that established work on the slave ships of which there are thousands leaving British ports and once you've got that established on the plantations and once you got it established as a basis for expanding British wealth how can you argue that somehow or other the great inferiority of black people isn't built into fundamental cultural values of the British John Hawkins was perhaps the first English trader to actually kidnap sleeves from Tarim which is a couple of miles from Freetown and forcibly took slaves away from surely the sad thing is that this one was even made a night when we are in school who read about Sir John Hawkins as if you were sort a good person he was thirty righteous person somebody who are contributed positively to you know the creation of the British Empire it was only much later that summer first learned which regrets that in fact he was not only involved in the slave trade but he actually captured you know slaves he established places down he down by cognitive of what mentors now over time it became an industry and a lot of English traders and a lot of Sarah Union rulers particularly those along the coast became heavily involved in the slave trade and we have for instance several islands of the course Australian that we are prominent slave trading posts like bonds Island for instance we are there we are English force or the Europeans at force even Americans we are a very heavily involved in the slave trade from bone china until I come for comfort by kya the number there you know keep I'm the number one he take up the Putin artists fire room OB bonhomie NASA da da and of course we know the way they were taken captured tied up chained and thrown into enter of the ships so it was a very bad experience for the slaves from the moment they are captured up to the time they reached the so-called new world and then those who survived and did arrive you know had to be put for saving and then when they were bought they had to undergo all kinds of indignities one woman man price Santa look for you Nautica did not come back we work for you is born cooking for you now for that it is pre two cans for one Kingman we would come collect tuna nakiya being at a conservative estimate over 11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic manacled and packed together like animals at least 2 million died during the infernal voyage known as the Middle Passage slaves are seen as deracinated people people who did not belong who were naturally alienated that is there are no rights of birth never seen us people who had been torn from another society but not socialized into the new one so they were socially dead so to speak they were seen as people without honor which is a degraded condition the value of this for the master is that the master had absolute power over the slaves regardless of what laws may say there are rights of life and death the situation grows up where thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of these black or dark skinned people are being kept down without rights and kept a work night and day by system of surveillance with whips and cutlasses and of course there is the fear that they will try and rise up that they'll try to run away and that when they do that they're going to slaughter the Masters and the overseers and their wives in their beds and really that any white person will be seen as a potential enemy by the blacks and so you get this mutual fear between the two groups and this tends to consolidate racial feeling and the only way to keep these slave societies even minimally secure was to armed all the white men and even indeed some of the white women too so you were there in your plantation manner you're there and you're in a settler outpost what are the natives doing sort of classic land you know from these movies and natives are restless what's going on drones in the background there's the idea that these people are sort of getting together and they're going to invade us they're going to attack us and it's a kind of inner projection Base Coronado walls you've invaded their countries you've subordinated them there's a long history of colored perils there was a red peril called Red Indians there's a yellow peril there's black peril there's this idea of Nadine on when I taught Oh onion on White House is threatening in on what are they scary non-white automated kind of things that have been done to the non-white over in the early sixteenth century from Chile in the South to Florida in the North this non-white other was no more than vermin to be exterminated the Dominican monk Bartolome de las casas was eyewitness to countless atrocities against the native populations his account reads like a catalogue of genocide the mainland in the region known as Florida the Spaniards murdered many as is their custom in order to strike terror into the hearts of these people they made their lives in utter misery treating them as so many beasts of burden in another large town the butchers but the whole town to the sword young and old sheeps and commoners not even the children were spared the butcher in chief arranged for a large number of natives in the area to have their noses lips and Chin's sliced from their faces they were then sent away in unspeakable agony and all running with blood to act as walking testimony to the great deeds and holy miracles performed by these dauntless missionaries of the Holy Catholic faith the things that las casas witnessed particular on Hispaniola or in Cuba these incredible crimes these incredible attacks on Indians disembowelling 's and burnings rapes and whatever else I'm sure that that level of violence is something that you could have witnessed in different places in the 17th the 18th century you know in other parts of the Spanish Empire but it was a peculiarly awful moment that las casas saw as the Spanish got to the Americas and tried literally to work the Indians to death the reports of las casas caused enough unease for the Council of Indy's the Spanish administrators of the new world to call a debate at Valladolid in Spain in 1550 the debate concerned not just the mistreatment of Indians but whether they could be categorized as human at all in contest with las Casas the champion of the native populations was the jesuit wanjin esther Sepulveda by this time the Spanish have been in the Americas for about fifty years and during that time the brutalities carried out by the conquest doors had reached such heights that had caused some alarm and out of that context came this particular debate on the one hand there was this idea that the Indians had souls they could be Christianized and they should be treated not as servants not as forced laborers but as people under the protectorate of the Spanish on the other side of the debate was the idea that perhaps these are not people with souls perhaps these are people who are natural slaves and in that context they could be coerced to produce labor what les cassis wants to do was to change the policy of the Spanish crown towards the Indians so paradoxically he was able to get slavery of Indians banned that's something which the Spanish crown bans outlaws and by 1542 the laws have been changed to ensure that it can no longer be Indian slaves but las casas also suggests that the labor shortfall in America can be made up with black slaves from Africa which I think he later regretted later in life it's a key moment insofar as the reflection on the system that produces race is there in that debate the system that produces race which will produce race over the next two three hundred years is that colonial system which takes this diverse range of peoples and defines them as Indian forces their category on them and it's in that context that you begin to see two things that go hand-in-hand with the development of racism on the one hand the institutions that keep in place exploited populations oppressed populations and in that context the debates that then take place as to what kinds of popular patience they are these debates begin with lawyers they move to anthropologist and they may move on to biologists always debating within that context of colonialism which fixes those people as objects of investigation Thursday 11th October thus far and no land another 12 hours will decide the crucial moment in the racial history of the whole Atlantic world and of the world is Christopher Columbus but not the first voyage which everybody knows about but the third voyage in 1498 Columbus sailed south to Sierra Leone where as he noticed the people are very black perfectly black and then he sailed due west from Sierra Leone and he wound up near Trinidad and the northern coast of South America and he reported that the people there were white with blond hair and that shouldn't have happened according to the prevailing theories of skin color in the whole classical world in the medieval period what happened with Columbus is that people started to realize that you could stay on the same latitude and get radically different skin colors and if that was the case then there had to be some other explanation for skin color other than geography so that's where you begin to get the emergence of biological theories of difference in skin color and that leads eventually to racist theories of differences in skin color so of view emerges originally identified as pre atomism that maybe there are multiple origins and that less civilized more primitive human beings have an origin that is not accountable for by a biblical narrative but are close to the animal world and that view then develops into a buccal polygenism and that is multiple origins when Europeans first encountered chimpanzees they were really struck by the similarities between what chimpanzees and humans but they called chimpanzees drills and one of the questions that John Locke talks about in his essay concerning human understanding is the question of whether human beings have mated with drills so the question that gets increasingly asked in the 17th century is are African peoples what we've called the same species as Europeans and Locke has real questions about whether we can say that they're the same species or not and one of the explanations for African people that you start hearing in Barbados for instance the English colony on Barbados in the 17th century is that black Africans are produced by the sexual union of a chimpanzee and a human being so they're not really human they're half animal and this gets bound up with a whole series of prejudices about the animality of Africans their bestiality their sexuality is animalistic even in the 20th century you get all sorts of claims about jazz music being animalistic these are prejudices that begin to be ingrained in European culture in the 17th century in the context of what we think of as major scientific or philosophical texts and literary texts - in the tempest whichever way you interpret Caliban Shakespeare's weird hybrid reinforces the idea that slaves are not fully human Shakespeare doesn't quite know how to figure the humor of wood and draw of water is this the working class is this the proletariat is this African is this the Savage Shakespeare doesn't know any creates Caliban no poisonous slave not by the devil himself upon thy wicked and come forth in The Tempest it seems to me pretty clear that Shakespeare imagined Caliban is a black slave he has an African mother and a black devil father and that in some ways Caliban is the first representation of the rebellious sexually obsessed violent ignorant black slave I have used not in mine own cell till I could seek to violate the honor of might prevent me I had people else this Isle with caliban's Shakespeare presents him as somebody who will be tricked by a few baubles you know not crystal meth not crack cocaine but by by a few trinkets and some booze many a Caliban might have found himself in the English plantations of America in fact The Tempest was partly inspired by the story of a ship which ran aground on Bermuda with a crew there mutinied the sea venture had been bound for the plantations of Virginia a slave holding colony in which Shakespeare himself had a financial investment the economic notion of the plantation is a large site of agribusiness and of a large cooperation of human labor for the arable field begins in in Ireland begins in Ulster of course it was a London merchant house that wished to plant dairy and to start the plantation of Ulster at the very time that at Shakespeare's time at the end towards the end of Shakespeare's life that the virginia company is establishing a colony in virginia the idea that the great glory days of england began with elizabeth you know there is no successful english colony under the reign of elizabeth great english imperial aggressive victories start having the 17th century really under cromwell with the growth of the empire inch of the conquest of jamaica and that's when the english also began to perceive of themselves as part of a superior white race Oliver Cromwell is a fierce and powerful revolutionary figure he was a great general and commander of capitalism that transformed the Atlantic if not the whole world this mighty vision he had of doing God's work had begun in the fens of England where the huge hydraulic works of fan mutant in Holland are harnessed to drain the fields so he played a role in that and to dis comin or to remove people from their customary lanced in order to produce the the riches of the alluvial plains of Lincolnshire and the Norfolk Broads they then transforms that interrelationship shall we say of water and land - crossing the Atlantic and - establishing the sugar plantations he doesn't do this alone of course he does it with a class of people this is why we say the capitalist class because they hope to capitalize the land turn the land into commodities and then into capital and do this through the sugar plantation in the 1640s in the very time of the English revolution or the English Civil War it's an amazing story of conquests cruelty and and God so if you look at something like the southern states of america up until the point of the American Civil War the greatest amount of wealth in America was the ownership of slaves and slave labor now this is enormous and it's in that process of being able to command the resources of other parts of the world extract them for your industries and that labor that you create this massive structural inequality the British become well off on the basis of the slave system Liverpool Bristol grow to kind of extraordinary levels of material on urban well-being because of the slave system Lloyd's of London the Bank of England Barings Bank and Barclays Bank Lord Howard as Howard has stately homes left right and centre are absolutely rooted in this slave system but it's a slave system that needs a justification that is the kind of racist element in it but the real rationale for it is profit the this sort of laundering of slave profits as opposed to simply the relocation of them in economic enterprises is I think a very important part of the modern development of Britain for example I always think of Bristol the development of Clifton and so on and so forth absolutely tied to the slave profits from the 18th century early 19th century slave trade slavery as it existed in parts of Europe prior to this period of the Atlantic slave trade was not particularly color-coded yes the slaves in Western Europe might be Slavs but you know that is have the same skin color and you couldn't tell by looking at somebody whether he was a slave or not but you know by the time you get to the West Indies and 1700 or something you can tell by looking at somebody whether or not he or she is a slave the ancients by and large did not suffer from that form of race identification and slavery based on race but they had their own version of it which was that all foreigners all non-greeks all Outsiders in principle could be enslaved legitimately because they were inferior it's not just people who are not Greek who are regarded as inferior in this it's an unalterable way but Greek men regarded Greek women in somewhat the same way so if you are male and Greek you belong just by that very fact to superior categories to begin with racial feeling can take simply the form of a version of dislike but in the case of new world slavery what it's doing is taking the form of domination of exploitation something much more coherent something much more purposeful it's not just a a casual prejudice against people who are unlike ourselves it's a determination to use those people who run like ourselves so it's this that creates the more intense racial feeling that comes out of the widespread adoption of slavery in the plantations in the Americas in antiquity defenders of the institution of slavery didn't rely on ideas of racial inferiority or skin color to justify it but the ideas of one of the great thinkers of antiquity who is much quoted in the Valladolid debates would be adapted to the context of new world slavery Aristotle if I could use an awful phrases then again the woodpile because his views were looked back to from the later medieval period onwards and cited because Aristotle was regarded as they were unfortunate he wasn't a Christian he lived too early nevertheless he was the next best thing and if he said slavery was a natural phenomenon then it probably was but it's very important to be clear that Aristotle was not speaking in terms of external racial characteristics color chapter 9 verse 25 and Noah began to be a husbandman an authority even greater than Aristotle's was invoked to justify slavery God and his good book Genesis chapter 9 verse 25 was interpreted by Christians as divine authorization for trafficking in slaves and the ownership of plantations and this is kind of a funny story and from our perspective it seems sort of ridiculous but this has taken very seriously indeed after the flood Noah gets out there are still waters all around and so Noah decides he's going to set up a vineyard Noah gets drunk he has three sons Japheth Shem and ham ham goes into Noah's chamber while he's lying in this inebriated state and then takes off the sheets looks down at Noah and then cools in his brother's and ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his but says look at our father who's lying naked and tries to get his brothers to laugh when now comes around from his stupor and he's furious and he pronounces a curse on hams descendants he said cursed be canaan the servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren she says that ham son who's called canaan will from then on be cursed in perpetuity and he'll be a slave to the other two brothers Shem and Japheth curse of ham was not specifically black from the beginning there was a medieval writer representing the Lords of the men are saying the peasants are the descendants of ham and that's why they have to serve Lord slave originally originated from Slavic and these are people who have been captured on the eastern front ears of Europe there was not until about the 15th century with the Portuguese and West Africa began to specifically identify Africans with the curse but the idea is that one branch of the human family has been enslaved because of this curse which Noah pronounced on ham it's a kind of one-size-fits-all oppressors story because you can decide whatever group it is that you want to enslave or oppress are the descendants of ham and therefore you have a biblical justification for your mistreatment of them [Music] Christianity is it's it does different things at different times in other words there's certainly a strand of thinking in which people justify slavery by arguing that it's bringing people you know people in Africa into Christianity and so forth Christianity is just one aspect of a number of different systems of thinking that would create the colonial basis for the kinds of knowledge which will be used to define non-european populations so you move from Christianity to liberalism to notions of humanitarianism to capitalism all these kinds of interventions are part of trying to manage and make sense of what the colonial enterprise is without questioning the colonial enterprise without questioning what Atlantic slavery is Christianity's role in slavery is very complex for most of its history it basically accepted slavery as part of the order of things in a way the parallel would be the attitude towards a homeless person today I mean we see it not as a sin or as evil but as an unfortunate situation and this continued right up to the middle of the 18th century when a truly radical change took place in which some Christian thinkers began to see slavery as a sin enslavement of the natives of North America was never European policy but that didn't make life any easier for these indigenous peoples whose relationship with the settlers would ultimately lead most of them either victimized or dead if you look at Native Americans from their perspective when white people one of the interesting facts about 17th century American history from Indians perspectives White's were in a way a bit similar to other rival Indian nations the ways and thoughts of the white men strange but for all that our skins are of different hues we are friends gin gas book you could talk about the 18th century as a hundred year period in which Indians increasingly realize that the battle is between them and white people and in 1763 when it became clear to a host of different Indian groups in the Midwest that the wind was changing they launched a rebellion was led by an Ottawa Indian named Pontiac laid siege so their British fought at Detroit he didn't succeed in destroying the fort but he got the people there very scared indeed and it made London aware of the problem of managing Indians especially in the Midwest and one of the most extraordinary things that happen is that George the third declared in the autumn of 1763 a line of proclamation that's what it was called the line of Proclamation which forbade any white settler from settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains without his explicit permission so effectively the idea was to put the brakes on white settlement to preserve British trading relationships with the Indians but of course the irony here is you've got tons of white settlers moving to America looking for land so in effect in 1763 this royal proclamation creates a new tension between ordinary white settlers on the ground and the crown and it's definitely one of the contributing factors in the American Revolution white settlers believe after 1763 that the British government doesn't support them and instead it backs the Indians and after the American Revolution or in the process of the American Revolution the gloves really come off for white Americans in the new United States is not an Indian friendly nation in least Native Americans were in an impossible situation side with the British whose stronghold was fought Detroit and they risk the wrath of the rebel colonists based in Fort Pitt side with these Americans and their militiamen and they would invite merciless retribution from the British and as for trying to stay out of it even if you were in Pennsylvania a state founded by Quakers upon principles of Christian brotherly love this too could have fatal consequences one group that didn't pick one side or the other with a Moravian Christian Indians who were gathered in three little communities and most important of which was called canard and Hooton he's Moravian Christians there are maybe a hundred one hundred and fifty had tried to stay out of the war they weren't hostile Indians they had adopted many of the customs the equipment the technology of white people they read the Bible they sang hymns they were to all intents and purposes the dream model of people back in the 17th century who wanted to convert and civilize Indians and then a group of Pennsylvania militiamen arrived when they had taken everything that they had that could be construed as a weapon you know tools axes whatever that the Indians had which could be used against against them the militiamen got together and decided to kill every one of them so every single Indian in fact the majority were women and children I think you're around thirty men so the rest 60 or so will women and children all of them were massacred they were brought in in pairs to a heart where they'll hear of the head with a Cooper's mallet and their brains were dashed out without any regards they're obviously being non-combatants and at the end of the massacre the white militiamen had committed it melted away there was never any legal action taken against them and their argument was that these Indians have tools was writing on them or they had books or they had implements they could only have stole them for white people and that's the tragedy or the irony of all of this in a way the things that showed that those Christian Indians were civilized were used against them because these militiamen couldn't believe they belonged to them but I think that's a tremendously evocative story for Pennsylvania because what began as this noble experiment with white people and Indians living side-by-side had now turned into this most grisly kind of race war in which the distinctions between good and bad Indian are totally erased it goes back to one of the problems I guess for Americans of white settlers what does it mean to be an American what is there about America as a place which defines the people that live there when the Boston Tea Party took place in December of 1773 this protest against the tea taxes which are being imposed by London and you get these Patriots running onto these ships of the British East India Company and pouring the tea into the harbor they dressed as Indians now that to me is tremendously interesting because they dressed as Indians to prove they were American it's as if when you get past the stage of mastering Indians militarily they become incredibly useful culturally in articulating American us the idea of being American you know there's a reason why there are cars called you know the Cherokee you know or the Pontiac you line up the major Indian leaders line up the major Indian tribes and you can probably find a vehicle or a weapon named after one you know the Apache helicopter you know Tomahawk missile you know how to look very far to find that kind of connection and many people pointed out the Indian appears on the nickel but the African appears on no coins so the Indian was sort of a symbol of America in a way no no the full destiny of America was to be civilized and Indians were to become civilized or they were to die out but they still identified with America in a way that Africans could not be the one thing that comes to mind looking at it over a long period of time is that one of the main distinguishing features of black-white relations the United States has been the idea the so-called one-drop rule purity of blood to be white you had to could not have a hand known black ancestor wasn't always enforced but this was the rule Indian blood and intermarriage with Indians going back to John Rolfe and Pocahontas was not no marriage between Indians and blacks but Indians and whites differently in America the mid 18th century is considered a pivotal historical moment when the Enlightenment dream of the brotherhood of man championed by philosophers like David Hume Voltaire Rousseau and the encyclopedist came to prominence this period gave rise to the ideals of liberty equality and fraternity principles that fueled the American and French Revolutions but these popular democratic principles were never universally applied choose any intellectual giant of the Enlightenment and almost without exception you will have chosen a proponent of equal rights who really believes that some men are more equal than others Kant is seen as one of the most important philosophers of the modern period of the past few hundred years and he's certainly seen as the most important moral philosopher in that the crucial idea is this idea of personhood and respect the person of others you don't dis other people and yet simultaneous with that Kant also has his writings in anthropology and physical geography in which he basically outlines a kind of four tiered level of human beings it's basically a racial restrictive view of personhood that a prerequisite for being a personhood is basically being white it's only the European terror the sort of top tier who have what it takes to become full persons and Asians one rung below Europeans black swuan wrong below that Native Americans these are the terrorists even if they are human they're not full persons the Enlightenment is a two-edged sword it provided the basis for an argument for the social and political equality of all men but at the same time it provided the opportunity to look at human beings not as you know children of God but as varieties of animal so if you decide that certain human beings are not human they belong to the same species then of course they don't have any right to sign contracts and they can't be part of the social contract that forms your political system and that's exactly what happens in these early democracies is that blacks don't have any voting rights many of the floss was right in this period they played a crucial rationalizing role in justifying European imperialism in justifying the domination of weights over people of color so why is it then that these things are not more widely known where the current establishment not-taken opposition the marginalization of this is like this sort of in a goes in tandem with the sanitized view of mainstream philosophers so that you know you you represent larkey represent kunti represent Hegel we represent these people in ways that you know does not address sort of racist dimensions of their thought and that sort of in a contributes to a picture of the modern period from which race has been whitewashed out in the name of their Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella king and queen of Castile they are and Aragon I now take possession of this land and named it San Salvador in spite the atrocities perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese after the discovery of the new world but colonizers eventually developed a society that allowed Europeans to mix with Indians on a scale that was unthinkable in French and English North America but in the south it was expedient for the settlers they had to multiply or die out because there just weren't enough of them to go round the Spanish had a very different understanding of the Indians than the British did I mean I think from the earliest moments of settlement Spaniards tended to regard Indians as people that they could fold into their social system not because they were nicer people this Manesh necessarily but because for a variety of reasons there were fewer white people in Spanish America because Spain never colonized America with anything like the number of colonists that England and eventually Britain brought over I mean the number of Spain it's peninsulares as they were known people from the Iberian Peninsula actually came to Latin America was much much smaller one sees emerging in the period of the Enlightenment in the latter part of the 18th century as abolitionism is beginning to take root in that part of the world as well a much more vigorous form of mixed-race interaction that you find in other parts of the world it's a different tradition coming out of southern European colonization Portuguese on one hand Spanish on the other and out of this a greater willingness to engage in forms of mixed interaction mixed intercourse and identified and acknowledged mixed-race populations emerging and out of this you get in the last thirty years already 1760 to 1790 in Mexico Mexico City in particular but you also get versions versions of the simpuru and elsewhere of what comes to be called custer painting mixed-race painting cost painting you might even call it which characterizes in explicit classic Ettore terms and after all classification is an emergent form of rationality of enlightenment thinking the custer painting lays out the forms of of offspring that emerge from certain kinds of mixture mixture between what they call Spaniard and an Indian on the one hand Spain in other words European or white with other racial forms in African and then mixtures as well with the mixtures of the mixtures so to speak so you get various gradations and you might even call it degradation of racial mixing that go from mestizo and so on the color lines were not originally drawn between just two races but you had a at least at least one intermediate race and mulatos or brown people the presence of the Milano in those colonies importance of Milano's in Brazil as an intermediate group the importance of mosquitoes and Spanish colonies with large Indian population it's something that I think does distinguish in the United States with its basically two category system you're either wiring your black South America is very complex and fascinating it's different but it wasn't necessarily better it's easy to be fooled by the system because you go there you see blacks and whites among the poor mixing together where they don't in the United States because what the US did with is one drop rule was to encourage a sense of solidarity among whites as a way of dividing them from blacks and one reason you never had working-class solidarity in America is because the one-drop rule and a binary system of race is a powerful tool for dividing the working classes what between whites and blacks and the lower down the system you go the more economically vulnerable or marginal the white person is the more is inclined to be racist because it's the only way in which he has some status at least I'm not black and so the white poor and the black pork are totally against each other so it became a perfect system of division Latin American societies are far more racist at the top than the United States I mean the Brazilian military brass is completely white the Brazilian political elite is until recently completely white whereas in United States the higher up you go now because of civil rights laws and so on the more integrated a population and the American political elite is it's already integrated I mean the Secretary of State is black you know the the Congressional Black Caucus is very powerful part of the reason for this is that the way black Americans took over the war drop rule and turn it to their own ends for mobilization and solidarity whereas in in Brazil the Guatemala racial democracy all I mean by that is that white men are gonna bed a black woman and not feeling guilty about it and producing a mix the kids who make great beauty queens but the system remain viciously unequal Brazil is the most unequal Society in in the Western world and uh and blacks are completely at the bottom so it's a pernicious system its apartheid without robust ID laws and at the top its are a racist if contemporary democracies can be called racist then it should come as no surprise that over two hundred years ago a very early democratic experiment in Sierra Leone went badly wrong Freetown became the home of the black loyalists ex leis who freed themselves by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence but their freedom turned out to be very limited because of the dictates of their former British masters to some extent what's interesting about Sierra Leone is how accidental the whole story is these people in a sense have become refugees and have become British because they'd actually cross the lines during the American Revolution to fight for the British so in 1775 the British governor of Virginia said that if black people who were slaves were cross lines would leave their plantations leave the Americans feel I can fight for him to the British they'd win their freedom but the British weren't committed in any deep way during the American Revolution to racial equality or even to emancipation it was a strategic military move where this colony was established in 1787 it was meant to be a free colony but for a variety of reasons it didn't work that way the problems with the colony inhabitants really came to the forefront with the arrival of the Nova Scotian settlers this year blacks who had helped the British during the American War of Independence and they had been promised some land in Nova Scotia they were called the black loyalists so many of the promises that a British made to them we're never fulfilled a tragedy of Sierra Leone in the 1790s is the difficulty the almost impossibility I guess for whites of letting black people run the colony I mean it was constantly run by or overseen by white people and black people I think didn't think that's how it was gonna work out they imagined they'd have much much more power of authority they wouldn't just be electing constables they'd be running the colony and it didn't happen these numerous questions Edna's that team here had all the resources that will enable them to govern themselves as an independent people they had black pastors they had black politicians who are mobilized them in Canada to move over to rallies so they really have a human resource to be able to govern themselves as a free and independent people do you have a view that emerges at the same time and fuels abolitionism the claim that does or who are not European or the European descent are historically immature by contrast with those who are European or European settlers European see themselves as having the obligation the burden to civilize something could still with us today one sees it in relation to the invasion of Iraq for example you know we will come in and teach you how to govern yourselves because you haven't been able to govern yourselves here the - it was really a great apology that was lost because had these people given the opportunity to govern themselves it is possible that perhaps surely who never been colonized in the real sense of the world and Sharon could probably have been the first black African country to be freed of colonial rule I believe there are a few events in my life which have not happened to many Olaudah Equiano whose first slave name was Gustavus Vassa teases freedom in London and becomes a key figure in the abolitionist movement his autobiography really becomes the the transforming political document to the abolitionist movement allowed that aquino is just one of the great campaigners consigned to the margins of history while William Wilberforce is represented as the all-conquering hero who abolished slavery however no matter which great abolitionist you choose you will find even greater forces behind them from the radical Christianity of the Quakers to the workers forming what would become of the trade union movement the other thing about equiano's was he's the one who connected the artisans of the London corresponding Society in 1792 he connected them with the steel workers the coal miners and the factory workers of Sheffield and it was this conjunction of the industrial proletariat and the artisans of London which historians have often seen as the beginning of the English working class as a whole but it was all out of equiano's who had brought them together the period where you see the most solidarity between enslaved Africans and the white working-class in Britain anyway I think we're the the early years of the abolition movement starting in the late 1780s hundreds of thousands of Britons signed petitions to Parliament against the slave trade and amazingly a lot of these petitions came from workers there were 769 metal workers in Sheffield who signed a remarkable petition to Parliament that said in effect you might expect us to be in favor of the slave trade because we sell a lot of the wares we make to the captains of slave ships who use them as trading goods to buy slaves in Africa but we want to express our solidarity with our African brethren and we are told that they do not wish to be slaves it's a very slo-mo kind of shifting of a kind of tectonic plates underneath Western life late 18th century and the shift is you know Enlightenment writing and kind of changes in theological views but the the small tectonic changes produce tremendous changes above and one of the things that they do is to open to question the very existence of the slave trade and slavery the decisive event that affected all of culture at the timing has to be the first successful slave revolution in human history and the successful break from European imperial powers and that's the Haitian War of Independence that breaks out in August 1791 it's one Island originally colonized by the Spanish who effectively abandoned the western portion of the island which the French squat on and eventually create their own colony on which they call sender mang the other thing I think just to remember is that this was the most successful colony in the Americas I mean we think of it today is it's a report nation in the Americas it's always talked about in those terms at that time it really was the richest sight wasn't a nation of its own with the richest colony in the Americas the productivity was enormous so for every innocence Empire in in the Americas in the sense had their eye on it would have loved to be able to take control of that of that sector of the economy the beginning the revolution happened really in the northern plain of santa man which really was this extremely industrialized zone in which there were these enormous sugar plantations that's where really where the revolution began and i think that's important to remember as well that these plantations which were some of the most industrial sites in the world at the time in terms of the combination of both of agriculture and production generated this revolution that it came out of these plantations the first stage of the of the revolution in 1791 was essentially about the slaves establishing control over these plantation domains they transformed these wealthy plantations into their camps one of the most interesting things that africanist ourian's have suggested about the revolution is that one of the reasons that may have succeeded is that there were huge numbers of men who had served in armies in africa who had been soldiers in africa who had been enslaved as a result of after participating in wars in Africa and they brought their military experience to send a manga 1793 Britain and France went to war and Britain saw a chance to do two things in one go to seize this a very wealthy territory for itself away from its enemy France and to suppress the slave revolt before it could spread to Jamaica which was very close by huge British force headed for San Domingo and for five years they fought the rebel slaves there who came under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture the great Haitian leader and they lost the attempted repression of that revolt involved hundreds of thousands of English boys and young men who were shipped off to Haiti and there they will meet at the other end of a bayonet or the other end of of machette the historic indignation of slaves fighting for freedom and it's a huge trauma to the English people this was a case where an army of rebel slaves had defeated the army of the world's superpower which was also the world's greatest slave trading nation and it was a great shock [Music] [Applause] [Music] same can be said of the French right who have also mu later lost against essentially the same troops when they tried to re-establish slavery the British defeat wasn't a senescence priests aged the defeat of Napoleon's troops that would follow a few years later this revolution seemed kind of unthinkable for certain forever a lot of thinkers and way the idea that this was happening in some ways the idea that slaves would become generals and leaders of a revolution would defeat these armies it was just really hard to kind of fit into what they believed and what they saw now a lot of people of course they'd think about it and brought it into their reality but I think it's challenged at the time and continues to challenge so many of our notions about where history is made how history is made who are the central actors in history this is really one of the foundational moments in the history of not just the Americas politically but in democratic theorizing of philosophy of thinking about what rights are so not only do you have a challenge to racist ideas that kind of consign people to the margins of history rather than placing them at the center but you also have to rethink I think a lot of broader narratives about Western history what's interesting about the Haitian Revolution is that it's the only revolution with the only Constitution that outlaws slavery and outlaws discrimination on the basis of race now that is historic that's not in the Bill of Rights in the u.s. it's not part of the unwritten Constitution of the British Empire but it's part of that history of opposing racism which actually comes from the enslaved themselves are not from the so-called humanitarian efforts of the abolitionist movement which couldn't have been successful unless the slaves themselves were making slavery unstable because they paid for it was a terrible one because there was this international boycott of Haiti and in the end they had to pay reparations it's not that reparations were paid to the slaves they had to pay reparations to the French for in a property expropriated and so forth I mean one reason that Haiti is today Horace Condren Western Hemisphere comes out of this that you know they they do this tremendous historical feat so here's the only successful slave revolution history and basic okay we are going to make sure that the contagion of your example does not spread the United States does not spread to Latin America we're going to isolate you are going to quarantine you we're going to make you pay slavery itself isn't abolished in the British islands until 1833 and indeed they're still Africans carried across the Atlantic to Cuba and Brazil illicitly another more than a million and slavery doesn't end in America till the Civil War extending Cuba and Brazil till 1888 the sad truth of many situations like this where there's a huge change on paper a huge change on paper doesn't change people's material conditions of life because what happened was British slaves finally became officially free August 1st 1838 but for almost all of them there was no work available except continuing to cut sugarcane and now they suddenly found themselves having to pay rent to the planters for the miserable huts that they lived in and taxes to the government and there were also all kinds of other strategies used essentially to prevent former slaves from gaining access to land to prevent them from gaining access to the cities to prevent them from gaining access to the professions and so forth so there were all kinds of other strategies all of them really largely tied together by a broader racial order that also kind of sustained a certain kind of subordination without slavery many of the abolitionists could see that it was unjust and it was cruel to perpetuate a system where people were enslaved and degraded but that did not necessarily mean that they saw those people who were degraded and enslaved as civilized like them so there is a disconnect and it's a disconnect that has to be marked and given some significance because historically we often think that abolitionism was like an anti-racist movement it wasn't an anti-racist movement you know Britain moved out of slavery straight into a wider and deeper colonial empire [Applause] I think is important that the British try and temper their sense of themselves and the sense of their past with an awareness that their history is not all drums and trumpets read it's not all the kind of glories he comes with a kind of a rather dark stained with a rather dark side to it was brildor Tania about written in the 1740s when Britain did rule ways but in the 1740s the British are carrying 40,000 Africans a year across the Atlantic never will be slaves Britain never will be slaves of course the end of slavery opened up all kinds of possibilities for contestation that simply were not there before so I think it's that the change was crucial and ex-slaves mobilized political institutions legal institutions religious institutions and we're able to do so and kind of push forward but it is striking I think that that in a sense the struggle to really bring about a complete you know end or complete erasure of all the effects and legacies of slavery is still continuing in a lot of ways I think we want to send the message as I do most I know most British people that we are a nation of fairness and tolerance and that is how I think most of you