Human Resources
Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things
Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba
Having read it
★★★★☆
Acknowledgement: the beginning of a process that can help us more clearly and confidently become aware of, understand and develop from the many threads of interconnectedness that have driven and (continue to) drive our world.
A fine example of the reasons for a better collective understanding and which doesn’t reduce many a historical – particularly slavery-associated – acknowledgment to a plaque, statue or even corporate promise, are these few words, albeit in the chapter on gynaecology, but very relevant to society as a whole:
Unconscious biases are real, and they affect the outcomes of modern-day patients. To fix the systems, we must understand how they were created.
It is a great book and despite its chapters sort of feeling like completely separate blog posts to this (old) reader, but I guess more suited to a pick-up at any chapter kind of book, it is well researched and delivered and would make a fine addition to the scholarly material of (secondary) schools in our contemporary times.
A good passage
In this story, culpability does not rest with any one party, and it is difficult to confront the fact that those from poor, rural communities were implicated within a wider, global system of ruthless slavery.36 Yet doing so helps us to deepen our understanding of how we are all connected by capitalism. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between village weavers and enslaved people, which we must not ignore, but, as this story shows, disadvantaged people everywhere, in just trying to make ends meet, can become entangled in unjust systems that create poverty, suffering and violence.37
A second good passage
Britain’s need for sugar fostered the growth of the transatlantic slave trade, but it was the ill fortunes of the sugar industry that was ultimately one of the reasons it fell apart. While in Britain’s telling, abolition was a triumph of humane reasoning, it was the economic strains that plantation systems were under and the move towards a laissez-faire economic policy that led to changes in attitude among the government and the wealthy. The story of sugar provides one of the most important answers to why the crime of slavery was committed for so long, and why it eventually stopped: money.
A third good passage
Today, Sir Robert Peel is still commemorated as the humble son of a textile manufacturer who became a politician who went on to achieve greatness. We have a habit of humbling the stories of the most extravagant, well-connected people, ignoring their privileges and perhaps over-emphasising their struggles, and it’s that very refusal to look directly at the reality of the past that allows Britain to avoid dealing with its systemic social inequalities today. This attitude was prevalent in Peel’s own lifetime, and Peel distanced himself from the landed gentry and ‘old money’ in his self-portrayal as a self-made capitalist, a ‘man of the people’ – a tactic that politicians often use. During the 2024 Conservative Party leadership contest, frontrunner Kemi Badenoch claimed that although she had grown up middle class she had ‘become’ working class when she worked at McDonalds.19 Obviously, we know that this is not how class works, but the importance of finding ways to connect with working-class people is a necessity, whether the connection is real or fabricated.