Whenever I get way too angry about how the colonizers messed up the Subcontinent forever, I console myself that it could have been worse. Like how the Congolese were butchered and maimed by blood-thirsty Belgians under their king. Or how the Dutch massacred people in ... oh, the list is long, dear reader. In the process of consoling myself, I then end up getting angrier about all of us from, and in, the "shitholes" who were terrorized by the melanin-impaired from the cold climes.
Anyway ... a couple of months ago, forced by the coronavirus to watch movies at home, we ended up wasting our time on a C-grade movie that was set in England. One of the bizarre sub-plots involved the backstory of how the father earned his fabulous riches from the sugar plantations that he owned in the Caribbean. This sub-plot that was left dangling hinted that the father was not any good-hearted colonizer.
The British did make quite some gold out of those plantations, which is why Trevor Noah wittily joked about the Common"wealth" games and how Jamaica might possibly get the gold back one medal at a time.
How important was Jamaica and the Caribbean to those godawful British?
Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important—tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica—were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses, the transformation of major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in national wealth.Fortunes were made far away from the cold and dark and damp British Isles. How were the fortunes created?
We all know the answer. It is one word.
Slavery.
All this abundance, luxury, and social progress at home derived from the brutal exploitation of huge numbers of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic (thousands of whom were brought over to the British Isles as well): by the eighteenth century, Britons were the world’s preeminent slave traders.Nearly two years ago, when I was in Chennai for a longer-than-usual stay in Chennai, I went to the local literary festival. One of the talks that I attended was by Venki Ramakrishnan--the Nobel laureate. In selling the importance of science, he stretched his argument by talking up science, technology, and the industrial revolution, as having transformed Britain. He never said anything about the role of slavery and colonization, which provided Britain with plenty of resources and fortunes. All the looting! During the discussions, there was question about this, but he flailed. He should have instead stuck to talking about the RNA!
If only we would educate kids about the history of these slave traders!
Even the sociopathic enslavers in America were empathetic humans compared to the British enslavers in the Caribbean who inflicted a "sickening degree of extreme violence" on their human chattels. As difficult as it was to read the following sentences, I forced myself to read them in order to truly understand what it meant to be enslaved by these atrocious creatures from Britian:
In Barbados in 1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved to anger about the bloody flogging of some other slaves: for his “insolent words” he was burned at the stake. At other times, black people were judicially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quartered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,” or publicly starved to death while suspended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).This was the white man's burden to civilize the non-white world that Kipling championed!
Beyond such horrific formal penalties lay the lawless universe of everyday enslavement, in which whites tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated black people with complete impunity. Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals. Like almost all West Indian whites, he also took for granted that they needed to be frequently and harshly punished. He flogged them incessantly and savagely, rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice, and urine into the scarified flesh to increase their suffering. At his whim, any man or woman might be scourged, branded, chained, dismembered, or exposed naked in the stocks day and night, covered in treacle and swarmed by biting flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he would then force another slave to defecate into the injured victim’s mouth, and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.
To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men"
And what comes with enslaving people? Hint: One of the rallying chants at the protest movements is directed against ... the heavily armed police. (Read Jill Lepore's essay on that, and you too will want to defund the police!)
It was the case in Jamaica:
To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed writings of the planters’ leading apologist, Edward Long, who’d lived through the rebellion, helped develop new, “scientific” theories of black inferiority and racial dangerSeems very contemporary, right?
Ready for the icing on this bloody cake?
[The] independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.”6 In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. Black lives, white rights."For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."
