- há 21 horas
David Olusoga shines a light on Britain's dark past - how it was built on the profits of slavery. The acclaimed series that inspired frank conversations on our colonial history.
Categoria
📚
AprendizadoTranscrição
00:10These Georgian terraces in the heart of London conceal a forgotten chapter in Britain's history.
00:20A new study of a government archive from the 1830s reveals that many of these houses were once the homes
00:27of Britain's slave owners.
00:34This is number eight. This was the home of Tully Higgins.
00:38He has 328 enslaved people on plantations in Demerara, which is in the British colony of Guyana.
00:46At number 12, we have Nathaniel Snell Chauncey.
00:49Now, he owned slaves in Guyana, in Grenada, in Antigua, and on the islands of St. Vincent and Tobago.
00:56In all, he owned 3,000 slaves. And further up the street, there's another cluster of slave owners.
01:03John Edward, Samuel Eiffel, Sarah Gaskin, John Briggs.
01:09These records transform our image of the slave owner.
01:14They reveal that thousands of them lived all over Britain.
01:18And they show how the profits from slave ownership ran deep into British society.
01:25There are the powerful dynasties that amassed vast fortunes by exploiting enslaved labour in distant lands.
01:36But there are also lawyers, doctors and vicars who never looked a slave in the eye or experienced the brutal
01:43realities of plantation life.
01:49So that's put onto your leg, and you can't run away. You'll cut your other leg, never mind the weights.
01:57For two centuries, slave labour was an engine of the British economy.
02:01And before the system was finally abolished, Britain's slave owners demanded even more.
02:07When slavery was brought to an end in the 1830s, a huge sum of money was raised by the British
02:13government.
02:14That money, the modern equivalent of 17 billion pounds, was paid out in compensation.
02:21Not to the slaves, but to the slave owners.
02:24The men who had invented the slave system and grown rich from it, walked away with what was then the
02:30largest payout in British history.
02:35The slave owners' compensation money seeped into every corner of the nation and the empire.
02:41They invested it in industry, education, the arts and commerce.
02:48Their money helped lay the foundation of our modern world.
02:53These are Britain's forgotten slave owners.
03:14The national archives in Kew record 1,000 years of British history, from Magna Carta to D-Day, the events
03:22from which we weave our national story.
03:29Among the 200 kilometres of shelving are the records of another celebrated episode, Britain's abolition of slavery in 1834.
03:38But new research has revealed a darker side to that defining event.
03:45These are the files of the Slave Compensation Commission.
03:50They record all the claims for compensation from across the British Empire following abolition.
03:56Here.
04:17George Cummins.
04:28These files tell us the name of every British slave owner.
04:33They tell us who they were, where they lived, and how many slaves they owned.
04:38And most chillingly, they give us the amount they were paid for those slaves, in pounds, shillings, and pence.
04:47There's a compensation claim from the Reverend James Hamilton for 216 slaves, 40,083 pounds, one shilling, and seven pence.
05:01Compensating the slave owners for the loss of their human property was the only way the government could bring slavery
05:07to an end.
05:09They settled upon the incredible sum of 20 million pounds, the equivalent of 17 billion pounds today.
05:17A national commission was established to distribute the money.
05:2246,000 slave owners came forward.
05:26This was the only time in 200 years that the full extent of slave ownership was exposed.
05:34And the records reveal just how deeply slavery had infiltrated British society.
05:40What's immediately apparent, if you look at these ledgers, is the sheer range of the people who are listed here.
05:48So, at one end, here is a record for George Hibbert and his brother, William Hibbert, of Portland Place in
05:57London,
05:57for the 360 enslaved peoples on one of their plantations in the parish of St. James in the county of
06:06Cornwall on the island of Jamaica.
06:09And for those 360 people, they are paid the sum of £6,244, four shillings, and five pence.
06:18And that's not their only plantation.
06:20In total, they were paid more than £80 million in today's money.
06:26The Hibberts are a prime example of the super-rich dynasties found in these records.
06:32But the records also introduce us to some more unexpected kinds of slave owner.
06:40There's an entry here for Agnes and Martha Montgomery of Perthshire.
06:45And between them, they own one slave.
06:48And for that one individual, they received £63, 19 shillings, and three pence.
06:56The slave owners weren't just aristocrats, but there's also people from the middle class
07:02and even what we might call the lower middle class.
07:04And there are slave owners listed here from all over the country, the length and breadth of Britain.
07:12The first people to piece together this revealing new picture of British slave ownership
07:17are a team of historians at University College London.
07:22From the compensation records, looking for trends as well,
07:26and that's what you'll be able to do with this kind of data.
07:28Under the direction of Professor Catherine Hall,
07:31the team has undertaken the painstaking task of analysing each of the compensation claims.
07:38People would have imagined, we would have imagined, before this work had been done,
07:42that, you know, there were great and rich people who owned slaves, enslaved people in the Caribbean.
07:50But actually, you know, there were widows in York,
07:53there were clergymen in Bristol, there were iron manufacturers in the Midlands.
08:01You needed to look at all the records.
08:03We needed to look at the 40,000-plus claims to know the scale of it.
08:11This research is transforming our understanding of the role slavery played in Britain's past.
08:18It also reveals how the legacy of slavery reaches into the present.
08:24The team have gathered the compensation commission files into an online database.
08:30That means that any of us can discover if there are links between our own families and the profits of
08:36slavery.
08:38I'm half Nigerian, so there's no point looking for my father's family in a register of British slave owners.
08:43So I'll put in my mother's family name, which is Kilburn, and see what comes up.
08:51There is a family of Kilburns. They're in Jamaica, in the parish of St. Elizabeth.
08:57And they're not major slave owners. Between them, they own, what, 21 slaves between the four members of the family.
09:04So they're bit players, they're not major slave owners.
09:07But in compensation, they still get a significant amount of money.
09:11Isabella Kilburn receives £302. That's around a quarter of a million pounds today.
09:17I don't know anyone in my family's history who had any money, so it's kind of unlikely that we are
09:23related to these wealthier Kilburns.
09:26But I could be related to these slave owners.
09:30And that's what's disturbing about the database, is it breaks down this idea that the slave owners were them and
09:37not us.
09:41So how did so many ordinary British people become involved in the enslavement of millions of Africans?
10:04It began in 1627, when a group of around 50 British settlers landed on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
10:19They planned to transform this uninhabited wilderness into farmland, and they brought along their own workforce.
10:31Many of the settlers who arrived on these beaches were what was called indentured servants.
10:37These were poor people who had, in effect, sold themselves and their labour, usually for a term of five years.
10:43What they got in return from their new masters was transport from Britain and basic provisions while they worked,
10:49which usually meant just food and shelter.
10:51What they were promised at the end of their term was ten acres of land here in Barbados.
10:56Now, this system wasn't slavery, but the indentured servants were often very badly treated, and they certainly weren't free.
11:05These servants and labourers were contracted to a handful of masters, pioneers such as James Drex,
11:12and later Christopher Codrington and Henry Lassels.
11:16They were ambitious men, hungry for wealth and power.
11:19In the first decades, the colony grew by farming tobacco, cotton and indigo.
11:26Now, the more far-sighted among them began to invest their still modest fortunes in the skills and the technology
11:34needed to begin an experiment.
11:36They planned to cultivate a new crop, a form of giant grass originally from New Guinea and brought to the
11:42Americas by the Portuguese.
11:49This agricultural experiment, led by James Drex, would be the catalyst for the use of slave labour on an industrial
11:57scale.
11:58African slaves weren't unknown in Barbados.
12:01In fact, when the very first British settlers had been on their way to the island, they'd captured a Portuguese
12:06ship and seized ten Africans on board.
12:08Those ten became the first black African slaves in the British Caribbean.
12:13What made sure that they were the first of many was sugar, and the back-breaking, labour-intensive task of
12:20producing it.
12:29The sugar planters tapped into the Atlantic slave trade that had been established by Dutch and Portuguese merchants.
12:38British merchants were soon perfecting the system, transporting slaves from Africa and returning slave-produced commodities back to Europe.
12:51Each year, ships were arriving, bringing in thousands of Africans.
12:55And although an African cost twice as much as an indentured labourer, the economics of slavery made perfect sense.
13:03An indentured labourer had to be freed after five years.
13:06A slave belonged to his master for the rest of his life.
13:08And what's more, any children the slaves produced automatically belonged to the master.
13:18Dating from the 1650s, St. Nicholas Abbey is one of the pioneering sites of the slave plantation system.
13:33For an enslaved African, this would have been a terrifying destination.
13:41Hundreds of slaves toiled across these fields in organised work gangs.
13:49This unrelenting regime emerged, in part, as a response to the nature of the crop itself.
13:56The moment you cut through a sugar cane, you started a stopwatch.
14:01The juice inside the cane will very quickly spoil.
14:05So the moment it's cut, it has to be rushed in carts to the next part of the process.
14:11To maximise the cane yield, the slaves were forced to labour through the night.
14:16This was the first industry to adopt the 24-hour shift system.
14:21The process so far, working around the clock in shifts 24 hours a day, was very modern.
14:27But what happened next was industrial.
14:29This is the factory.
14:31This is where the raw sugar cane was processed.
14:34And the power for the factory came from the windmill.
14:37Hundreds of windmills like this were built across the Caribbean.
14:40And they harnessed the winds that blow over these islands.
15:04The mill would extract every last ounce of sugar juice.
15:08Here too, the crop imposed a time pressure.
15:15If the juice wasn't quickly processed into granules, it would ferment and spoil.
15:26This system of industrial farming was so advanced that it endured into the 20th century, as this film shows.
15:37But during the slave era, it was a more brutal process.
15:42Africans arriving here had a life expectancy of seven years.
15:47All of it, from the planting of the sugar out in the fields to the processing that takes place here
15:52in the factory,
15:53could only be done because of the labour of hundreds of men, women and children.
16:00The British soon transplanted the slave plantation model to other Caribbean islands.
16:24Among the records at Kew, we can see how many lives were bound up in the slave system.
16:34Because slaves were deemed to be property, they appear in inventories and registers that detail their names and ages,
16:42where they were from, what work they did, and whether they were fit to perform it.
16:48Simon, who's just six, Adam, 29, a Cooper, who's sickly and born in Africa.
16:55Adam, who's 41 and listed as an invalid, again born in Africa.
17:00And on every other page, you come across the children.
17:05David, seven, Frederick, six years old.
17:09Nelson, Romeo, both six.
17:12May, five.
17:14Elizabeth is two years and a few months.
17:18Frank, who's two months and weekly.
17:22And on and on and on.
17:25Page after page.
17:27Thousands, hundreds of thousands of names.
17:29These are the people who paid the price for this great experiment of slavery.
17:36At the time of abolition, in 1834, this roll call of slaves within the British Empire listed 800,000 names.
17:46This massive labour force was controlled by just over 40,000 owners and their estate managers.
18:07The Barbados National Archive keeps records of how Britain's first slave owners built a new kind of society.
18:23Barbados became the world's first slave society.
18:28This is a unique historical development.
18:31A slave society is quite different from a society with slaves.
18:35All the societies in the hemisphere had enslaved peoples.
18:39But Barbados was the first to be built and sustained completely upon the enslavement of Africans with no alternative system
18:49of economic development.
18:51The slave system was ruthlessly enforced, right from the start.
18:56One document found here dates from 1661.
19:00It's known as the Barbados Slave Code.
19:04Authored by the island's most powerful slave owners, it gives a rare insight into their way of thinking.
19:12Part of that process of transforming people from human beings and into things is to justify it.
19:17And on the very first page of the Barbados Slave Code, it describes Africans as people who are heathenish and
19:23brutish and certain and dangerous kinds of people.
19:26This is early racism, racism that's born out of not just hatred but self-interest.
19:31The question is, does that language originate in the context of Barbados?
19:36Or is it imported from England into the Barbadian space?
19:40The historical evidence suggests both of these things are taking place.
19:43The English arrive in the Caribbean already with a fully formed racist and racial view about other people, especially African
19:52peoples.
19:53But the market conditions have enabled an existing racial mentality and racist mentality to take root in economic and financial
20:02management.
20:03And so you build an economy that is reflecting your state of mind.
20:09The code goes beyond racist ideas.
20:12It details the slave owners' reprisals for acts of resistance.
20:18Looking at the slave code, the issue of violence comes up very quickly.
20:22It says here that if any Negro shall offer any violence to any Christian, any white, by striking or such
20:30like, that Negro shall, on his first offence, be whipped.
20:36On his second offence, be severely whipped and have his nose slit and be burnt with a hot iron on
20:43some part of his face.
20:45The Africans are in revolt. They are in resistance.
20:49The English have made an enormous investment, capital investment in their plantations, in their enslaved labor, and they want to
20:56make a profit.
20:57So this system requires extremely violent suppression.
21:04So this blueprint for how to run this sort of militarized, highly capitalistic, entrepreneurial, brutal, terror-based society, this spreads
21:15out from here, doesn't it?
21:16Barbados is the incubator. Barbados is the experiment that it could be done.
21:26So this island is unique, not only for its beauty and all the contemporary positive features, but this is where
21:35the greatest, the greatest experiment in human terror in the modern era was first put in place in Barbados.
21:48The British spread the slave code across the Caribbean colonies.
21:59Jamaica's National Institute holds a rare collection that reveals how the slave owners enforced the code.
22:17We have here a slave leg shackle and somebody was caught trying to run away from slavery. This would have
22:25been placed on them.
22:28So that's put onto your leg.
22:30No.
22:31And you can't run away. You'll cut your other leg.
22:34Cut the other leg. Never mind the weight.
22:35Right.
22:35You can't run away from it.
22:39Here we have Brandon Anne.
22:43So you can imagine.
22:44And this was used not only to mark ownership of the slaves, but also as a punishment piece.
22:52I've read about it.
22:53I suppose being returned from having escaped and being Brandon on the face and on the chest.
22:58On the face, yeah.
22:58Uh-huh.
23:00We have here our tongue restraints, and this piece would be placed around the mouth to hold down the tongue,
23:10and it latches at the back.
23:14As you can see, there are three holes, so chances could have been used for a child.
23:20Oh, God.
23:24Absolutely horrific.
23:26Yeah.
23:42Those implements, those implements of torture, are just disgusting to me in a way that few things are.
23:48I don't really know why. I don't know why I'm so irrational about it.
23:52You're supposed to be detached as a historian, and I kind of can't be with those things.
23:57And every now and then you'll hear someone say that if slavery was as bad as people say it was,
24:01then the slaves would have risen up,
24:03and they would have used their numerical advantages to overthrow the whites.
24:08When you look at those things, you realize it was a system based on terror.
24:12It was a system that was medieval in its brutality, and people just had their life and their capacity to
24:21resist just beaten and tortured out of it.
24:24And those are the things in that room that were used to do that.
24:29And I'm glad that they're quite rare. I'm glad that most of them, I shouldn't feel this way as an
24:33historian, I'm glad most of them were melted away.
24:36But the few that remain just cut into me in a way which I can't really explain.
24:57The suffering, initiated by Britain's slave system, endured for two centuries.
25:07And the slave compensation commission records reveal one of the reasons why.
25:12Any moral objection was soon outweighed by the sheer amount of wealth the system generated.
25:22This is a claim for £4,293, 12 shillings and sixpence.
25:28And it's made by the rather grandly named John Samuel Warnley Sawbridge, Earl Drax.
25:34Now he's a descendant by marriage of James Drax, who'd been among the very earliest settlers,
25:39the very first of the planters to successfully cultivate sugar,
25:43and the first to use mass slave labour on his plantations.
25:46So the Drax family, they're at the very beginning of British sugar slavery, two centuries later,
25:53and the Drax name appears in the registers for compensation.
25:58293 pounds.
25:59Here is Robert Cooper Ashby, who's a descendant of George Ashby.
26:03Britain's pioneering slave owners had helped colonise the Caribbean islands.
26:08They'd also invented an irresistible system of wealth creation.
26:13At around £5,000. That's £4 million in today's life.
26:17Jane Codrington.
26:19Mary Ann Codrington.
26:21As demand for sugar increased, the slave plantation model would enrich their descendants for generations to come.
26:28George Codrington. William Collins Codrington.
26:30This is a register of slaves for the Bell Plantation, which is the property of the Earl of Harwood.
26:37The Earl of Harwood is Edward Lassels, who's the grandson of Henry Lassels, who'd arrived in Barbados in the 18th
26:43century.
26:43Earl of Harwood, £3,835, six shillings and five...
26:48Two generations on, and the Lassels family are still very significant slaveholders.
26:53There are almost 300 slaves listed here for the Bell Plantation, and the family owned a further five plantations.
27:10By the middle 18th century, pioneering slave owners like the Draxes, the Codringtons and the Lassels had made their fortunes.
27:19Many would now return home in triumph.
27:25Their profits from slavery were already seeping into the fabric of the nation.
27:30Now they began an even greater transformation of Britain.
27:35This landscape, this very artificial landscape, with the pastures and the lake and the very neat, ornate gardens,
27:44was carefully designed to create one impression, the impression of permanence.
27:55But it's an impression that's false.
27:58This place is really a monument to social change.
28:02Change brought about by money flooding in from the Caribbean.
28:12Harwood House is the family seat of David Lassels.
28:16The 8th Earl of Harwood, first cousin once removed to the Queen, 53rd in line to the throne.
28:23All the earls of Harwood and many of the countesses of Harwood up on the walls.
28:28Over the years.
28:29Mixed bunch.
28:31Here we have the most magnificent room in the house.
28:34The gallery.
28:36Wow, nice.
28:38Interior by Robert Adam.
28:41Beautiful ceiling.
28:43Furniture by Thomas Chippendale.
28:45One of the English greatest craftsmen.
28:46The mirrors and side tables and so on.
28:48But the money was made.
28:50Henry, the founder of the Lassels dynasty, acquired plantations and slaves by lending money to sugar planters and taking possession
28:58of their property if they defaulted.
29:00Whatever else he may or may not have been, however abhorrent we found the trade he was in now, he
29:05was clearly a very, very smart businessman, very clever entrepreneur.
29:09They always say in the Caribbean that it was a place where you could make a lot of money but
29:12it was also a place where you could lose a fortune because there were men like Henry Lassels who were
29:18there ready to seize on people who couldn't keep up with their rents, couldn't keep up with their mortgages.
29:22A lot of people made great fortunes at that time, didn't they, across the country, and that's what he went
29:27there.
29:28Henry was in search of social status as well as riches.
29:32Not only for himself, but for the generations that followed, starting with Edwin, his firstborn son.
29:40There's Edwin over the mantelpiece, in a red velvet outfit, studied classics at Cambridge, went on the grand tour, traveled
29:48around Europe, looking at the great antiquities of Rome and Greece and so on.
29:52There's a portrait of him by Joshua Reynolds, the greatest portrait painter of that era.
29:58The man you go to to say that you've arrived.
30:00Exactly. Edwin could afford the best, so he got the best.
30:05In 1835, the Lassels' ascent to the aristocracy received the royal seal of approval.
30:12This is the state bed, made exclusively for visiting heads of state.
30:18Queen Victoria stayed here when she was still Princess Victoria.
30:20And she slept in this bed?
30:21She would have slept in this bed.
30:23But there are three level layers of mattresses.
30:25You've got a horsehair mattress, and then you've got a wool mattress, and then you've got a down feather mattress
30:31to give sort of maximum firmness and comfort.
30:34So it literally fits for a queen.
30:35Exactly.
30:36And you're currently the 8th Earl of Harvard.
30:38I'm currently the 8th Earl of Harvard, that's my job title, yes.
30:42And there are many families, not always on the scale of the Lassels, who are making this journey, this multi
30:47-generational journey, from being plantation owners on the ground, who are looking slaves in the eye, to being seamlessly part
30:55of the British elite and aristocracy.
30:57Yes, I think their story was typical.
31:01It might have been quite fast, unusually fast, because Henry made a lot of money in a relatively short period
31:07of time over about 20 years.
31:09But it's not unique by any means.
31:10It's not unique.
31:15The social progress of the pioneering slave owners was to have a huge impact.
31:21Edward Jervis Jervis, 2nd Viscount St Vincent.
31:25Like the Lassels, many of the first wave of British slave owners were handed peerages.
31:31John Hope, 5th Earl of Hopetown.
31:34By the time of abolition, in 1834, the compensation records reveal that at least 37 members of the House of
31:41Lords were slave owners.
31:46Their incorporation into the establishment ensured that the slave owners' interests and the nation's interests were firmly aligned.
32:04West India Dock in London is testament to the impact that the slave owners had on the British economy.
32:15When it was built in 1801, it represented an investment of more than £1 billion in today's money.
32:26Dr Nick Draper was a banker before becoming an historian.
32:32If we'd been standing here looking out on the West India Dock in the first years of the 19th century,
32:38on a busy day, what sort of scene would we have encountered?
32:42There would have been a scene of a very substantial activity, but orderly activity.
32:46The convoy would have arrived from the West Indies, perhaps 12 West Indian merchantmen, very large capacious ships.
32:52They would have swarmed around the ships to take the sugar as quickly as they could into the secure warehouses,
32:57and part of the purpose of the warehouses was to keep the sugar away from the workforce.
33:01The turnaround time in these docks was down to something like four days from the four weeks, and sometimes longer,
33:08that had been the case when they were trying to offload in the Thames.
33:11So you keep more of your sugar, which means you can sell more and make more money, and you turn
33:15your ships around faster so they can go back to the Caribbean and move more sugar.
33:19Yeah. The owners of the West India Dock are richly rewarded in the first period of its existence.
33:24So they know exactly what is needed to make this place the perfect place in Europe to bring sugar in
33:29from the Atlantic world.
33:31That's why it was built. They had a vision that they could deliver on.
33:42The commercial culture that the slave owners brought home was just as enduring as their physical transformation of London.
33:51The huge amounts of capital they required kick-started some of Britain's first credit and investment networks.
34:00And what is it about slavery and the slave trade that makes the men involved in it so financially sophisticated,
34:08so savvy?
34:10Well, it's probably the demands of the business itself. It is an extremely capital-intensive business, either to be in
34:15the slave trade or in the sugar business.
34:17Both of those require significant amounts of capital. That requires credit, it requires an understanding about the time value of
34:23money, which again is an extremely significant component of the modern capitalism that we see around us.
34:28The money that's embodied in the slavery that's kept in those warehouses, that flows up to the city that we
34:34can also see, the city of London.
34:36Yeah. And London becomes the single most important market, not only for the physical sugar, but also for the West
34:43Indian merchants as a group and as a class.
34:46That's where they operate. And part of its continued existence today as the global financial centre undoubtedly has its origins
34:52in its success in becoming, in the 19th century, the key component of the sugar economy.
35:03The first waves of slave owners had created a global economy, taking labour from Africa to produce sugar in the
35:11Caribbean that was then sold in the markets of Europe.
35:17And the establishment of this lucrative trade, with its increasingly sophisticated commercial services, enabled thousands of British people, who'd never
35:27seen a plantation, to become slave owners.
35:38The records of the slave compensation commission reveal who these people were and where they lived.
35:46Across the British Empire, there were 46,000 individual claims for compensation, more than 3,000 of them from slave
35:55owners who lived in Britain.
36:04A closer examination of the record shows that this minority of British-based slave owners owned 50% of all
36:13the slaves in the empire.
36:14The records also confirm that there were clusters of slave owners in the cities most involved in the industry.
36:22Bristol, London, Liverpool.
36:29But slave owners could be found all over the country.
36:39Proportionally, Scotland had more slave owners than anywhere else.
36:48Britain's resident slave owners held an astonishing concentration of power and wealth.
36:53And they pocketed half of the 17 billion pounds that the government paid out to bring slavery to an end.
37:10So how did these later generations of British slave owners acquire their human property?
37:17George Hibbert, William Hibbert, Samuel Hibbert, William Tetlow Hibbert, George Hibbert Jr.
37:24This family started out as cloth traders. They dealt in the sorts of goods that were used by slave traders
37:31to barter for slaves on the coast of Africa.
37:34But very quickly they became slave owners and plantation owners, and on an enormous scale.
37:43The Hibberts were typical of the men who worked their way into the expanding slave economy from an involvement in
37:50an allied trade.
37:54Their wealth would often help them acquire political power.
37:58In 1806, George Hibbert used his profits from slavery to win a seat in Parliament.
38:05This was yet another way for slave owners to protect their interests, by penetrating the heart of the British establishment.
38:13Out of some 650 MPs, more than 80 made compensation claims to the commission.
38:23For many others found in these records, the path to slave ownership was not through business, but through inheritance.
38:33This book contains the will of one Joseph Barnes, who dies in 1829,
38:38and in his will of 1831, leaves to his dear wife Hannah a share of his 297 slaves.
38:46They provide her with an annual annuity, which becomes her only means of support for herself, her daughters and her
38:53grandchildren.
38:54This is the transfer down through families of slaves owned by someone directly involved in the slave industry,
39:01down to someone who's just married to.
39:03It's slavery seeping in to the histories, to the finances of families.
39:11Inheritance explains the surprising number of women who became slave owners.
39:18Mary Hunt, Woolwich Common, London, Jane Bain, Inverness, Scotland, 10 slaves in Jamaica.
39:24Women accounted for more than 40% of the slave owners found in these records.
39:29Maria Isabella Flockton, Spa Cottage, Bermondsey, London, 18 slaves.
39:34To receive compensation, claimants had to submit forms.
39:38These were sometimes accompanied by letters pleading for a more generous settlement.
39:43I am a poor widow with a large family to provide for.
39:47And my only dependence is on the payment of the compensation money.
39:51All I have to look forward to in life.
39:53Failing it, I have no other prospect than positive starvation.
39:56Maria McAndrew of Cumberland Street, Edinburgh.
39:58The female claimants generally owned fewer slaves.
40:01And they were often entirely dependent upon them for their livelihoods.
40:05I am an annuitant to the extent of £200 a year.
40:09And my children are legatees on the same estates to the amount of £5,000.
40:14Mary Sutherland Milford, Anna Maria Frazier of Douglas Row, Inverness.
40:19Most of these women were in effect trapped.
40:21They were dependent for their incomes upon a system that they hadn't created
40:25and over which they had very little control.
40:27The majority of them were relatively minor players in the slave economy.
40:31But not all of them.
40:46A few British women were large-scale plantation owners in their own right.
40:51Lady Anna, Eliza, Ellets and Bridges, Duchess of Chandis, was one of them.
40:58Upon the death of her first husband, she inherited the Hope Plantation in Jamaica,
41:04along with more than 300 slaves.
41:09She ran Hope from this London townhouse.
41:13We still have some 200 letters to her estate managers.
41:18Researcher Hannah Young has used them to find out how absentee slave owners administered their affairs.
41:27She's incredibly knowledgeable about plantation ownership
41:30and is very assertive about what she wants doing on the plantation.
41:34For example, she orders that the trenches are to be dug crosswise instead of perpendicular.
41:40And these are the trenches that sugar cane is planted in?
41:42Yes. And she is particularly keen to ensure that there's fresh manure to improve the quality of the soil.
41:49But the other half of her property were the enslaved people.
41:53What do we learn about her relationship with them to the letters?
41:59This is an example which complicates the way we think about Anna Eliza's motives.
42:04She begins by saying,
42:06I'm extremely concerned at the loss of the Negro Bacchus.
42:09This is an enslaved man who's died on the Hope Plantation?
42:12Yeah, a skilled man.
42:13And this was of particular importance.
42:15The reason she's so concerned is because he's essential in the still house.
42:20And she hopes that the loss isn't irreplaceable.
42:22So what she's really concerned about is not the loss of life, but the loss of skills and skills that
42:29underpin her profits.
42:30I don't think the rhetoric is entirely a facade.
42:35I think that as an absentee, she was physically and psychologically removed from this site of violence and exploitation.
42:42So it perhaps allowed her to believe she was a benevolent planter.
42:47But ultimately, at the heart of everything, these slaves are property.
42:52She had lists of these people, their names, and occasionally how much they were worth.
42:58So all this effort, all of these letters going back and forth across the Atlantic, all of this knowledge and
43:04reading, did it work?
43:07Well, in the 1770s and 1780s, Hope continued to be a very profitable plantation.
43:14Anna Eliza was receiving about £6,000 a year from the sale of the Jamaican sugar.
43:20A lot of money. An awful lot of money.
43:22I presume you will order the trenches to be dug crosswise instead of...
43:26£6,000 is the modern equivalent of £5 million a year.
43:33By the time of abolition, slave ownership had infiltrated huge swathes of British society.
43:40But the slave system was also elevating some of the most unlikely people into the elite.
43:46In fact, Thomas Williams.
43:55Few illustrate this more clearly than the man who lived here, Piercefield House in Monmouthshire.
44:03Magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Monmouth.
44:09The hundreds of slaves who laboured on his plantations in the Caribbean may have been forgotten.
44:16He died on the 13th of May, 1852.
44:21But their owner, Nathaniel Wells, is still remembered as a respectable country gentleman.
44:32Aged 72 years. Not a bad life.
44:38The story of Nathaniel Wells, the magistrate, the slave owner, the pillar of his local community, isn't everything that it
44:46appears to be.
44:47Because Nathaniel Wells had himself been born a slave.
44:51His father was a plantation owner in the Caribbean and his mother one of his slaves.
44:57When the father died and Nathaniel came of age, among the property he inherited were three plantations and the hundreds
45:05of slaves who worked on the fields.
45:08Mixed race children were common in the Caribbean, a result of the routine sexual exploitation and violence to which the
45:16slave owners asserted their dominance.
45:20The vast majority of these children lived and died as slaves.
45:25But Nathaniel Wells was treated differently.
45:28When he was nine, he was sent to England to be groomed as his father's heir.
45:33So he comes of age, he's 21, he's mixed race, but he's educated in England.
45:38That's right.
45:39And he's now very rich.
45:41Why does he at that point not go back to St Kitts where he'd been born?
45:46I think it would have been far too difficult. He would have been a threat to the whole set-up.
45:50He also would have had no rights. Even as a free black, he couldn't have even voted, let alone sit
45:56on a jury, or what he eventually did here, which would be to sit in judgment.
46:00So he was too black and he was too rich to operate in St Kitts, but he could use that
46:06wealth to build a new life, to find new status and prestige here in Britain.
46:11Yeah, that's a real irony, isn't it? Because the society here that created the whole set-up in the West
46:18Indies that wouldn't allow him to participate.
46:21Yet here, ironically, he could. He could rise within society and apparently be accepted.
46:27In the end, does that wealth and that status and prestige, does that matter more in the way people see
46:32him than the fact that he's mixed race?
46:35On the whole, I think it does. And I think it works in that most of the references to him
46:42refer to his gentlemanly manners and his charitable nature and the role that he plays, rather than to his colour.
46:51But there are a few. He's referred to as an Othello-like character.
46:57I think what we want to imagine would happen was this mixed race man who'd been born a slave, who'd
47:02seen slavery from the other side, would inherit these plantations and that he would free all of the enslaved people.
47:08That's not what happens at all, is it?
47:10It can't happen at all. I suppose he knows that. He does free a handful of people related to his
47:18mother.
47:18He doesn't free anybody else. They are the means by which his wealth will be, continue to be secured.
47:27And he would have been as aware of that from childhood as anybody else.
47:36The compensation records make no note of colour.
47:40So it's impossible to say how many of Britain's forgotten slave owners were of mixed heritage.
47:49But it certainly seems that some benefited from the system.
47:54These were people who had seen slavery from both sides.
47:59And for some of them, Britain could provide refuge from the slave codes of the Caribbean.
48:06The slave system was now part of the British way of life.
48:10And new waves of adventurers were still setting off for the Caribbean to claim a share of the profits.
48:31For the thousands who arrived in Jamaica, Port Royal would have been a welcome sight.
48:42Not only did it mark the end of the perilous crossing of the Atlantic, it was also a gateway to
48:48a new life in a land of promise.
48:58When Jamaica hit its economic stride in the second half of the 18th century, this island, 5,000 miles from
49:04Europe, and with no real natural resources to speak of, became one of the most profitable places on earth.
49:10The men who rose to the top of this society, the men who owned giant plantations and hundreds, sometimes thousands
49:16of slaves, became some of the richest men, not just in Britain, but in the world.
49:21But beneath them was a whole ecosystem of minor players, estate managers and overseers, bookkeepers and merchants.
49:29Now, they were all making some money, but what they dreamed of was of getting enough capital to buy slaves
49:35and, critically, land, and then striking it rich.
49:44One of those men was a 29-year-old failed farmer from Tupholm, Lincolnshire, called Thomas Thistlewood.
49:53Thistlewood was typical of the wannabe slave owners, with one exception.
49:58From the moment of his arrival, he obsessively kept a diary.
50:03Friday, 4th of May, 1750. Went ashore, took my things with me, walked to William Doyle's. Was well-received, dined
50:12with him.
50:13He offered me to go to his plantation next week and stay there, ready to succeed his overseer, who leaves
50:19him in two months.
50:22Across 90 volumes, Thistlewood gives us one of the few accounts of the corrosive, corrupting effect the slave system had
50:30on the slave owners themselves.
50:34Sunday, 30th of September, had Joe flogged for impotence to me, appears to be drunk, and had Bristol corrected for
50:42lying and impotence.
50:45He comes to Jamaica and he sees the brutality. He understands that you have to be firm and tough.
50:53Because you are reinforcing the law of the land. He understands that. And he just adjusts. To the point he
51:01adjusts so well, that he does some of the most remarkable things ever written in Jamaica, done by a slave
51:10master.
51:13First of August, put him in the bilboes, both feet, gagged him, locked his hands together, rubbed him with molasses
51:20and exposed him naked to the flies all day and the mosquitoes all night.
51:27When a slave runs away and is caught and is beaten, then you put pickled salt on his back and
51:35you make him really feel pain. That is normal across the island.
51:40But Thistlewood prides himself. He has his own recipe for the concoction to put on the back of a slave
51:47he's whipped.
51:51Saturday, 6th of October, Punch catched at Salt River and brought home, flogged him and Kwaku well, then washed and
51:58rubbed them in salt, pickle, lime juice and bird pepper.
52:04He's adapting. Inventing.
52:05Yeah, he's being inventive, creative. Yes, creative and inventing.
52:09And that's why I'm saying that somehow he learned it so quickly.
52:16Derby was again catched by Port Royal eating canes, had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in
52:28his mouth.
52:32That gets to the heart of the issue with Thistlewood is what would be more comforting to believe in a
52:38diary that's not overburdened with comfort,
52:40is that this man is a sadist, that there's something psychologically wrong with him.
52:45Right.
52:45But he mentions so many other incidents.
52:48Yes.
52:48In which other planters behave in similar ways.
52:50Yes.
52:51You wonder whether he was just an ordinary man.
52:53Yes.
52:54Who came into a system that was brutal and just adapted to it.
52:57Yes, yes, and adapted very well.
52:59And I'm sure there must have been some kind of dialogue with himself and the slave owner,
53:04and I'm sure they have told him, if you are going to survive here long and be successful, you will
53:09have to do this.
53:10So I'm sure in a matter of days, he came to the realization that this had to be done.
53:15So it is the system, I think, that actually made him who he is.
53:28Wednesday, 15th of July, Mr. Dorrell's negros tried today.
53:35Oliver Qua hanged.
53:37Fortune Qua, both ears cropped, both nostrils slit and marked on both cheeks.
53:53Thistlewood's diary further chronicles his nearly 4,000 sexual encounters over the period of 37 years.
54:01Many of them, the rape of enslaved women.
54:09When he was an older man, Thistlewood must have considered trying to go home, back to England.
54:15But he never does.
54:16Never does.
54:17Never does.
54:18Because this is home for him.
54:21He has forged his Jamaican identity, right?
54:25He lived a life that he could not live in England, right?
54:29He made money.
54:30He had social power.
54:32He was an outstanding man.
54:33So, obviously, that was something he found very attractive in Jamaica.
54:37And he could carry on his escapades doing whatever he wanted to write in his diary.
54:44What would he write in his diary in England?
54:46What could he do to servants in England?
54:48That's not fun.
54:49Well, if he tried to behave the way he did towards servants in Britain, he'd end up in court.
54:54Of course.
54:54Because they were human beings.
54:55Of course.
54:56Under the law.
54:57And they had rights.
54:57Of course.
54:58But there are no rights here for him.
54:59So, he's absolute king.
55:00A done.
55:01So, he can do what he wants.
55:03And I think that's the attraction why he stays here and even then he dies.
55:27Over the course of two centuries, slavery transformed the Caribbean.
55:33Britain too changed beyond recognition.
55:38It became a nation as addicted to cheap sugar as it was to the profits of slavery.
55:44A land in which poor farmers could become aristocrats.
55:49That turned widows into slave owners and ordinary men into tyrants.
55:57Above all, the slave system made Britain wealthy.
56:13Thomas, 33, carpenter and healthy.
56:18Lavinia, 36, field hand, born in Africa.
56:21And when it was finally abolished, the names recorded in these ledgers were at the centre of the struggle.
56:28800,000 enslaved men, women and children.
56:32Jack, 36.
56:33Samson, 38.
56:35Eve, 38.
56:37Jane, 33.
56:38Charlotte, 38.
56:41Martha, 33.
56:42And from these little fragments of lives, we can at least begin to imagine who they might have been and
56:49what their lives were like.
56:51Pitt.
56:52Blackie.
56:53Malia.
56:54Fanny.
56:55Malia.
56:56Market woman.
56:57Market woman.
56:58House servant.
57:00Garden boy.
57:01Field.
57:01This is an entry for a slave called Ambrose, who's described as superannuated, which just means old.
57:07He's 70 and he was born in Africa.
57:10And from those little details, you can work out that this is somebody whose whole life was consumed by slavery.
57:16He was seized from his home in Africa.
57:20This is a man who felt the shackles on his hands and his feet when he was chained to the
57:26deck of a slave ship.
57:27This is someone who came to the Caribbean, who survived the torture and the whipping, the overwork, and lived through
57:35all of that for decades, all of that misery.
57:37But he's 70, which is old for a slave in the Caribbean.
57:41And this document's from 1817.
57:43The slaves are freed in 1838.
57:46And you realize that Ambrose isn't going to make it.
57:49He's going to die a slave and he's never going to know freedom again.
57:53And these little details of individuals, their lives recorded in numbers and entries in a ledger, make you realize that
58:01slavery wasn't just a crime, it wasn't just a tragedy.
58:05It was an appalling waste of human life.
58:22In the next program, Britain's slave owners wage a propaganda war to fight abolition.
58:30Ten men manage the biggest government payout in British history.
58:34For the nation as a whole, it is the only way out.
58:37And how the slave owners' wealth helped build the Britain we live in today.
58:431781年
58:43There's a place that saved by million became an army in Britain.
58:51In phases for the nation as a whole, it is as a legendary business educational tool.
58:52history takes place to apply, what he is named based against fascism.
59:03We're about to run a plague in Britain.
59:04It has probably just been created by a millennial española which came to influence the Cold War.
59:10It had been executed by se.
59:11You
Comentários