Zachary Macaulay

Transcription

>> Thank you for coming too. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you this morning about the linkages of London and slavery and within that about new work is underway at UCL that looks, examines some of those linkages in particular. My title as Steven said is "What Does London Owe to Slavery". And as you'd recognize, there's a-- at least a deliberate ambiguity in terms of the title. On the one hand, it means to what extent is the development or what's the development of London into a world city and the center of-- the financial center of global campus and a function of its involvement in slavery. That's created a question about the past and it's a question that should be dealt with perhaps the most appropriately by academic historians. There's also embedded in the question a second meaning, the implication that there is potentially a debt to be paid, that there's an obligation arising from London's involvement in slavery historically. And that raised a question, of course, the questions of from whom and to whom. Those are not questions that academic historians can settle. Those questions belong to us all. Now, there's really a connection between the first meaning of the question, the empirical background and then the second which is the so what? And logically and chronologically, the first question-- that [inaudible] on the question should precede the second. So, London's past is relevant to its present. That's not confined obviously to this issue in history. It's one of the reasons why we're studying history in the first place. But the connections in this particular case seemed to be a bit more difficult, more contentious, and potentially more controversial. And so, it's important that Steven signals, I would try and confine my talk to about 30 minutes and then give an opportunity to the floor to contributions and questions arising, not only for the first meaning which is what I'm gonna focus but from the second meaning which is the so what. What academic historians can do in this context is to contribute data, and what I'm gonna be talking about is to describe the work underway under the banner of legacies about slave ownership which is intended to provide data. Now data is slightly unfashionable in terms of history today, academic history today. But what we're doing is attempting to provide both facts and also frameworks or proposed frameworks within which those facts can be evaluated and assessed. I should also say the outset that the intention is that we make the work that we're doing fully publicly available at the end of the project in ways that I come on to describe. Before talking particularly about the project itself, I need to set just a little bit of context, and for those of you in the audience who already know this stuff, forgive me but I think it's important that everybody is on the same basis of knowledge. When we talk about Britain and slavery or London and slavery, what we're talking about is colonial slavery. And by that I mean that slavery, chattel slavery as a social institution is never embedded in Britain itself, in metropolitan Britain itself. Britain came late to the slavery business. When it came, it was very enthusiastic in its embrace of slavery. But the slave system was established effectively by the Portuguese as early as the mid 15th century, even before the discovery of the new world by Europeans that was a slave sugar complex established by the Portuguese in Madeira and the slave trade was up and running. So, Britain stepped into an existing system when it begins to colonize or to seize its own colonies in the new world from 1607 Virginia, 1623 St. Kitts onwards. And as Britain becomes a very enthusiastic participant in the slave trade and in slavery, it continues to increase the size of its slave empire all the way through the 18th century. In 1763, as part of the settlement after a war with France, Britain seizes a whole load of new territories and in the Napoleonic Wars, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain does it again and takes again a whole new series of colonies from France and its allies including Mauritius, The Cape of Good Hope, British Guiana, Trinidad, these are significant expansions of Britain's slave frontier. At that time, as some of you know, when Britain is actually coming close to abolishing participation in the slave trade itself. In 1807, the slave trade-- Britain's participation in the slave trade is prohibited by act of parliaments. Slavery itself importantly continues. You know, the social institution of slavery is not abolished until in 1833, enacted as [inaudible] Parliament, the Abolition Act which amongst other things provides for a period of apprenticeship for the enslaved who remained in bondage [inaudible] labor until 1838. Now, this period that I'm sketching out obviously from the 17th century to the early 19th century coincides of course with the changes in Britain that we associate with the Industrial Revolution, the transformation of British life through urbanization, through the automation of production, the arrival of Britain's first industrial power. It also coincides with emergence of London as the world's leading financial center. London has always been a very significant city obviously in the context of the UK, [inaudible] of England, then in Great Britain, then in United Kingdom. And it dominates British life in many of these ways that it still does today. And that's a function of Britain concentrating a lot of its processes into London. The courts here, as in the rural court, institute of government, institute of law, it's also the main ports for many years alongside the Thames. And those things come together to create a hotspot, a world city. Within that, the emergence of Britain as a financial center is a function-- of London's financial center is really a function of the 18th century. I-- the very period in which we're most active in the slave trade. In the 18th century, Britain ships turn half million enslaved Africans from the west coast of Africa to the Atlantic colonies. Not only our own, but also those of other European palace. And within that, London itself accounts for about 700,000. And when I say London itself, I mean the ships that leave from London [inaudible] by London merchants and the voyages are operated by London's slave traders and the ships tend to return to London at the end of the triangular trade that they're involved in. So, the coincidence, well, there was a convergence of three things at the same time. Slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and London's emergence as the dominant financial center it becomes by the early 19th century, not only for Britain but for Europe and for the world as a whole. We can't simply say that these changes were caused by Britain's involvement in slavery. Of course we can't. If slavery were a sufficient condition, slave trade were a sufficient condition of industrialization, Portugal and Spain would have gone first and they didn't. So, it's a function of a lot of other different forces that come together at the same time. The commercialization of agriculture and period of expansion on the east as well as into the Atlantic world, the enclosure movement, the transformation of technology, so lot of things come together and the challenge is to isolate within the slavers impact and analyze slavery as a component part of a much broader set of forces. Now, we're obviously not the first scholars to begin to puzzle about this connection. Seventy years ago, a man [inaudible] Williams wrote a very brilliant book for capitalism and slavery which sets out the thesis that the industrial revolution in Britain is intimately connected with Britain's participation in the Atlantic slave system. And although his arguments since then had been pushed backwards and forwards, he still defines that the landscape in which everybody is researching and thinking about slavery and Britain were. It's either an opposition to Williams or consistent, more consistently with him. And recent scholarship, particularly two books, there's a book very recently published by [inaudible] about London and the late 17th century. She argues that London's participation in the Atlantic trade with the colonies in the Atlantic, which in many cases are slave colonies, not exclusively but makers of the slave colonies. She sees that as being a critical period in London's leap up the world table in terms of its financial-- its status as a financial center. And a few years prior to that, Joseph Inikori wrote a book about Africans in the Industrial Revolution which makes a very sophisticated version [inaudible] case that the combination of the commercialization and agriculture in Britain and Britain's participation in the slave trade and the slave economy of the Atlantic world are the two forces that come together to create this unique industrial revolution. So, in doing the work that we're doing, we're not running entirely against the grain of the current scholarship. I think it's important just to register that. The project that we are embarked on as I said is called the Legacies of British Slave Ownership. It's run by Professor Catherine Hall, includes my self and the [inaudible] who has a pretty good history background. We're funded by the ESRC. And what we're doing is looking at the entire [inaudible] of people in Britain who own slaves at the end of slavery. When slavery was abolished through the 1833 Abolition Act, one of the provisions was that [inaudible], compensation will be paid to the slave owners, okay? The British state is buying the freedom of the enslaved from the slave owners in a very elaborate financial operation that throws up the need of course to identify all the slave owners and they want to be identified because there's money at stake. And so, they stepped forward and made claims on the British state. And in exchange they're paid not the whole value of their slaves but part of the value of their slaves and they cashed out of slavery. >> There's no financial provision made for the enslaved which may not-- may not be surprised to learn. And what we're doing is taking these records that are generated by the compensation process and analyzing who are the slave owners in Britain. Clearly, many slave owners are in Barbados or Jamaica, St. Kitts. They live and work with the enslaved. But there is a corpus of people, very significant people who live in Britain and own slaves and absentee landlords. They're-- they're miles away from the reality of slavery but financially, they're benefiting from slavery and of course, they are active politically in defense of slavery in Britain. And there is a corpus of around two and a half to 3000 slave owners in Britain who own about half of the total number of enslaved. So, it's a small number of slave owners relative to the total number of slave owners but they're very significant slave owners. They own, as I say, half the enslaved. And there are, as again many of you know, an excess of 600,000 enslaved in the Caribbean at this point. These are a lot of people. All those two and a half to 3000, you would expect wealth brings power. They tend to be members of the elites in Britain. And for every subset of elite that we've looked at so far where there's MPs, members of baronets, sheriffs of counties, those traditional badges of elite status, around 5 to 10 percent of those people are in the slave compensation records, and we can debate afterwards if you want whether 5 or 10 percent is a big or a small number, but that is the number. It's a consistent pattern that comes back. All those slave owners, almost half are linked to London in the sense that they have recognized some addresses in London. And of course some of them have-- based in the country as well. London, because of the nature of its-- of its-- of its infrastructure, attracts the season, people who come for the seating in parliament originally and then who come for social reasons. So, we're not suggesting that these people are, in every case, permanent resident in London, but there is a significant bulk of these people who are connected to London, and what I want to do is-- is to explore, using this rather, I think wonderful map. This was created by Rachel Evans, who's our project administrator, who's currently on maternity leave, and it shows as you can see, the area in which you're sitting now. This is Fitzrovia. Rachel did this map stimulated by an independent researcher called Cristiano [phonetic] [inaudible] who's doing some work on Fitzrovia. And in response to-- to the approach from Cristiano about this area, we did the work to look at who lived and worked in-- in this area, where we are. You can see [inaudible] this is where we are, this is where you're sitting at the moment, along here where the University of London is on Gower Street. And the pins are slave owners, these are houses that were identified and linked to slave owners in the 1830s. And there are, I think altogether, there are about 6000 slave owners in this area. And as you say, this spans already a 10-year period, people who are living at any point within the 1830s were picked up, so [inaudible] they walked down the street and every house would be occupied at the same time by the same people. And I'm gonna use four or five examples from here to highlight a number of things that seem to us to be important about London and slavery, and we start off with the first one. This is gonna be John Adams Wood, lives in [inaudible] place. John Adams Wood is a name that maybe familiar to some of you. He is the owner of Mary Prince, and Mary Prince is the author mediated by her white sponsors, but Mary Prince is an enslaved woman who's brought to London in the late 1820's by John Adams Wood. And in Britain her status changes, she is effectively a servant rather than an-- than an enslaved person. But her freedom is confined. She cannot go home, which is where she wants to go, she's married. She cannot leave Britain without being re-enslaved, and so she is trapped in this extraordinary world. She-- she leaves the house, she leaves John Adams Wood's house, and is originally helped by a very poor couple who take her in. She's then found effectively by the abolitionists, they take her up, they [inaudible]. They transcribed her life story and that life story is an extraordinary life story, inevitably. Given the patterns and mobility, the disruption to her family or any family linkages are completely overwhelmed by slavery because the decision about where you go and what you do is not in your own hands, it's in the hands of somebody else. So, the lack of autonomy that she has and the basic decisions in her life and then the space she tries to create within that, these are all very important signals from slavery. Of course it is mediated and narrative, and my point in-- in bringing forward John Adams Wood is not only because the curiosity value of him living just around the corner from here, but to emphasize that one of the things that our project is not about, is about the black presence in London or about the experience of the enslaved. Not because that work is not important, it's obviously extremely important, but there are other people who are better equipped to carry it forward and we're doing a different project. But this work being done is, again some of you know by [inaudible] geography department here. There's a new book by Kathy Chater about the black presence in Britain in this period. There is good work being done. We're focused on the John Adams Woods of the world. And the second reason for raising, it is really that it's striking that despite the hostility that's generated around the libel cases that devolved from Mary Prince's narrative and the challenge to it, that John Adams Wood is still able to live in London comfortably enough, right. He's not, as far as we can see, under any social pressure in London. London's a big city and he's taken up and absorbed by it and he doesn't fear for his safety as he walked down the street. He is a normal member of the community and he's a slave owner. Okay. Second exemplary case is a-- David Hall, important place. Then and I guess now, I'm more at market part of this-- this area, just on the-- the west end of it. Hall is a mem-- or was a member of the slave-owning family in Barbados since we put this together would now confirm that is the same David Hall. By the 1830s though, he was a partner in a merchant firm called Hall-McGarel [phonetic]. You would never have heard it, there's no reason why you should. But they are one of-- about 150 merchant firms in Britain, in London who take slave compensation in this process in the 1830s. And merchants are involved because they have conventionally lent money to the planters as part of their business relationship. That-- those agents for the planters in Britain, they buy supplies, they finance the purchase of slaves when it was possible to buy slaves, and they build up credit balances with the planters owing them money. And at various points, the merchants step in and secure their exposure-- their financial exposure on the estates and on the bodies of the enslaved-- on the enslaved themselves. So, when the compensation goes around, the merchants are in the queue for money, and it's to say, there are rather 150 merchant firms involved. Is 150 a lot or few? It seems like a lot in isolation but there are more than 5000 merchant-type firms in the city of London at this point. So it's a small number numerically, it's 3 percent or so, but this a-- these firms tend to be bigger firms, better capitalized because the-- the credit intensive nature of their business and that wealth brings them power within the city, and I come back to-- to that in a moment. The Hall-McGarel firm today has no resonance. It's-- it's disappeared. Hall, himself, when he died in 1842, shortly after the compensation process, left 200,000 pounds in effectively non-real-- non-landed real estate, what is called personality. That made him one of the very richest people in Britain who died in that year. His partner, a man called Charles McGarel, lived much longer, and McGarel sponsors his son-in-law-- sorry, his brother-in-law, who's a generation younger than him called Quintin Hogg, into the firm that have Hall-McGarel and successive firms after emancipation. So Quintin Hogg is a-- is a young man. He doesn't leave Eton, I think until the 1860s. But he's taken out by McGarel, and made a rich man through his involvement in British Guiana, in sugar production after emancipation, and Quintin Hogg, as you may recognize, found his own political dynasty. We've had two Lord Chancellors in the past century from this family, again both called Quintin Hogg, the first one, Count Hailsham and the second Lord Hailsham who served under Thatcher and under [inaudible] as Lord Chancellor. The most recent member of-- of this dynasty is Douglas Hogg whose mote training we all paid for [inaudible] recently. And until Douglas Hogg, all of the members of this family carried the McGarel name. Okay, so the name of this slave owner was embedded in the heart of the Tory [phonetic] party for 150 years effectively by this-- this strange dynastic quirk of McGarel effectively adopting his-- his-- his brother-in-law. [ Pause ] >> Third up. This is Benjamin Greene, he's a brewer originally from Bury St. Edmunds, who's the Greene in Greene King, which still exists I think now as [inaudible] brewers. >> And he was a violent pro-slavery advocate. He was a slave owner in St. Kitts and he managed estates rather slave owners in this rather odds-- a nexus of suffered gentry who owned enslaved people. He left Bury St. Edmunds out of the social tensions that arose in that town from abolition and slavery, the contestation, and came to London in the late 1830s. His son, Michael [phonetic] Benjamin Buck Greene goes to St. Kitts in the late 1820s to manage the family estates and managed them into this compensation process and Benjamin Bunk Greene's formative years are spent in the Caribbean running slavery estates. Bunk Greene comes back, joins his father for a period in motion business and then sets up on his own with new partners and prospers and becomes governor of the Bank of England. And he is by name is the only governor of the Bank of England who's embroiled in the slave economy. Between 1807, the abolition of the slave trade, in 1834 the abolition of slavery itself. There are I think 14 governments of the Bank of England 'cause they served two years-- terms of two years at that point. Half of those are in the slave compensation records in some shape or form. And after the end of slavery, those traditions continue in-- between in Victoria's reign [inaudible] from about 1837 onwards, there are 33 governors in the bank of England and ten of those arrived-- the recipients to slave compensation themselves or they are the sons of-- not daughters at that point clearly. They are the sons of slave owners. So, the top of the banking system is again imprecated with slavery. Couple more and then we'll move on and forward. John Hopson Forbes is a prominent lawyer in London and, again, I'll highlight him because this is a period in London in the 1830s when the professions are getting going-- accounting, legal firms are being established that's become part and parcel of Britain's-- or London's prosperity because they provide services to the entire-- to Britain and to some extent globally. And Hopson Forbes is one of these men. He's acting for slave owners and he is a trustee or an executor in about a dozen claims altogether that we've found. So he's intimately involved in the slavery business of his clients. You may say of course he is. That's what boys do by following their clients. But there are some law firms who are not-- who are active in this period, who are visibly not in the slave compensation process. One in particular [inaudible] Morris Chris is found within this period and appears to have taken a principal decision not to be part and parcel of this system. Freshfields which still exists today is a-- is a very successful law firm and the largest in Europe, took a different decision and James went in Freshfield and his partners again are embroiled in a whole number of claims here on behalf of slave owners. And finally on this map, I just wanted to finish up with a slightly different type of example. This is Harry Barker, 150 [inaudible] Court Road. The people I've talked about so far are obviously members of the elite in Britain, in London. They are either-- they are up on middle class and there's a whole bunch of aristocratic claims as well and we haven't [inaudible] on here 'cause they tend not to live in this area. Okay, the aristocrats are somewhat slightly down the road. But Harry Barker owns two slaves, two enslaved people in Saint Vincent and with his wife. It's not clear to us what the path to ownership is but he writes to the commission as a-- for slave compensation to say, "I'm gonna go out to Saint Vincent and-- and assume my claims." So it's only two people [inaudible]-- only two people and yet the amount of money is material enough to him for him to be contemplating taking a voyage which are not straightforward to press his claims. So there is-- as well as the elite, there is a tier of people, a thousand or so we think, in Britain, who owned small numbers of slaves that tend to be widows and orphans and this is how they support themselves. Okay, just as an aside really on [inaudible], I think it's important to recognize that of course the density that you see here is not typical of London as a whole. It's certainly typical of this area. If you go west from here along [inaudible] Road towards the west way, particularly to the south as-- as you -- as you go west. The area around Holly [phonetic] Street, Wimpole Street is denser even than this pattern in terms of slave owners. This is where the West Indians come to-- to live and to be. In the suburbs, of course, it's a much more-- it's a much thinner presence but almost everywhere that you turn on the peripheries of London, you will find houses that belong to or were built by and slaver owners, but they are thinly spread. It's not a density like this. So the Fitzrovia map is telling us something about the presence of slave wealth in the northern expansion of this new density of areas in and around this period. And I think from my description, it also should have told you something about the city of London and how that's being impacted by slavery in this period. But of course, there are other characteristics of these people that we need to think about as well. Where else did they put their money, one always places the railways. The railway boom was on the way at the same time as the state compensation money was coming in and it's possible to look at at least more than simultaneous arrivals of slave compensation money and departures in terms of investments in new railway companies and Charles McGarel for example as I mentioned, invested just under 100,000 pounds, a very significant amount of money by the stands of the day. In a series of railway schemes, many of which were bound-- were to do with binding London together and binding it to the hinterland in North Kent and the south coast, so. We're also tracking the slave owners in terms of connoisseurship and collections, okay. Again, the wealthy people, they tend to participate in the accumulation of physical stuff from-- particularly southern Europe that takes place in this period as Britain raids the old aristocratic families of Europe brought low by them [inaudible] wars in the French revolution and just aggregates a whole load of themes, paintings, carriers, [inaudible] in Britain. And so again, what we're trying to do is track how these accumulations of stuff by slave owners come together and then how they're dispersed. And of course, because of the wealth that's involved, slavery seeps into many, many institutions. The slavery companies in the city for example, we haven't done systematic work but they clearly are masters of the goldsmiths company or [inaudible] of the goldsmiths company, the Mercer's Company, the very senior elite companies who are slave owners. So, the money flows as one would expect it to do. In the context of UCL, we haven't done the work on the subscribers for UCL to pick up whether there is any significant concentration of slave ownership there but we would not expect that to be. UCL as many of you know is founded effectively by a nonconformist tradition which is trying to escape from the lock that Anglican, that Anglican-- the Church of England has on higher education. Kings College London, again as some of you know, is founded in response to the foundation of UCL. It's founded by the Anglican establishment to counteract this kind of Godless institution in Gower Street. And in the subscription lists for Kings College London, there are a significant number of slave owners who are subscribers who found to the [inaudible] of Kings College. About 10 percent of the subscribers that were found so far are slave owners. Well that tells you of course is that 90 percent are not, and that's really where I want to come to as just-- as being to wind up here. London I think is at the beginning of confronting its roles in slavery. If you go to Liverpool, you can sense the people there as cited with the history of slave trade and the history of the city as an impatience to get on and to [inaudible] to write other things in the history of Liverpool. In Bristol, there's work being done that will effectively propel Bristol I think into the same trajectory as Liverpool itself. In Glasgow, this has hardly started as a process of thinking and exploration. We were there a few weeks ago and there's a rather wonderful pamphlet that's being produced by some community activists there [inaudible] which is their view about what the Scottish take this on slavery. Scots are all over the slave economy, 15 or 20 percent of our people, of our slave owners are Scots. It's disproportionate to the size of the Scots' population in relation to [inaudible] British population. And in London, we have started but I think barely. For 200 years, almost 200 years, we've celebrated in London, it's connections were abolished in pretty western [inaudible] and the National Valhalla. I think there is Wilberforce. It includes Charles James Fox, it includes Zachary Macaulay. As some of you know, there is now a memorial to victims of the slave trade in the city in Fancourt [phonetic] just at Fenchurch Street. And there is a struggle on the way which has been going now for a number of years by organization called Memorial 2007 to fund and place in Hyde [phonetic] Park itself a memorial to the victims of the slave trade. In these stand in the docks, there is of course a Museum of London in Docklands, the permanent gallery now, slavery, sugar and London. And the museum in Docklands is a very striking juxtaposition of of course new global capitalism in Canary Wharf, an old global capitalism in the West Indian Docks. And the docks transformed London. They stretched its geography and created the east end and the West Indian Docks were the pioneering institution amongst those. But again, the west Indian trade is not the only trade that drives the development of docks. >> It's not the only dock that's built. And that takes me back to I think what is the central challenge in thinking through these issues around London slavery. London is so large, its history is so complex and there's so many things going on. But there are two risks, I think in thinking and talking about London slavery. The first is that slavery can get lost, okay. There are very good general histories of London in which slavery does not forgot at all. There is not even a mention on slavery. All the slave trade is being a component part, and that clearly we know from the work we've done but intuitively one knows that can't be right. But equally it's not true to say that London is built on the blood of slaves. There are lots of processes underway that create London as it currently is or as-- and that-- as it became in the 19th century. And it's important that we can continue to put slavery and the slave trade is one of those streams in the context of the other things that are going on, and that's not to minimize its importance but it's to contextualize its importance. So, everyone's [inaudible] close with a plea. It's very easy in London to accept, to receive wisdom, the short hand about institutions that are here and there are term particular where I think that has been the case now for a number of years. One is the National Gallery and the second is the Tate Gallery. And in both cases, there tends to be a reflexive response to, well, of course those are the fruit of slavery, we know that's the case. The National Gallery falls into this category because the man-- his collection forms the cornerstone-- formed the cornerstone or the foundation of National Gallery, a man called John Julius Angerstein is described as a slave owner. In fact, he wasn't a slave owner. He was the trustee of a slave estate in [inaudible]. But he made his money primarily from marine maritime insurance, and he was the chairman [inaudible]. That industry, that business is absolutely embedded in the slave trade and slavery. Not again because that is the only business that insurance companies with-- no insurance brokers were doing-- insurers were doing in the 18th century. Of course it's not the only business but it's a very, very material one. Inikori says that the two thirds of the income of the insurers is down to the slave trade. I don't think that's right. I think the number is closer to a third but it's still a very material component part. So, Angerstein is implicated if you like, that's the right word, in slavery, but not as a slave owner. It's a more complicated relationship in that and one that we need to take it off. Tate Gallery again, Henry Tate is Barry Boone [phonetic] when slavery is abolished in the British colonies. I think it's 11 or 12, something like that, when slavery is abolished. So, he's not buying slave produced sugar from British colonies but. I'll answer the question on my part, is he buying sugar from Cuba and Brazil which continue to be slave economies all the way through until the 1880s. I don't know the answer to that, but that seems to be a relevant question to ask at least. And secondly there's the more elaborate argument which says that sugar itself, the creation of a consumer society on Britain, they developed it at the market which then Henry Tate can step into and exploit, is indeed a function of slavery as of course it is. No slavery, no sugar in Britain. And therefore, the connections between the gallery become-- they pertain the gallery and slavery, again become attenuated but again a real-- as I say, what I think it is-- it's difficult to do is to try to be precise about these things. So, the work that we're doing is intended to fill some of the empirical gaps and the knowledge about the connections of slavery, slave ownership in particular, to Britain and to London in particular. And as you gather-- we're aiming to catalogue the legacies of slave owners. And then as I said in the outset, what we're going to do is to make the [inaudible] available and then create a form, a basis on which you better access this and search it for whatever you're interested in about these people, what this and arts, products, whatever it is and so that other people can take the [inaudible] they're on and do the work with it which we think will [inaudible] to support. I think the ones we've kind of made our contribution then logically at least comes to debate about the so what, the consequences that I described at the outset. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Well, I'd like to say thanks very much, Nick, there. That's a certainly fascinating presentation there that shows us that in fact sugar shouldn't taste as sweet as it does. And among other things, I was also fascinated as well as the connections with Cuba and Brazil and I also noticed there's a little bit of rivalry between UCL and Kings. Did you notice that? But we'll leave that to one side. That might come up in the questions and I think we have about 8 minutes or so, sorry, 3 minutes, okay. I've been reduced. We've got 3 minutes for questions. Any questions, please? Okay, we have the microphone coming. >> Oh, it's at the end of the slave when composition was paid outs. Slave traders in Africa down the [inaudible] of Benin, they sent a delegation to London to get compensation because some-- you know, which smashed their slave trade. Do you think there's anything? >> No, they didn't. It's an important question I think. The point is that the slave traders were banned and prohibited from conducting their business and didn't received compensation. The slave owners were banned from their business of owning slaves did receive compensation. And there were voices as you say corrected, they were-- the slave traders themselves certainly said, we should be compensated in 1807 for the lost of our trade. But they're unsuccessful. And I think the difference is that in the 1830s what was being debated was real profiting, okay. And even many of the Abolitionists said this is regrettable thoughts, there are property rights in enslaved. We don't agree with that concept today. But practically that is what it is the enslaved are property and it needs so they can possibly purchase. We're gonna take the enslaved away and we need to compensate the owners for it. So no be-- successfully made that case around the slave trade that they were gonna rights in the abstract trade in 1807. So it's a very different dynamic. >> Good, we have a question at the back, sir. >> Yes, my name is [inaudible], I'm a PhD student at [inaudible]. You've made a couple of remissions, I don't know if it was deliberate and a couple of not too misleading statements. For example, Britain and Europe used Caribbean slavery mainly for the production of raw materials. These raw materials did keep the industries going in London, gin for example and sugar. And in fact, the refining industries, a lot of products came to the metropolis, not just England but all over Europe were refined and re-exported back to these territories and another comment which I wish you'd made at the beginning is a clear distinction between atlantic slavery and Arab slavery of Africa. And another comment I'd like to pile on to that is that victims of Atlantic slavery are not dead and buried. There are people, millions of people all over Africa was suffering today because of what went on and why you mentioned and taped this to sugar are not bloodstone, father of I think a prime mister or so and the sugar states in Guyana and-- is instigation of intensive labor from India to keep this plantations going when the Africans refused to work. >> Thank you very much. I think what we do-- There're a lot of ideas in there. I wonder if we can get a response straight away from Nick. Thank you very much. >> Okay. I think probably the three things that I put out of there. Firstly, the point is being made about slavery, and the slave ownership, and the slave economy is absolutely right in central. Okay. Our work is to do with slave ownership and what the point is being made is that whole industries are built on slave produce, okay. And that ends the debate about sugar and refining. So again, we're not pretending to answer the question about what is on [inaudible] to slavery. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> -- some dimensions of-- they will help answer that question. But you can't. You're correct. Answer the question what is on the [inaudible] to slavery, but I'm thinking about the industries that are based on the slave produce. So then [inaudible]. The debate about Atlantic versus Arab slavery, yes, again specifically, this paper is about Britain and Colonial slavery in the Atlantic. And on to the third point which is the victims of slavery are still alive, in a way that's the whole point that I was making at onset but there is a discussion to be had about the [inaudible] around the work that we're doing. We understand that it goes into discussion and reparations and restitution, of course it does. Of course it does. >> Okay. I'd like to say thanks very much again, Nick, for a very, very interesting lecture and put our hands together and say very much thank you. [ Applause ]