follow us on Twitter and Facebook
Movement for Justice & Reconciliation
  • Legacy
  • About
  • Projects
  • Stories
  • News
  • Resources
  • Who's Who
  • Contact

Exhibition shows Church of England’s links to slave trade

16/2/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
A new exhibition in the library at Lambeth Palace includes artefacts such as a “slave bible” with passages relating to freedom and escape removed and documents revealing the Church of England’s involvement in a fund linked to transatlantic chattel slavery It is the latest step in a wide-ranging programme of work launched in 2019 that aims to “address past wrongs” by researching the church’s historical links to the slave trade.

The Queen Anne’s Bounty fund, set up on 1704 to tackle poverty among clergymen, made significant investments in the South Sea Company, which the church knew was involved in purchasing and transporting enslaved people as its main commercial activity between 1714 and 1739. This fund has grown into the £9bn managed by the Church Commissioners out of which a new fund of £100m was set up last month to support projects “focused on improving opportunities for communities adversely impacted by historic slavery”.

Picture
The exhibition also features early abolitionist views, which was intended to showcase the “spectrum of opinion about the slave trade”. However, Prof Robert Beckford said: “The focus on abolition is an obfuscation of the horror of the slave trade and a willingness to collude with the sub-humanisation of black people. What it means ultimately is there is no recognition of how the church’s theological ideas made slavery possible.” He mentions as an example the omission from the exhibition of  the Codrington plantation in Barbados, which in 1710 was bequeathed to and subsequently run by the Anglican church’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). It was known for its brutality, with enslaved people branded with hot irons bearing the SPG’s logo.

​Read more here.

​The Codrington Estate is featured in MJR's film ​‘
After the Flood: the church, slavery and reconciliation'.

0 Comments

"The Commonwealth Games are rooted in slavery"

10/8/2022

0 Comments

 
This article by Nadine White, race correspondent for The Independent is headlined: 'The Commonwealth Games are rooted in slavery – let’s consign the event to history'. Despite being a fan of sport, White says this particular event "sticks in my throat because the Commonwealth, as an institution, is rooted in chattel slavery and the brutalisation of African people."

She continues: "After the abolition of slavery in 1833, financially prosperous Britain skipped off into the sunset without investing in the economies of its former sources of slaves in any meaningful way – and those left behind in the former colonies have grappled with poverty and destitution ever since. Britain paid nothing to the freed slaves in an attempt to redress the injustices they suffered."

Most of the 56 member states of the Commonwealth are former British colonies. But "the wealth is not common. ... The Commonwealth purports to be about 'promoting justice and human rights', yet reparatory justice for chattel slavery, a heinous crime perpetrated against African people by colonialists, has not been paid." The Commonwealth Games should be: "scrapped and replaced with a sporting event that isn’t bonded by racial trauma against a backdrop of Eurocentric denialism".

Read the full article here.
0 Comments

Justin Welby apologises for slavery-linked investment fund

17/6/2022

0 Comments

 
Research by the Church Commissioners into a Church of England investment fund has revealed that for over a century it invested large sums of money in a company responsible for transporting slaves. 'Queen Anne's Bounty' was formed in 1704 to help support poor clergy. In 1739 its accounts showed £204,000 (estimated to be worth £443m today) had been invested in the South Sea Company which had an exclusive contract to transport slaves from Africa to Spanish colonies in South America for more than 30 years from the 1710s. Church investments in the South Sea Company continued well into the 19th century and the fund today is worth £10.1bn.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby has said he was "deeply sorry for the links". "This abominable trade took men, women and children created in God's image and stripped them of their dignity and freedom. The fact that some within the Church actively supported and profited from it is a source of shame. It is only by facing this painful reality that we can take steps towards genuine healing and reconciliation - the path that Jesus Christ calls us to walk."

Read more here and here. Read the Church Commissioners report here.

MJR's documentary ‘After the Flood: the church, slavery and reconciliation' reveals more of this history of complicity with colonial slavery on the part of the Church of England and other churches, and also talks about the reconciliation Justin Welby speaks of. Find out more here.

0 Comments

What Barbados needs is true accountability for slavery

3/12/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
During the ceremony marking Barbados’s historic transition to a republic, Prince Charles referred to the “appalling atrocity of slavery”, describing the period as the “darkest days of our past” and adding that, moving forward, the “creation of this republic offers a new beginning”. Though this was welcomed by some as a bold statement, it stopped short of an apology and was felt to be  a missed opportunity to make amends, on behalf of all that he represents, for the impact of slavery, a system in which Britain played a leading role. Britain’s entire infrastructure, and that of all its institutions, was built off the backs of enslaved black people.

As the legacy of slavery continue to violently reverberate across generations of black people, any form of apology or reparations from the crown or the British government have yet to be received. Writing in the Independent, Nadine White says: "There’s more work to be done in truly escaping the grips of colonialism and reclaiming a sense of black identity, above and beyond the brutal corridors of our past, even if that aspect of the journey will forever be included in the story. Those who benefit from the plight of black people, whether inadvertently or otherwise, ought to take responsibility because simply stating facts isn’t going to cut it. That cannot buy bread."
Read the full article here.

0 Comments

A history lesson on the Antiques Roadshow

20/4/2021

 
Antiques Roadshow
Recently on BBC's Antiques Roadshow, this gentleman, getting some silver sugar containers and tools valued, told the viewing public about how Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery “immediately” in 1791 was delayed by Henry Dundas’s decision to do it “gradually”, so setting back abolition for 15 years.

“We’ve calculated that about 630,000 Africans were transported into slavery on the basis of one word: gradual. While slaves were working and dying, people in Britain were consuming the sugar – in those bowls and with those tongs. And to me, those silver bowls tell us the sort of things we do in order to make money and to have a lifestyle that we think we deserve.”


The valuer’s response: “Hugely poignant. I have to say I’ve never really stopped to consider that link with the slave trade and it is deeply moving. I don’t think I can look at silver sugar basins in the same way again.”

​
Well done sir!

Historic England audit of slave trade links

8/2/2021

 
A 157-page audit by Historic England, the public body responsible for preserving buildings and monuments, has identified hundreds of sites around Britain with links to the slave trade, including schools, farms, pubs and gravestones. The list includes halls, churches and entire villages have been linked to the “transatlantic slavery economy”. 

The research “identified the tangible presence of England’s slavery past in buildings, houses, streets, industrial heritage, urban fabrics and rural landscapes”. The report states: "The transatlantic slavery economy was invested in the built environment of the local area in housing, civic society organisations, churches, village halls, farms, shooting lodges, hotels." As an example, Nunnington in North Yorkshire has been included because a slaver built a school and houses there.

Completed last summer, just after the toppling of statue of Edward Colston, the report is more comprehensive than the National Trust review limited to stately homes, but still does not address all "tombs, monuments and memorials of individuals and families made wealthy from associations with the Atlantic slave economy"

Historic England said the audit would “identify significant gaps in knowledge that can be targeted ... to produce a more complete picture of the impact of Atlantic slavery on the built environment in England”

Conservative MP Nigel Mills has accused the report of being a "Waste of time", claiming: “What happened hundreds of years ago was wrong. But we don’t need to constantly berate ourselves for it.”

Read more here and here.  Download the report here.

The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

5/11/2020

 
Picture
The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery is a new book by Michael Taylor. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, 800,000 enslaved people continued to work in the British colonies producing sugar and other commodities for the home market. Slavery remained central to Britain’s economic and strategic interests, and resistance to further reform meant a 26 year delay to the abolition of slavery in the colonies. This was led by “The West India Interest”, a pro-slavery elite involving wealthy planters, hundreds of MPs, civil servants, financiers, landowners, clergymen, judges and military chiefs, including publisher John Murray, The Spectator magazine, William Gladstone, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and George Canning. Taylor explains that racism went hand-in-hand with the business, because people needed a way to rationalise slavery to themselves. They were helped by clergy who associated white and lighter skins with Christian concepts of “goodness” and purity and black skin with darkness and evil.

This review says: "Taylor’s magnificent book opens a window onto a most shameful commerce." Another reviewer comments: "In an era when black history is at last being given its rightful due, Taylor’s potent book shows why slavery took root as an essential part of British national life and why to remember it otherwise is 'misleading and self-serving'”.

Read more here.

A Response to the National Trust report on links to slavery

23/9/2020

 
With the help of advisor and founding trustee, Dr Clifford Hill, MJR has written a response to the recent publication by the National Trust of a report showing connections between 93 of its historic places and colonialism and historic slavery.
The report is welcomed, particularly the statement: “We believe that only by honestly and openly acknowledging and sharing those stories can we do justice to the true complexity of past, present and future, and the sometimes uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history since the 16th century or even earlier.” 
The National Trust say that 29 of the properties now in their care have direct links with colonial slavery and the slave trade, and about one third of all their properties have some kind of connection to colonialism. The hope is expressed that the National Trust research will lead to the establishment of a positive programme of dealing with the vast number of buildings, statues and plaques that have links with British colonial history and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Read the full response here. Read the National Trust report here.

Enslaved - a new TV series on the transatlantic slave trade

15/9/2020

 
Enslaved is a six-episode docuseries that explores 400 years of human trafficking from Africa to the New World by following the efforts of Diving with a Purpose, as they search for and locate six slave ships that went down with their human cargo. These modern day adventures serve as a springboard to tell the stories of the ideology, economics and politics of slavery, while also celebrating stories of resistance, the cultures left behind and the culture that we live in.

​Co-presented by Samual L. Jackson and Afua Hirsch, Enslaved is showing in the US and Canada in September and on BBC2 in October.
​

How the shadow of slavery still hangs over global finance

25/8/2020

 
This article by Phillip Roscoe asserts that the transatlantic slave trade "pioneered a new kind of finance, secured on the bodies of the powerless. Today, the arcane products of high finance, targeting the poor and troubled as profit opportunities for the already-rich, still bear that deep unfairness." The slaver's banking system was based on the system of financialisation developed by Florentine banking dynasties of the 15th century which gave rise to money as we know it now. The "obscene novelty" of the slavers’ innovation was that this financial value was secured on human bodies.

​Slave traders also pioneered the use of insurance as a means of guaranteeing the financial value of the their commodities.  It was the infamous Zong Trial of 1783, when slavers tried to claim insurance on lost cargo of humans, which exposed the toxic relationship between finance and slavery. Contemporary finance is "still riddled with regimes of dominance and exploitation at work". Read the full article here.
<<Previous

    MJR News

    The latest information, views and news from MJR.

    Please read our Third Party Disclaimer.

    Categories

    All
    After The Flood
    Anniversary
    Article
    #BlackLivesMatter
    Blog
    Campaigners
    Class
    Comment
    Coronavirus
    Education
    Empire
    Event
    Exhibition
    Film
    History
    Inequality
    Information
    Injustice
    Legacy
    News
    Privilege
    Production
    Publication
    Racism
    Reparation
    Report
    Research
    Resources
    Response
    Review
    Slavery
    Windrush

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014

    RSS Feed

| Home | About | Legacy | Stories | Work | Projects |After the Flood | Resources | Exhibition | Who's Who | Contact | News | Support |
MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION. REGISTERED CHARITY NO. 1161441
© COPYRIGHT MJR 2021. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.