S4, E10 Slavery and British Development

'Slavery and British Development'.

Speakers: 

• Bronwen Everill, Cambridge University 
• Jennifer Adam, Bank of England. 

Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

What is Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice?

These podcasts are recordings from the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice lecture series 2023/24, 2022/23, 2021/22 and 2020/21, a visiting lecture series coordinated by Professor of Development Studies, Professor James Putzel and Dr Laura Mann.

The Cutting Edge series provides students and guests with fascinating insights into the practical world of international development. Renowned guest lecturers share their expertise and invite discussion on an exciting range of issues, from climate change policy, to pressing humanitarian crises. In 2020, the series took place online, enabling us to host fantastic speakers from around the world and to stream the lectures on YouTube, opening them up to a global audience. Now we are back in person but still recording the sessions to share with our global audience.

SPEAKER 0
So welcome everybody back to the Cutting Edge lecture series. I hope you all had really wonderful winter breaks and you were able to relax and not just study. Um, it's a pleasure to to welcome you to this week's session, which is about the role of slavery in British development and more broadly, about the role of slavery in establishing the global economy. Um, this is a topic that's new this year, and I think it's a really important topic. Uh, and when I was thinking about this panel, I had kind of three aims in mind. And the first is I wanted to draw attention to the kind of intellectual impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on knowledge production within this country. Uh, because of those protests and because of the legacy of George Floyd's murder, we had a big momentum in this country towards investigating the kind of institutional legacies of slavery and colonialism within some British institutions, including the Bank of England, but also the National Trust, The Guardian and a lot of universities. Um, this kind of created little bits of money for historians to do research on the role of slavery in British capitalism and British mainstream institutions, but it also created quite a politicised environment for these historians. Um, so they, you know, they were working in quite difficult circumstances in some senses. And also many of them were on temporary contracts. So, you know, it was a moment of funding, but also a moment of kind of precarity for them as well. So because of their efforts and because of the protests and because of the historians involved, we do have some great research from that movement. And we also have a bit more public acknowledgement and public awareness of these issues within the UK. So one of the things I wanted to draw your attention to before we start is that Maya Bullen, who is our events and communications officer, made this map, which includes various places where you can learn about the history of slavery within London and within the UK. It includes the Bank of England exhibition, which Jenni is going to talk about in her presentation. Uh, the second aim of this panel today is to get you guys to think about the global context of development. Every country, when it develops, there's a global history to that country's development. So British development didn't just happen because British capitalists and workers were kind of becoming more efficient and reinvesting in the British economy and driving industrialisation. It happened because of the use of of global resources through colonialism, through slavery, and through the creation of a kind of global context, global system that benefited British commercial and political interests. So I kind of want us to use the case of Britain to think about that more broadly in the context of contemporary development. And the last thing I hope that this panel gets us to think about is the kind of historical legacies and path dependencies of that period, okay, how those kinds of inequalities have been reproduced over time, both in terms of the kind of advantages, advantages of formally colonising powers, as well as the disadvantages of formerly colonised powers, that when these new countries gained their independence in the 50s and 60s, it didn't necessarily mean economic independence. Right? We're still in this very asymmetrical world. Um, so we do have two wonderful guests to help us think about these things and discuss these things. We first have a Jennifer Adam, who is the curator from the Bank of England. She is responsible both for the exhibitions and displays, but also overseeing the historical collections of the bank. She was formerly at the British Museum. Um, and she was talking about how the British Museum was kind of investigating some of these links as early as 2007. And when she came to the bank, uh, I think, I don't know, when did you join the bank? Oh, uh, 2010, 2010. There was a bit of institutional inertia. Sure. So, yeah, but obviously in 2020, it created this kind of moment for for the bank to acknowledge these issues. And she's going to talk about the exhibition and sort of the public, uh, awareness and public reception of this exhibition. Um, then we have Bronwen, everyone who is a historian and the director of African studies at the University of Cambridge. She's a comparative economic historian, and she's done research looking. At the internet. Interconnections between West Africa, the United States, British Empire, looking at the history of slavery and abolition. Also the global history of humanitarianism, and I think the history of the kind of business of slavery and abolition as well. So thank you both very, very much for coming and speaking with us. We're going to give each speaker 20 to 25 minutes, and then we'll open up for questions from the audience. So without further ado, let's welcome them with a round of applause. And I'll invite Jennifer.

SPEAKER 3
You very much for that introduction, and thank you for having me here today. I'm going to talk about the context and development of the current exhibition at the Bank of England Museum, slavery in the Bank, which outlines the links between the Bank of England and, by extension, the City of London and the British economy and transatlantic slavery. Now, essentially, this is a modified version of a talk that I give in gallery at least monthly. I've got some slides here to show what's in the museum. Uh, I'll give a bit of a background on why we embarked on this project, and a quick overview of the exhibition itself, and why this work will continue to be important for the Bank of England well beyond the run of this exhibition. Um, we close the exhibition on the 22nd of February, so there's still time to visits if you are able to make it to the Bank of England Museum. Now. The exhibition opens in April 22nd, but the work for it began a few years before that. In line with increasing work in the museum and academic sectors towards applying anti-colonial approaches to displays and storytelling. Now, this is a kind of response that the kind of work that was going on in other major institutions who were examining their own connections to transatlantic slavery, notably universities like Glasgow University in 2018 and several others since then, including Cambridge University. Um, looking into the sources of the money that had helped grow and benefit organisations over the years. Now the Bank of England has a slightly different position in that, in that it was handling the money itself. So in the past, the bank's stance had been that it had no direct connections to transatlantic slavery, whatever that means, that it wasn't directly engaged in the trade and that those of its founders and early directors who had business interests in the West India trades, or were directly engaged in transatlantic slavery, did so as their own private business affairs, not in their capacity as an official of the Bank of England, but follow the money. There are some very clear connections. We knew at that time of several early officials of the bank who were engaged in the trade in one way or another. Um, many of you will know that on abolition in 1833, it was the enslavers and not the enslaved, who were given compensation for the loss of their assets. The bank played a role in administering that compensation. And if you think of the model of investment in the banks, so people held Bank of England stock, that money was then this is putting it extremely simply. The bank was founded to lend money to the government. So at that time you have money that's being funnelled through the Bank of England into all kinds of different national projects. Now, as you've alluded to already, it's fair to say that there is almost always institutional nervousness about looking into this topic, not just for the bank, for any institution. It's highly political. There are many worries about offending people, about opening an organisation up for criticism, for doing too much, for not doing enough, for doing it in the wrong way. And sometimes the fear of getting it wrong and inviting criticism makes it difficult to start, especially when museum and heritage is not for the Bank of England. For example, when a museum and the heritage side of it is not a core part of the organisation's raison d'etre. So for the first couple of years of doing this, it was very much in the background of other projects, gathering information about what we have in our museum collections that was related to this part of the Bank of England's history starting to work threads into other projects and exhibitions just where we could, so that we were quietly putting it in there. Of course, it gathered momentum in early 2020 with an internal project by the Bank of England ethnic Minority Network. So that's a staff network to highlight the bank's links to transatlantic slavery. And so we worked with them, the museum and archive teams, we worked with them, uh, and it was intended to be an internal staff project with a staff of 4500. There's certainly a lot of interests. Uh, but of course, the events of 2020 catalysed many organisations around the country, around the world to really, uh, look into the subjects, look into their connections more deeply. And that gave us the real push to create an exhibition in the museum around the subjects. Um, and we decided that when we eventually reopened the museum, which was going to be in April 2022, after a very long period of closure during lockdown, we would open with an exhibition, slavery in the Bank. Now, one of the biggest lines of enquiry that summer was the question of who we commemorate on our walls and in our public spaces, looking at these portraits and sculptures in use so that was a key thread of the exhibition from the very beginning. Um, looking at these individuals connected with the bank and how they helped shape or reflected transatlantic slavery over time. Um, the the exhibition also looks at the bank's role as a financial institution in the period and the services that it offered to the government and to other merchants, traders, businesses and organisations, to private companies and individuals. And how that brought it into context brought the Bank of England into contact with the trade in the enslaved. And at the heart of that are details of how that led the bank into the ownership of two sugar plantations in Grenada, including the 599 men, women and children who were enslaved there. So that's what I'm going to cover for the rest of this talk. Now, to give a bit of context to this, going back to 1694 and the founding of the Bank of England, it was established first and foremost to be the banker to the. Governments. There was a distinct lack of funds. What changes? Uh, they needed a more structured approach to, uh, credits, rather than loans from Goldsmiths bankers, which were proving to be a bit chaotic and unreliable. So the Bank of England was founded as a joint stock company. Until 1946 it was a private company. Money was raised by public subscriptions. The public invested the first £1.2 million, and that money was then lent to the government. So that's nearly £200 million in today's money. Um, I'll mention some sums of money throughout this talk. There are issues with calculating historical sums of money in today's today's language and today's money, but it gives you an idea of the order of magnitude, if nothing else. Um, the subscribers were buying the bank's capital stock. It was incorporated as a joint stock company and was a private company until 1946. Even though as it grew throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it was taking on more of the role of a national bank, acting as a to manage economic crises, to stabilise the City of London when the inevitable bumps and bubbles were coming along, and providing banking services for the government. So it's important to keep this model of ownership in line in mind, um, the company owned by its investors, because the governance of that company is connected to its ownership. To qualify for election as a director of the bank, one had to have invested £2,000 in bank stock in the mid 1700s. That's the equivalent of about £360,000 today. So keep that in mind when I'm talking about the connections of some of these individuals. I've mentioned the research done on some of the subjects of portraits, and that was a key part of the preparation for the exhibition. Uh, it's all too easy to get used to just walking past portraits of white men in wigs. Uh, they're right there in our public spaces. We might not know what they're there for. Uh, but we have to know that's a key part of these projects is understanding why they're commemorated and whether they should be. Um, so I'm going to focus on four individuals here who represent different aspects of the trade and how it changed. Now in the, um, this goes to cuts to the heart of the question of whether you keep these portraits on display or if you take them off display and put them away. In our case, these portraits were in different private spaces around the Bank of England. They were removed from display in early 2021. We'll keep them in our store. They're not going anywhere. And arguably by putting them in this exhibition and contextualising them, we're sharing more of this information about these individuals than ever has been before. But this is not a comprehensive survey of how the slave trade was shaped. It's highly subjective to the Bank of England since these are four of its historical officials. So I'm going to begin with here's the exhibition here in situ in the Bank of England. Um, I'm going to begin with Robert Clayton, who appears here in the robes of the Lord Mayor of London. He was a prominent financier of the late 1600s, and he's shown here in the regalia of the Lord Mayor of London. Um, in 1679, Clayton married Martha Trott, whose father settled on him upon the marriage 75 acres of tobacco estates in Bermuda. So he was an enslaver himself, but for nine years he was also a principal member of the board of the Royal Africa Company, an organisation that was renowned for the brutality of its regime. Between 1672 and 1698, the Rack held a monopoly on the trade of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas, and in return it was trading textiles, cowrie shells, which incidentally disrupted local economies across West Africa. Um copper firearms from Europe at the rack. Being a royal company, it's protected by the Royal Navy, of course, with royal patronage and investments. It is thought to have trafficked around 150,000 souls between 1672 and 1720. So that's more than any other single entity that was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Um, during Clayton's tenure, uh, around 44,000 people were trafficked, and he doubled his investment in the rack. So he made a lot of money from his initial investment that qualified him as a director. His money is famously went to philanthropic causes. So this is a legacy that Christ's Hospital and Saint Thomas Hospital are working with today, um, especially since 2020. And we feature him here because Clayton was a director of the Bank of England in the very early years of the bank. So remember that to have qualified, you had to have invested your money into the Bank of England. So I move to Gilbert Heathcote, who again appears in the robes of Lord Mayor of London. It's quite a stepping stone for. City officials. He was one of the men who was charged with finding the initial investors for the Bank of England. So when the bank was set up, he was one of the people who went and found the people who would make that £1.2 million of seed money, if you like, for the bank. He was instrumental in getting the whole notion of the national bank off the ground, and he served as director and twice as the governor of the bank. Heathcote was an incredibly successful businessman. He had business interests around the Baltic, but he was also an agent for Jamaica. So he was dealing with remittances to and from the Caribbean, um, and a leading importer from Jamaica. By the 1690s, he sponsored at least one slaving voyage, and in 1698, when the Royal Africa Company lost its monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, in large part it was due to the lobbying of figures like Heathcote and others. The deregulation of the trades opened it up to any merchants who wanted to participate. Um, and that led to a 300% increase in trading activity over the next 15 years. Not only did Heathcote serve as a commissioner for the bank, he was also a director for many years, so he would have invested a significant amount of money in the Bank of England. Um, to qualify as election for governor, you had to invest about £4,000. Now, on his death, he was said to be the richest commoner in England and left an estate of £700,000. That's about £100 million today and left £1,000 to charity. Now, philanthropy cannot possibly offset the debt caused by this kind of trade, but I think it famously, Alexander Pope satirised him for his meanness. I think it gives a measure of the man. So the opening up of the trades set the scene for figures like Humphrey Morris, who was renowned amongst his contemporaries, as well as named by his biographer David Mitchell as the Prince of slavers. In the course of his career, his ships made 103 slaving voyages, trafficking, trafficking around 30,000 enslaved people, more than any other individual merchant in London. He had an extremely successful business model. Now, while the RAC operated out of fortified trading posts along the west coast of Africa, Um Morris had a fleet of ships that was continuously in moving in motion trading market information as they went, and constantly in communication with London as well. Now, the reason we know so much about Morris is that after his suspiciously precipitous death in 1731, it was discovered that his business was in fact failing and and in complete disarray was being propped up by embezzlement from his daughters and also from the Bank of England. Now, Morris had been the director of the bank for many years, and he was the governor between 1727 and 1729. And during that time he defrauded the bank of some £29,000. So in an attempt to claw back some of the money from his estate, the bank confiscated all of his business papers, including powers of attorney logbooks, correspondence with the ship's captains, and altogether it gives a really revealing account of Morris's business, not just his business model, but how he was treating the enslaved in his, um, uh, in his operations. So, for example, he gives directives to his captains to allow people food and fresh water and allow them to exercise on the deck. This is nothing to do with regarding their their humanity or looking after them as individuals. He's merely interested in keeping his investments in good shape until he can pass it on the other side of the Atlantic. So again, it's a it's a coldly brutal, um, picture of the trade. But the papers remain at the Bank of England, the Morris papers, and they can be consulted by researchers at the Bank of England archive by appointments. Now, the last person I'll mention is William Manning, who was governor of the Bank of England from 1810 to 1812. Now he was a West Indian merchant. He also inherited plantations in Sanquhar. He was a financier, providing financial services for slave owners like mortgages and loans, and enslaver himself. He was also a key voice in support of the development of the West India Docks, and that was a project that vastly expanded the Port of London to receive slave produced goods from the Caribbean. So we're talking tobacco, cotton, sugar, things that were hugely important commodities at a decreased cost because of the cheap labour, um, and was making them more available and more in demand than ever before. Manning was also, like a number of other Bank of England governors and officials at the time he was an MP. He was thus a key voice in support of the trade in the House of Commons, lobbying to protect and expand the interests of transatlantic slavery at the highest level. So now is the time when I ask you to think about the timing of all of this, because this is at the turn. West India Docks opened in 1801. Um, yeah, sure. Transatlantic slavery is legal at that point, but it's not so simple to say that this was just the the the business of the time. Sugar was one of the key drivers for demand for enslaved labour. As such, it had been the subject of consumer boycotts since the 1780s. Women may not have had to vote at that point, but they certainly as household managers, they could exercise some economic power. The House of Commons debated in 1776 whether the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and rights of men, and we see the impact of black abolitionists of the period. The movement for abolition is really building in this period. There was an active movement by the 1780s. 1792 saw the establishment of the Sierra Leone Company, um, still with the concept of emancipation there. But in this period, London is drastically expanding its capacity for slave produced goods, shaping the city around its trade. And it's not just London either. It's not just the Port of London. Bristol, too, is shaped around the trade. And then from 1740, Liverpool begins to dominate in this period in this area. Think of the sugar trade in Glasgow and the docks there, and then urban trade urban centres like Manchester, famous for famous for its cotton industry. But where does the cotton? Come from? It's coming from the Caribbean. Cotton from the Caribbean. Brought to Manchester. Made into textiles. Sold back to West Africa, from where the enslaved are brought to the Caribbean. Then the sugar and the cotton back to London. That's a triangular trade right there. The country homes purchased from all of that money, they're all around the country. So, for example, think of the work done by the National Trust in the last few years to identify these stories and these threads. Think of a place like bath. Yes. It's an an ancient spa, but by the late 1700s, it's a playground for the wealthy of Bristol. So thus far, I've mostly spoken about individuals connected with the bank and the way that they illustrate various aspects of British involvement with transatlantic slavery. So an officer of the Royal Africa Company, someone who helped you regulate the trade. Uh, Morris, who as an individual profited hugely. Uh, Manning, inheriting wealth and property and people as chattels and lobbying for the trade at the highest levels. But what of the institution itself? Now as offices of the Bank of England, they had invested significant amounts of their own money. Um, the bank is at the centre of a really complex set of financial relationships in this period. It's not only a banker to the government, it's also providing financial services for thousands of individuals and businesses, loans, credit and accounts. And throughout the 18th century, we see it taking on a role within the City of London to stabilise crises and bubbles. So as a pertinent example, we've got the South Sea Company here. I'm sure most of you will have heard of the sassy company The Sassy Bubble of 1720, which was one of the most significant early financial bubbles when the share price of the sassy company rose dramatically. Uh, people were investing in it, hugely determined to make a fast buck. And then it collapsed, losing, causing many investors to lose catastrophic sums of money. So Isaac Newton famously lost huge amounts of money in sassy company. Um, the sassy company was a trading company. Uh, it had part of its remit was to manage part of the national debt in a similar way to the Bank of England lending money to the government. But that value was heavily based on the South Sea Company having been awarded the ciento. So that's a monopoly to provide to supply enslaved African people to the Spanish colonies of South America. When the South Sea Company burst. The Bank of England stepped in to stabilise and prop the company up, as its total failure would have been even more catastrophic to the City of London, and the banks supported the company for some years afterwards. Also taking on the management of its part of the national debt. Now as such, that has in the past been a point where we've spoken about how the bank consolidated its role as a national bank, as a lender of last resort, that kind of thing. But it also demonstrates how integral the notion of slavery was to the financial system of the time. So many investors and companies depended completely on that model, and politically it could not be abolished without massive compensation. As a provider of loans and credits, this is another display from the museum. The bank provided services to financial services to many companies and that included, in 1772, uh, a Scottish company called Alexander and Sons, uh, during a credit crisis. The bank provided credit to them and that loan was based secured on three properties an estate in Scotland and two in Grenada. In 1774, Alexander and Sons defaulted on the loan and the company failed and the bank, amongst other creditors, took possession of the security. Now they would have wanted to sell the properties on to try and recoup their losses, not to maintain the plantations as a going concern. But this process was heavily complicated by the American Revolutionary War, during which Grenada was recaptured by the French and then back to Britain in 17 1783. And again, this illustrates the, um, effects of colonialism, where you have, um, uh, Caribbean territories just being fought over as a resource by European countries. After that, it took five years to buy out the various creditors until the bank took sole possession in 1788. Now, when you have a transaction like this, most often it will be, well, very often it will be recorded in the minutes of the courts of the executive of an organisation. And it may just be such and such a decision was made. The plantations were sold, this, that and the other thing, it's rare to have the fine detail, the nitty gritty, the many hundreds of documents that supports these transactions and these events. But during the research for this exhibition, we came across a cache of documents which hadn't been fully catalogued, um, relating to the Bachelor and Sherman estates in Grenada, which the bank had taken possession of. Um and as part of this included documents, correspondence, deeds for the lands, powers of attorney, uh, and inventories. Uh, and we have an inventory from 1788, uh, at the time that the bank was preparing to sell on the properties, again, not only the property and the building assets, but also the other chattels of the estates, including the names, duties and the assigned monetary value for 599 men, women and children who were enslaved on the estates. In fact, not even the names always there are. There's a listing for two infants not yet baptised, not named, but still assigned a monetary value for their potential as working adults. For me, that document does two things. It gives the names of the people who are at the heart of this story. Um. It's the kind of detail that's all too often lost from these books of court minutes, these executive committee minutes that record the occasion of a transaction. If not, it's detailed, but it also so it makes these identifiable individuals identifiable, but in its coldness as a financial record. It also strips them of their humanity, reducing people to a line on a balance sheet. Now, we reflected that in the graphic design of the exhibition. Most of the exhibition around the outside is a very bold, yellowy orange red colour. You can't avoid it, you can't walk past it, you can't miss it. It's right there in your face telling you what happens. But the central portion of the exhibition, we took a more muted approach to the design. And you'll see in the banner above that, we've included the names of all the individuals who were named in this inventory, because this document really encapsulates the violence of transatlantic slavery. People transmuted into a financial transaction. It's a document created to make a sale. So at this point, if we were in the gallery, I'd point to a reproduction of a beautiful group portrait. You can just see it here. Um, it's a it's a lovely portrait. It's a Gainsborough from the Tate. Um, it shows a man called James Bailey with his wife and his children, including a babe in arms. It's a few years. It was painted a few years before Bailey purchased the Bakelite and Sherman estates from the Bank of England. But he the money that was used to pay for this portrait, to commission this portrait would have come from his business in the West Indies. Uh, his business in enslavement. Um. Bailey purchased the lands from the Bank of England. He paid £15 million for the lands and the enslaved workforce. But there is his legacy in that portrait is from his power and his profits, his children, his descendants. And then think again. If that line in the inventory, uh, infants not yet baptised, you can see it's just up there. So that's not as any kind of justification or excavation that the £15 million that Bailey paid for the estates meant that the Bank of England didn't. Uh, it made an overall loss on their initial loan. And I'm not going to give details of similar transactions that have taken place at other banks, but this situation is absolutely not unique. Lenders would frequently accept property as security of a loan. And if you look to the UCL's Legacies of British Slave Ownership database, you will see that many of those who were awarded compensation in 1833 were given so as mortgages in possession. So that's the more technical description for the position that the bank find itself in. And that also incidentally included people who were Bank of England officials in the 1830s. But throughout this period, from the 1600s to abolition in the 1830s, for hundreds of years, transatlantic slavery was a key contributor to the economy. The triangular trade shaped modern Britain from the growth of the early modern economy, the foundation of the economy that we have today, and we live with the racialized legacies of this today. It's evident in the streets around us in the City of London, the names of the places that the Jamaica Wine Bar, West India Key. We see this trade in plain sight, the streets that are named after prominent figures, uh, from of enslavement. Our last thoughts. The compensation given to the owners of the enslaved. That was the sum of £20 million. This was not money that the government of the time had just sitting around. It was nearly half of all the tax revenues of that year. Most of the money was raised as a loan from a consortium of financiers, and a quarter of that sum was given as a form of government stock. The 3.5% reduced annuities that was administered by the Bank of England. The specific type of financial instrument used to administer that debt means that it wasn't fully paid off until 2015, so that means that taxes paid by the descendants of the enslaved effectively paid for that loan. Um, not effectively. They paid for that loan and they paid the enslavers for their own emancipation. So I've used up most of my time now, so I'll finish by saying that's at the moment there's compensation warrants and trading companies, and I'll finish by saying that at the moment, as well as the exhibition itself, we also have a number of these orange intervention panels around the museum, too, at areas where the narrative story of the history of the bank touches on the theme of the exhibition, but might have been a bit too tangential to include. So, for example, the one on the right, we have a paper receipts. It's, um, the, the very early days of paper money of banknotes, as we think of them now, were essentially a form of receipts that goldsmith bankers would issue from money that had been deposited with them. It became easier to trade that receipts than to go and get the gold and then pass that on. So we had a number of goldsmiths notes in the exhibition. They happen to be from a bank called Clayton and Morris. Remember him who was speaking at about at the beginning, Robert Clayton. That was his bank. So these panels pick up on some of those threads, um, throughout the museum. Now, this exhibition is running until the 22nd of February, at which point, after nearly two years, it's going to be replaced with a new one. But it's not leaving the museum entirely. At the same time as we put the new exhibition in, we will also be updating a number of other spaces to make sure that this story is part of the permanent displays in the museum. We cannot let that fall out of institutional memory again. Um, it's we'll be talking about the, uh, role of the early directors, the bank's ownership of the Grenada plantation, and also the bank's role in administering the compensation scheme. These things are too important to admit. Transatlantic slavery is not something that we can dismiss as a historical artefact, as a niche area of black history that doesn't touch on all of our lives because it's a part of British history, and its legacy is connecting many and varied parts aspects of our birth, our education, our employment, health and financial lives. And it's hugely important for our institutions to recognise this. That's why we did this project in the first place, and I'm proud that we've been one of the first financial institutions to do so in this manner, with a public exhibition on the topic, but I look forward to continuing that conversation after the exhibition closes, because there's still so much to say on the topic. But for now, thank you very much. There are more resources on the museum's web page, which is part of the Bank of England's webpage. Um, come and see us.

SPEAKER 5
You know, do a little wiggle. Um, thank you. All for being here. It's like getting late on a Friday afternoon, and I'm sure there are more exciting places to be in London on a Friday afternoon, so I appreciate it. Um, and thank you for the invitation to come and talk about my work on West Africa and its relationship to questions of slavery and economic development. So historical slavery has largely been understood, um, as a form of highly exploitative labour extraction embedded in a socially and often racially stratified society. But there are two other aspects of slavery beyond labour. Um, as as we've been hearing about enslaved people, as commodities and as assets, and a growing body of academic scholarship is highlighting fruitful research avenues which bring this into wider view that enslaved people were simultaneously labour, commodities and assets for the people who claim to own them, was crucial to the societies in which slavery was practised. As research on, for instance, the development of credit networks enslaved societies in the US South has shown we still understand surprisingly little about the ways that slavery and economic and the economic consequences of things like abolition contributed to development and underdevelopment in the global economy. So the most obvious relationship, sorry, the most obvious function of slavery was as a system of labour around the world. Enslaved people worked for others, creating value and doing work that their owners would not have to do, or which their owners could not find enough people to do cheaply enough for it to be worth it to them. Enslaved people were also a form of commodity. They were something that created value through its exchange middlemen and some middle women, as I'll talk about, made money from the sale of enslaved people and the ancillary services around that exchange. As the scale of slavery expanded, growing like other commodity trades cotton, coal, oil, gold from a luxury exclusive to a small number of extremely wealthy people to a necessary component of global production, more parts of the economy began to hinge on the slave trade, and slavery was also a system of investment. Enslaved people were people, and they were also labourers. But what set them apart from other contract labourers was their function as an asset. Enslaved people around the Atlantic world were used as collateral for loans. They were mortgaged and they could be hired out as an income stream, which could itself be collateralised. And this function eluded the abolitionists, who we'll talk about in a little bit. While the commodity role was the hardest to disentangle from the economy, the investment role was the hardest to disentangle from society, culture and politics. So Adam Smith and other political economists had a blind spot about the work done by enslaved people when they wrote about economic development. In a passage where Smith describes the reason for British success in creating wealth in the Americas, his focus is on the market for wage labour, not enslaved labourers. Slavery, he thought, was a backward social institution rather than something that could be explained by economics. In fact, it wasn't until the work of Eric Williams, the scholar from Trinidad in the 1940s, that the economic value of enslaved labour to the economy was really raised in a systematic way. Instead, people campaigning against the slave trade and against the use of enslaved labour on plantations in the US, Caribbean and South America actually argued that it was more expensive to use and slave labour than wage labour, because they saw it as part of an older feudal version of society. An important part of making that argument was pointing to the existence of slavery in ancient societies in Egypt, Greece and Rome, but also to the existence of slavery and societies that they considered backwards at the time the Ottoman Empire and in Africa. Essentially, they said, slavery cannot be part of the modern economy because Africa has slavery and Africa is not modern. The Ottoman Empire has slavery, and the Ottoman Empire is not modern. But in fact, the type of slave trade that Africa, Europe and America and the Americas were engaged in was was innovative and modern and was based on a misunderstanding about the role of slavery in African political economy. The Atlantic slave trade was based on a commercial bargain that benefited people willing to engage in a dehumanising traffic. Like a lot of morally dubious human activities, a set of cultural norms that have risen over centuries in Africa as well as in Europe. In ancient Rome, which formed the basis for a lot of the emerging ideas of the European early modern period. Enslavement was a result of warfare. Enslaved people were then sold around the empire, but could also buy their freedom, be granted freedom, or rise in the ranks of the military. A similar form of enslavement existed throughout large parts of Western Africa. The collapse of several large West African states in the 14th and 15th centuries accelerated enslavement as a war, as warring successor states made slaves of their enemies. The Portuguese and Dutch initially observed the slave trade within Africa and thought that they had finally found a trade they could get involved with. They had been struggling to find a niche for their own products in Africa, but they needed something to trade so that they could export the gold that they identified as a good opportunity to export. They assumed that the Africans they were trading with were all pretty much the same. That's where the racism comes in, that they were trading their countrymen simply because they had the same skin colour. That's their assumption. And that since some people did it, it must be legal and that if it was legal and yet so obviously odious, then Europeans shouldn't feel too bad about making money from selling people with obviously backward views of morality. So that was the sort of misunderstanding that started it all. In the 16th and 17th centuries, there were numerous attempts by African states to end their involvement in the slave trade. Slavery was legal in most African societies, just as it was across the world. But British traders, as well as their predecessors the Portuguese, the French, the Danish and the Dutch understood the legality of slavery within certain certain circumstances to mean that all forms of enslavement were legal. Political leaders who attempted to explain these circumstances were ignored. For instance, a petition from the region of modern Angola in the 17th century attempted to use Catholic doctrine to end the slave trade. Political leaders who attempted to block slave trading outright found themselves at war with European monopoly companies, or found themselves replaced by European backed coups that put regimes friendly to slave trading into power. This was the case in 18th century Whydah in modern Benin, where a reformist king was thwarted by the mercantile elite who were benefiting from the slave trade and their European allies. And crucial to this process was the repeated claim that because slavery was allowed in Africa, the Europeans were doing nothing wrong by taking advantage of the institution. So, as we heard from Jenee, what began as the trafficking of around 500 people a year in the early 1500s grew to 80,000 a year by the end of the 1700s, largely through innovations in the trade. The growth that was was made possible by particularly to the late 18th century or mid to late 18th century innovations, and those were deregulation and the emergence of new forms of credit. Um, and I will just show you some other, um, books on this topic. Oh, sorry. I'll skip ahead. Just in case you're taking notes. So the gradual rise of independent or separate traders affected the relationships that had formed along the coast and challenged the primacy of the state monopolies on trade for both African and European participants in the slave trade. Over the course of the 18th century, more and more trade was conducted on behalf of individuals rather than as royal agents. So if we're thinking in terms of who who is benefiting from the quote unquote, economic development of slavery, it's sort of shifting from being a royal monopoly in Europe and in Africa to being more focussed on individuals. Both African and European individual traders hope to cut out the middleman and reduce the infrastructure costs of the old ways of trading. No permanent establishment greatly reduced customs payments and taxes for trading privileges. The groups in places that have been shut out of the trade before 1752, when the Royal African Company's monopoly on the company of merchants trading to Africa monopoly finally, and saw their fortunes increased dramatically over the next 30 years, as the proliferation of independent traders and the growing numbers of ports involved in the slave trade led to an increase in competition, but also an increase in the amount of the slave price going directly to the seller. So, as the historian William Pettigrew has argued, it was in fact the debates over the end of the monopoly and the expansion of the so-called independent traders that had the biggest influence on the exponential growth of the slave trade in the 18th century. On the commercial side, the separate and independent traders were able to operate with much lower levels of investment. They did not need to build infrastructure. They relied on the Royal African Company and Company of Merchants trading to Africa's existing infrastructure in terms of forts along the coast, and they had no intention of developing relationships with African leaders interested in expanding mining or commercial agriculture. Their capital could be raised on a per voyage basis, especially by the end of the 18th century and into the 19th century, and they relied on a much more impersonal set of credit relationships than the Royal African Company had. Crucially, credit facilitated the purchase of enslaved people as assets. Investment assets that generated a return that could be used as collateral for other credit to invest in business ventures. Send children to elite institutions, name buildings, buy land, buy bank shares in order to support long term and long distance trade, and to encourage the growth of slave sales in the Caribbean. Especially new forms of credit were created in the London market. So Roger Anstey described the capital required for a slaving voyage in the late 18th century as being roughly the British slaving voyages, being roughly £8,500. Um, which, as you've guessed from these earlier comparisons, was a lot, uh, according, uh. So by 1770, credit most likely underpinned the vast majority of slave sales in British America with the terms upon which slaves were being bought, often reaching 12 months or longer so planters could buy slaves on credit, uh, assuming that they were going to make enough money from selling their crops at the end of the season. Um, but they could also then roll over that debt and accumulate, um, sort of new forms of capital. The rise of separate traders and private trading firms meant the British investors did not have the security that, for instance, a royal charter brings. This was a unique result in the British world, since French and Portuguese trading was still largely run through chartered monopolies. And it was Joseph and Zachary. Uh, of the Africans in the Industrial Revolution. Um, who has argued that it was the need for long term credit solutions for the slave trade that drove the development of modern credit financing in the London market. Resident traders in West Africa required large capital development financing. African traders to the interior were trusted with long term commodity credit. Plantation owners were able to finance the purchase of slaves. Consumers were able to buy slave produce commodities on terms of credit. So over the course of the 18th century, Britain shifted from being, as Stanley has written, a net importer of capital and primarily from the Dutch to a net exporter of capital, primarily to the New World colonies and the United States. With exploding demand for African labour to produce the sugar, rum, cotton and tobacco demanded around the Atlantic by consumers increasingly able to buy on credit. African slave traders were in turn extended more and more generous terms of credit, and those terms sort of extended to up to six months. And the collateral was typically upon somebody who could be sort of a stand in, um, for, uh, for the debt. So one way of seeing how important slavery was as an asset was how abolition dealt with this credit mechanism. When the music stopped and enslaved people as an asset class were no longer recognised, the government compensated slave owners, as we've already heard. Their capital was not at risk. It was guaranteed they were too big to fail. And this is where you can clearly see the impact of slavery on the economic development of the second half of the 19th century, where slaveholders were not compensated largely in Africa, economic development stagnated, where they were largely in Europe. It continued fairly smoothly. And because I'm a comparative economic historian, I had to go and see if there was a case that showed this, um, without relying on geographical determinism. Um, so these are just some books that touch on this. I thought I would throw this up there in case you're interested in the long history of that. Um, so I went to Senegal, which is one of the which is the only African country where compensation was paid, uh, in the same kinds of forms as it was paid in Europe. To think about how, uh, how that compensation process fed into development. So historians have debated the impact of abolition on West Africa's political and economic development for for decades. In part. The debate has been contentious because in the Atlantic system of enslavement, there were those three approaches that I mentioned before, um, and the trans the transition away from the Atlantic slave trading system across the 19th century affected the stakeholders in those three economic functions differently. So direct monetary compensation enabled many owners of enslaved people and investors, including institutional investors in enslavement, to pivot to new business opportunities with their capital. Since the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project created a database of the compensation claims for British owners of enslaved people, historians have turned to compensation payouts as a rich source for understanding the wider, long term connections between slavery and capitalism. Yet neither capitalism nor slavery was a process limited to the experience of the United States and Europe. Compensation in Senegal provides an opportunity for thinking comparatively about the possibilities and limitations of compensation in facilitating capitalist continuity within certain social groups or business enterprises, easing the transition for particular groups of investors in slavery, specifically those who use enslaved people as capitalised assets. So looking at the specific case of Senegalese compensated emancipation can highlight what is and is not shared across different experiences of the transition from slavery, from slavery based capitalism, enslaved people were part of the mix of securities that could generate loans, with which Senegalese businesses could expand their access to commercial goods needed to conduct trade in the interior. As the historian Barbara Salo put it, without slavery, labour could never be a capital asset because free labour could only be rented. So people were used to raise capital, and that was an important feature of slavery. So, for instance, in the case of Louise Pickard, who was a Senegalese businesswoman, in case anybody in Senegal is, it's um. Uh, for instance, in the case of Louise Picard, who is a Senegalese businesswoman and the daughter of a French notary and a Wolof mother, these notarial contracts from the archives in Dakar show that she was using the enslaved people that she and her children owned to raise money. Using a hybrid approach that mix together, Wolof rules about pawning with the emerging French use of notaries for financial transactions. She had taken out loans guaranteed by pawning five captives to another woman in the colony called Kati Michel. The enslaved captives were described as being held as surety against the loan. At the end of the terms of the loan, the five enslaved people were then resold from Kati Michel to Louise en Picard to discharge Louise. Debt to Kati. A few days after her visit to the notary to deal with her debt to Kati, Michel, another loan made to Louison was discharged through the sale of an enslaved captive to her creditor. Pierre Valentin took the enslaved 16 year old son, whom Louise Picard had inherited from her mother, to clear the loan, plus another 100 francs in cash that she still owed. Luisa's ability to pay the 100 francs in cash was possible because she had sold two enslaved women owned by her son, 17 year old Anna Gülen and 15 year old Kumba Laub. Although this was recorded as a sale in the notarial archives, the document was another pawn shop contract, specifying that they could both be redeemed for 700 francs, something that Louise Picard was not able to do. But what happens to those human capital assets? When slavery was legally abolished, as it was by the French in 1848, could compensated emancipation indemnity payments prevent any kind of sort of development shock from abolition? In 1849, the reason Picard complained that, quote, we can never, from the proceeds of the indemnity, form an annuity that can even approach the fruits that we collected from the labour of our captives. Today, some owners of captives find themselves debtors to traitors for fairly large sums. The creditor will seize the compensation. So French Revolution was decreed in the Revolution of 1848, had set aside 6 million francs in cash, 6 million in annuities bearing 5% interest, with one eighth of the compensation package set aside for the establishment of colonial banks. So in total over 365 francs were awarded to the claimants. In Senegal, which you can see is a tiny, tiny amount compared to other parts of the French Empire. So was abolition a shock to Senegal's developing economy? The numbers would seem to support this, at least in part. 37% of the claimants had identifiably Senegalese names, and these claimants greatly outnumbered the European names in claiming zero compensation because they had transferred their claims in the interest of debt repayment. Similarly, men were better represented amongst the very high compensation payments, while only one woman fell into that category, suggesting that men were able to buy up more of the debtors claims at a discount, or that they were awarded titles based on the reassignment of debt. But as was the case for the French slave holders who are indemnified in Senegal's case, compensated emancipation allowed some capitalists to withstand the shock. One third of the people included in a list of notables published in the monitor de Senegal independence in 1858 were compensation claimants. Their combined compensation claims amounted to more than 157,000 francs, and with those assets they had become or continued to be landlords, landowners, traders, dealers, merchants, work supervisors, mayoral deputies and property managers as they were listed in the in the newspaper Louisans. This extended family claimed over 6000 francs. Her son, Pierre Pan turned up as a representative, acting on behalf of an heiress in a civil claim in the 1870s. Her nephew was the famous Senegalese explorer Leopold Pan, who went to work as a groundnut merchant for the French firm of Morelli from Marie Torres. Pan continued to own property in Gori, which, judging from the sales in her neighbourhood, was valued at between 2000 and 5000 francs, and she rented out rooms to her formerly enslaved workers who had nowhere else to sell their labour, and who worried that moving to the mainland beyond French rule, they would risk enslavement. In urban Senegal, Labour as a capital asset was replaced by investment in urban property because rental income from real estate replaced the income streams from hiring out enslaved workers with nowhere else to live. Formerly enslaved labourers in Saint Louis or Goree were forced to live with their former owners and pay them rent. Um, and that's a picture of grey. So what were the consequences for capital when the legal acts that ended slavery included compensation? They entrenched an economic elite, but they also created some economic development in quotes as people reinvested in brick factories or in commodity exports, or in education of their children. These cases of compensated emancipation in Africa are extremely rare. The norm was to just abolish it and hope that people ran away from their owners. Um, what's called in the literature the slow death of slavery? So for people interested in the frontiers of development economics, I think this leads to a useful set of questions to turn to. Did the replacement of enslaved people with other forms of capital exacerbate inequality within states, as well as between them? What specific kinds of economic development were facilitated by slavery as a capital asset? What other units for analysing the history of economic development, other than the unit of the nation state, would be useful for capturing these changes in the 19th century and most pressingly, as we struggle to combat climate change, how can you abolish a toxic asset without either entrenching inequality between or within states?

UNKNOWN
Thank you.

SPEAKER 0
So thank you both. You've really sort of, uh, set the scene very nicely. And interestingly, I learnt a lot from both of your presentations and hopefully we have a lot of questions from students. Um, so does anybody have any questions or comments? Yes. So we have one question down here. And again, if you're upstairs and you want to ask a question, you have to come downstairs. Okay.

SPEAKER 6
Hi. Thanks. Tom-Henry. Very interesting presentations to both of you. I have a question for Bronwen. Go for it on the. Yeah. Okay, perfect. So you said we should think about other units of evaluation rather than the nation state. And I would love if you could maybe give some examples or maybe one example of that.

SPEAKER 5
Oh, that was a provocation for you guys to come up with the answer to that. Um, well, I mean, I think the sort of like the most obvious and much gone over one is probably class rather than, you know, nationality. Right? So if you're thinking about who who benefits from slavery, is it is it useful to think about like, oh, you know, Britain benefits from slavery or oh, Senegal benefits from slavery, when in fact, like some people in Senegal benefits from slavery. Many people in Senegal do not benefit from slavery. Some people in Britain benefit a lot from slavery. Many people probably more than in Senegal. But like if we're thinking about the compensation process as as sort of reflecting how people were able to use their investment in slavery to have a like longer term legacy, um, in cases like in, uh, the interior of Sierra Leone, where compensation does not paid, um, the sort of impacts of abolition are very different from in cases like in Senegal or France or Britain. Um, and so thinking about how you trace those, like longer term development legacies, you know, sure, it's it's really obvious that some of the people involved with the Bank of England made it big and, and had sort of successive generations live off of that. Um, but in places where you can see specifically where how the money comes in and how it goes back out again through that compensation process. Um, I think it's it is it does raise questions about like how to think across about the like category of people who are invested in the slave trade more broadly as a transatlantic group, in a time when nation states are, like less important, um, than they are now. So if you're thinking about, like, the legacies today, how does that translate to the units that were important at the time?

SPEAKER 0
Okay. I'm going to take a few questions at the same time. Um, I'm seeing no ladies, so if any lady puts up their hand, they'll be immediately put to the front of the queue. But we have a gentleman here in a white turtleneck.

SPEAKER 7
Hi. Hi. First, I want to thank you for like, the very interesting and informative presentations. I have one question for each of the presenters. That's okay. So first I'm thinking like it's definitely very critical to examine the, uh, the rackers and the history of these institutions to see how they benefited, like how they were involved in these, um, very inhumane, inhumane processes. But also I'm thinking about what does actually tell us about today. Like, are these institutions still functioning in similar ways as it was in history, like because there was a discussion about, um, this green colonialism happening in, like in North Africa, how like companies from the global north are appropriating people's lands for, you know, green transitioning, like taking their lands to, to to like, you know, uh, do you like solar panels and stuff like that? I'm just wondering, like, it's, um, it's important to look at history and how does that sort of link back to the current, uh, functioning of these institutions? Is there also similar concern about what's going on right now as like as much as what happened in history? And also my second question is about, um, the the issue of justice in this compensation, the whole thing, um, how do we think about justice? Um, like as you've mentioned, like is is the slave owners who got paid, you know, to end this atrocity and also this links to the environmental issue as well. How do we stop the pollution? Um, because those who have polluted environment do not deserve the money because. Yeah, exactly. How does justice come into play in this discussion? Thank you.

SPEAKER 0
Okay. If you could pass the microphone back to the gentleman in the facemask. Thank you for audience participation.

SPEAKER 8
Hello. Thank you very much to both of you. Um, I have a very similar question. Just wondering if either of you could talk about how the fruits of your research or the research of Bank of England or other institutions that were implicated in, uh, chattel slavery could be trying to produce, through a historical accounting, particular numbers or percentages that would be able to quantify the totality of injustice has taken place and tried to figure out if a sort of reverse of development is a possibility, to be thinking about what percentage of the UK or other institutions that have benefited from slavery should be putting forth, not just in terms of like aid or development, but like, uh, policies that would oblige certain types of, uh, reverse development, perhaps to, to, to rectify the injustices and things like that, and maybe a comment about, like, what the development actually is and whether it's fair to call it that in some ways.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, we'll stop there for now. But then we'll have the next one will be the man in the white jumper and the ladies at the back.

SPEAKER 9
Okay. Okay. Sorry.

SPEAKER 5
Um, in terms of the issue of justice. Um. Yeah. So, I mean, this is this is a tricky one because, um, I think I think you would agree with me that, like, um, and I and for sure many researchers on the sort of economics of slavery do, um, that the point isn't the point. The point isn't to point fingers at specific individuals. Um, more so it's to say like this is the the these are specific examples of people who did benefit in a system that lots of people benefited from. Right. And in small like in small ways, like one of the greatest things about the Legacies of Enslavement website, which you can use, it's, um, it's run out of UCL. Um, is seeing like all the like people who had like tiny little annuities, right? Like just like normal, like people who had no probably even no sense that their pension was coming from slavery. Right. Um.

SPEAKER 3
And they, you know.

SPEAKER 5
Their pensions coming from slavery and then they get compensation and now their their pension is coming from compensation. Right. So like, you know, the like classic like little lady who is just like living off of her £10 annuity a year or whatever. That is the situation for all of us right now with fossil fuels, right? We all benefit from them. So to say, like, oh, like BP, shell, whoever this is going on the internet, this is going to get me in trouble. Um, various people I don't know are benefiting, you know, have benefited, have polluted. And they should they should be punished. That's all of us. We've all polluted. We've all benefited from it. That is like the whole way that like capitalism, economic development has worked for the past 100 years is through that pollution. Right. And so I think it's it's more about thinking about like, I mean, the reason to reflect on that side of it, I guess, from my perspective, is to think like it's we can't just point fingers because pointing fingers is not. I mean, sure, we can point fingers and we probably should, but that can be the extent of it, right? Because we all have to recognise that, like, you know, pension funds now are invested in jail or BP or many other things. Um, or, you know, the green transition, if it's going to work, is going to have to work within the capitalist model, which is going to be extractive. Right? So it's like like you were saying like, like if people are going to be investing in wind farms instead or investing in, um, you know, solar panels or whatever like that, in order to do it at the scale that we're expecting to continue our lives exactly as they are, like the slave owners were continuing their lives with that compensation, then, you know, we have to think about what it is that we're trading by being able to continue those lives, I guess.

SPEAKER 3
I think that sums it up really well. Um, from the perspective of an organisation like the Bank of England, for example. Um, we started the project so that we could work out what the situation was, where these connections were, and try to identify them, and really so that we knew so that it hadn't just drifted out of institutional memory. So, for example, Humphrey Morris, who, uh, had the one who'd embezzled the money from the bank, these four portraits that I showed you. Three of them had been on display around the bank. Morris had not. But I suspect it's more because of the embezzlement than because of the slavery. Um, it's so that we we know these connections, and we're not just, uh, drifting. Uh, we're better informed, and we can assess the extent of that involvement. Um, when it comes to this, this is moving on to the next question, actually, when it comes to identifying, not just the involvement of these, uh, notable figureheads of the organisation, but investments in, uh, the organisation as a whole, all the people who invested in bank stock or invested in a particular kind of fund that was run through the Bank of England. Um, I don't know if you've ever seen any of the ledgers go follow the, uh, museum's social media streams and you'll see some of the archive stuff that they put out, including some of the photos and videos of handling bank ledgers. They are absolutely colossal. All these massive books from the 17 1800s, tiny copperplate writing of all the transactions. It is a huge amount of work to track that kind of information. The amounts of, uh, just people power needed to comb through and digitise and input these transactions and assess the scale. It's a massive project, and arguably that resource is better turned towards improving what's happening in the present day. Um, uh, trying to make understand the we've sussed out what's happening in the past. We've got an idea of this historical view. Um, but then with that in mind, how do we make things better today in terms of widening access to, uh, opportunities, employment, supporting people, uh, coming into organisations, making sure that our not just the general body of employees, but the senior leadership and the management positions are more diverse, like there are so many questions relating to that. Um, so somebody touched on it earlier talking about, um, an element of precarity when it comes to putting together these, uh, research projects. Often it's, uh, uh, maybe a postdoc researcher commissioned to work for a year or two on working out what an organisation's connections to transatlantic slavery might be. They don't necessarily have a lot of sway within their organisation to really make change, to propose change. Um, so making sure that that work can actually contribute to something bigger in the organisation long term is hugely important. And it's something that many organisations are still trying to work out how to do.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, let's take some more questions. Um, do you still have. You have the microphone. Okay. Take us away.

SPEAKER 9
Hi. Uh, thank you for today's interesting, uh.

SPEAKER 0
Could you speak a little bit more?

S11
Oh, hi. Uh, thank you for today's interesting panel. And my question is that to what extent is the slavery and the triangle trade system supported by the British military force? And more specifically, uh, what is the role of, uh, British Royal Navy, Royal Navy relative to today's topic?

SPEAKER 0
Thank you. Thank you very much. And the lady at the very back, I can't remember who had her hand up.

S12
I feel like my question is kind of already been answered, but, um, it was.

SPEAKER 0
I think you need to speak a little bit more into the microphone.

S12
Hello? Can you hear me? Maybe. Like this. So like. Like turning it. There we go.

S12
Okay. Um, I think my question is kind of already been answered a bit. Um, it was in relation to, um, compensation, um, given towards the enslavers. I was just wondering about the Bank of England stance or whether they have any actions or plans towards, um, reparations towards communities that were actually the enslaved. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER 0
Okay. Thank you. And the lady right in front of you.

S13
Thank you very much. Actually, I have one question for each of you. Um, I think at one point you mentioned that the payment of debts continued of the descendants until 2015, and that the investigation started already in 2007. Um, and it was underlined that it was already in 2007. So I wondered whether there was any attempt in between to stop those payments.

SPEAKER 0
That was actually at the British Museum. I think I said.

SPEAKER 3
2007 was the, um, let me get my centuries right, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. So there's an exhibition took place in 2007 at the British Museum about that. Okay.

S13
But the question still remains the same whether there was the attempt to stop this payment of that and then towards what you've said, actually, um, you were pointing that it was about the individuals and not about pointing towards the individuals, but much more about a structural thing like we have all polluted. So it's a general thing. But then at the same time, you were saying that some people in Britain have benefited in some in Senegal. Isn't that a problem as well, to kind of reproduce this notion of it's all of us, instead of clearly locating especially monetary and material recognition in Europe? Thank you.

SPEAKER 0
I don't know if he wants to go. These are very difficult questions for you.

SPEAKER 3
Should we start with the Royal Navy? Um.

SPEAKER 5
I was just going to say, in terms of the payment of compensation like that was paid at the time, right? So then the debt that was being paid up until 2015 was to the.

SPEAKER 3
That was how.

SPEAKER 5
Yeah. That wasn't being paid to. So they the, the compensation had gone to the slave holders in 1838. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3
Um, in 1833, in order to pay the compensation to the owners of the enslaved. There was essentially a loan of 20, £20 million created. And that loan was, to put it very simply, it was only paid off in 2015. So all the tax monies over the centuries go into paying by taxpayers. Yes. Yeah.

S14
If you were living here, then you paid for the slavery.

SPEAKER 9
Yeah.

SPEAKER 3
Yeah. And descendants of the enslaved will have contributed to that as well. Through their tax monies. Um, the Royal Navy.

S14
Given your work on abolition. Did not make some places go into depression or I mean, you looked at individuals, but was there an overall effect on the society of the loss of capital? So yes.

SPEAKER 5
This actually goes back to the question that I didn't answer about development. Um, yeah. So this has been a big question in West African history is like about the crisis, about our nation. So the slave trade is abolished, sort of in the 1807, 1808. Um, and the people and states that had made money through slave trading suffered, um, and, and so the question of economic development is, is sort of what. Yeah. Where are you counting economic development. So is it, you know, if elites are able to I mean, so in the case of, you know, some West African states, if they're able to tax the slave trade and then use those taxes to develop their cities or whatever, the same way that you're getting, you know, the development of ports in Manchester and Glasgow, the building of roads, the, you know, global connections are being facilitated by this, you know, increasing consumer goods are coming into the country. Um. When that when that ends, does it cause what is called a crisis of adaptation where there's sort of political chaos? Right. So those people lost control of the slave trade and, you know, and sort of lose political power because they have lost their economic base. Um, and so there are pockets of wars that result from that. And so it's a big sort of subject of West African historiography is like, do those kinds of wars create the opening for Europeans to come in and colonise? Um, yeah. And it really depends on the place and its level of investment in the slave trade. Um, and I would emphasise, I guess, that like what I'm interested in, I mean, that is a whole field of research and there's a lot written about it. What I'm interested in is there are lots of places where actually, um, people like states were not involved in the slave trade in West Africa. Um, and uh, and thinking about how actually the abolition of the slave trade, um, creates opportunities for those states that had not been involved in the slave trade to sort of seize on new trading opportunities created by legitimate commerce. Um, so thinking about African abolitionists, not just always thinking about European abolitionists, Europe imposing abolition, yes, it imposed abolition. And yes, there were losers from that in terms of development and and state capacity and stuff. But also there were plenty of people in Africa who were looking, looking to abolish slavery. And this offered a really good opportunity as well. Um. Sorry. That was a lot from me.

SPEAKER 3
Um. So there was a question about the role of the Royal Navy. Sorry, who did that come from? Um, well, essentially, the Navy is, uh, this is not my specialist area, but the Navy would have been protecting British trade interests, so it would have been protecting British trade vessels. Uh, Royal Africa Company vessels, merchant trading vessels as well. Um, so throughout the period, but then equally as after abolition, it would have been working to prevent, uh. Slaving voyages as well. So essentially the Navy is working to protect whatever the law says is right at the time. And that too can be quite a political thing because, uh. The Navy is a very fond part of life for many people, and discussing that aspect can become quite heated quite quickly. Um, but essentially the Navy is there to protect British interests, whether it was for or against, uh, slaving voyages.

SPEAKER 0
And there was the question about the compensation of the enslaved and reparations. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3
So the compensation was awarded. There have been a couple of questions about that that was awarded in the in 18 after 1833. Um, the question of whether compensation should have gone to the, um, the enslaved or can now be given. Uh, essentially that's a question of reparations. That's not something that I can really make a statement about. Um, it's on a on a national level. It's a very big question that would have to be led by government. So it's not something that I can really lead on either way. Um, but whatever happens for individual organisations, institutions, families who benefited, who made fortunes from slavery or inherited the wealth of that, that would have to be a matter for the individual organisation, put their, um, what they felt ethically was the best to do. Um, but for the Bank of England, I can't really make a comment on that. I'm afraid so. That's a really evasive non-answer. I appreciate it's very unsatisfactory, but the only way I can get.

SPEAKER 5
Um, just to in case you haven't seen the there's the, um, recently Laura Trevelyan has been working with Caricom to try to get families who know that they're descended from the compensation. Um, pays, um, that, uh, to work with Caricom on these questions of reparations at an individual family level. Um, so it's worth looking into, um, in terms of collective guilt versus individual guilt. Um, yeah. I just think it's weird to do it at a national level when when nation states now are made up of like of of large groups of people who come from the places that were colonised. Um, and so to talk about it, to say like Britain is guilty. Um, I feel like it says something about who is not British within the British state. Um, and I don't think that that's particularly where we want to be going. And considering, um, the levels of ethno nationalism that are being fomented at the moment. So I think we have to think carefully about assigning national guilt. Um, not that we can't do it, but we just have to be careful when we say things like Britain did this, that we're not saying, you know, black people aren't British, um, or something, you know, which which, you know, ultimately, um, plenty of people, I think, on the, um, ethno nationalist side would be willing to embrace. So just being specific, I think is good, but also recognising that at the time abolitionists were telling everybody, if you if you eat this sugar, you are participating in the slave trade. People knew at the time their own sort of like little parts of, of the way that they were benefiting, the same way that we know the little parts of the ways that we benefit from having cobalt in our phones or whatever, like, you know, we all know that like we are swimming in capitalism and that it is not great. But like thinking about how to get outside of the fishbowl is not not easy either. Um, and there are big sharks in there and there are little minnows.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, so let's take some more questions. Uh, let's start at the back. Right here. And then somebody you had your hand up from pretty early. Okay.

S15
Hi. Good evening. Thank you for the talk. So my question is, now that we're more aware of maybe.

SPEAKER 0
If you could speak into.

S15
Okay, now that we're more aware of like, um, Britain parts or like slavery in connection to like British development. What efforts are we making to like, not repeat that in a way where people are talking about the rise of new colonialism and how some, for lack of a better word, some black people are still finding very difficult to integrate into the British economy because of things like racism.

SPEAKER 0
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And the gentleman here with the blue hoodie.

S16
Thanks. I was wondering, to what extent do you think that the abolition of slavery was facilitated by, you know, economic reasons rather than moral or humanitarian ones?

SPEAKER 0
And then we'll we'll come to James Putzel. And but I see you guys as well.

S11
Thank you.

S17
This is, you know, really, really interesting. I mean, just following up on, um, on the moral question of today, um, it probably is very important that people living in our rich societies know that the origin of capitalism is theft and slavery, because there's a lot of mythology about this.

SPEAKER 5
Are you allowed to say that here? I've been holding back, I didn't.

S17
Could you say something historically about what happened to the economic interests that were diverted, prevented from slaving? For the decade, many, many more decades of the slave trade that went on with the Southern United States. Yeah. And the overlap of of interest. Thanks.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, we'll stop that. But I see the next round. I don't know if you want to go fast.

SPEAKER 3
Um, I can't read my own handwriting. Um.

UNKNOWN
What you're saying. Banking.

SPEAKER 0
So we we had racism in banking and we had, um, the question from James about, uh, the kind of origin of capitalism.

SPEAKER 3
Um, we have another exhibition in the museum at the moment that touches on the topic of financial exclusion. Um, as a result of racism in banking. Um, when I so a few years ago, I was at a museums conference, and I met, uh, Linda Burrell from Museum and the National Caribbean Heritage Museum, and she was telling me about partner hand, which is a way that, uh, many people from Caribbean backgrounds will be very familiar with this. A way of saving. Um, Ross is the technical term for it. It's a way of saving that's found all around the world. And it really grew in popularity in Britain in after the Windrush generation, uh, because of racism within banking and the refusal of financial services to people who had come, had been invited to Britain to help rebuild after the Second World War and yet were refused credit, refused bank accounts because, oh, you haven't been here long enough or you didn't earn enough. Racism was at the root of it, all of that exclusion. So we have a display at the moment. Uh, about partner hands. It's called partner and partner hand, a Caribbean answer to a British banking institution. And it was developed with museum. And to talk about the subject. It's part of an ongoing series of exhibitions we want to do that relate to different aspects of financial exclusion. Um, and this came about when Museum and came to see the, uh, slavery in the Bank exhibition. We started talking about the racialized legacies of that of racism within, uh, banking that stops people accessing services. And it felt like a natural progression to talk about something that is very much in living memory and people's day to day experience as well. And it's not. So while the display is about the Caribbean experience post Windrush, it's a model of saving that is known around the world. It's in case you're not familiar with it, it's a really simple model. You might have a close group of people say ten people. You decide that each week, month, payment period, whatever, you're going to invest a certain amount of money. So after ten, ten months, investing £100 a month, for example, everybody gets £1,000, uh, every week somebody takes away that whole pot at the beginning. You it's essentially an interest free loan because you get to take that money away and then you pay it back over the time, uh, if you don't get the pot until the end, uh, it's a way of saving. So we have that in museum at the moment to reflect that side of things. Um, again, talking so that as a regulatory thing, uh, the Bank of England isn't, uh, involved in regulating that aspect of financial conduct for banks and institutions. But over the last few decades, legislation has come in to try and stop that kind of exclusion in the banking sector. Um, so that we're trying to address the legacies in, in the museum itself as well. Um, hope that touches on the. The question of its, um. What else have we got? The questions?

SPEAKER 5
I think the other I mean, the Eric Williams question, like, um, did Britain abolish the slave trade because of moral or economic reasons? Um.

SPEAKER 9
Um. Uh, yes. Um.

SPEAKER 5
I yeah, I'm not going to be able to answer that. I mean, I think the best way to think about it again is probably an analogy, right? So like if somebody, um, if somebody comes up to you and it's like, you should turn off your lights when you're not in your, you know, house or your apartment or whatever. Um, it'll save you a lot of money and it'll help save the planet. Are they doing it for economic reasons or are they doing it for, you know, moral in terms of, like, ethical saving the planet kind of reasons, right? Um, and I think what makes this particularly hard question when it comes to abolition is that's exactly the same kind of argument that they were using. They were trying to make an economic case because it was an economic thing, and they were trying to make a moral case because it was a moral thing. Right. Um, and so they try to do both at the same time, which makes it almost impossible as a historian to to disentangle what they really meant or what individuals who, you know, joined the cause were doing it for. Um, I wrote a book about like, abolitionist businesses that were trying to, like, use business to try to, like, get people to say, like, look, you can make a lot of money doing abolition to like, I know slavery was really, you know, profitable, but you could you can make a lot of money in abolition. Um, but they're, you know, whether they're doing that purely from a profit motive or purely from an economic, I mean, purely from a moral motive is much harder to disentangle. Um, and then, you know, and then and then you get to the level of the British state and like, basically, the British state is at war with France. And it's very it's a convenient reason to board a bunch of friendships, I think. But, you know, um, there's a lot of moral suasion going on as well.

SPEAKER 5
And in terms of, oh, I can't remember what your question was, James. Uh, the South perpetuation. So actually the US abolishes the US like does a lot wrong, but it does abolish the slave trade at the same time as Britain abolishes abolishes the slave trade in terms of the transatlantic slave trade. I should also say that, like, you know, the intra Caribbean trade continues the South, the trade within the South continues. It is actually, you know, Virginia and Maryland slave owners who are vehemently opposed to reopening the transatlantic slave trade in the 1850s because they are the ones who are making all the money from selling slaves to Louisiana and Arkansas and Alabama and Texas. So, um, uh, so, yeah. So sorry. What was the the question for? It was just like, how does it continue?

SPEAKER 9
Yeah. That's right. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

SPEAKER 5
Of course slavery slavery continues for ages. Yeah. And and I mean, also interesting is that because there is a civil war, um, southern slaveholders are not compensated. Um, which of course makes them furious because there is this British precedent and there is this French precedent.

SPEAKER 0
Really interesting. The idea of like the scarcity value of to abolition so that the slaveholders, slaveholders in America are actually against more trade. Never thought about that. Okay. So we have Vladimir. Um.

S19
Thanks. Should we expect East Indies and the Bank exhibition, or Opium Wars and the Bank exhibitions? Because there are other atrocities that were committed, probably financed by the Bank of England, but just at the another geographical area.

SPEAKER 0
What could you say that the beginning of the question again.

S19
Should we expect the East Indies and the Bank exhibition or Opium Wars and the bank exhibition.

SPEAKER 0
And then just behind you?

S20
Um, in regard to changing, I guess some of like the geographies of power and the bank's museum exhibit. And I'm thinking also, uh, in Belgium, repurposing Leopold's, uh, former human zoo to be a museum of, uh, of slavery. What do you take as a sort of guiding principle to provide some sort of justice or clear explanation of the historical events that happened?

SPEAKER 0
Yeah. I noticed recently that the Docklands Museum has also introduced a new exhibition, thinking about the role of the Docklands in the slave trade as well. Um, okay, so we'll have our academic visitor.

S21
No. Thank you. I think it's very interesting. Um, presentation and questions. Well, I think this question is probably we see maybe I'll just ask about it. Africa. Since, uh, many here are African experts. So I think it's in terms of like what? So like the, the, the reasons for the Africa's, you know, uh, current development is more, uh. Talking about this colonialism. So I think it's which is after the slave slavery trade. So, uh, what's the current studies on this? You know, uh, how much of this, you know, the Africans developments, uh, current has been attributed to, you know, um, the slavery trade and how much was actually is there any way we can, you know, uh, distinguish what's the impact of the slavery trade and what is the impact of the, you know, colonialism on the African developments in today's recent study?

SPEAKER 0
Okay, I'm going to let Claire speak just because she said in there.

S14
Around the time of abolition. And so we get the industrial revolution and absolute cruelty in the treatment of working class people in Britain. Is it the same capital? I mean, is it is I mean, and obviously Eric Williams saying British in the Industrial Revolution depended on, um, capital from slavery, but early industrial Revolution was enormously cruel and exploitative and misused children, etc.. Can we see any links? I mean, is there anything to say about that?

SPEAKER 0
I appreciate that we've we've kind of asking Bronwen to cover all aspects of the history of slavery. Some of these questions from from the audience. I think we should also be discussing in our courses with our teachers as well, you know, the more contemporary implications of things that that we should also, you know, talk about on TV 400 and the other courses. Okay, we'll stop there. But I see other hands up. So do you want to start?

SPEAKER 3
Um, well, I can start, um, talking. So if. Have you been to Royal Museums Greenwich at the Maritime Museum there has quite extensive, uh, exhibits about, uh, the, the East India Companies, uh, East India Company and sort of maritime trade, because so much of this is to do with maritime trade and links, uh, to areas that the British went to, decided we would like that. Thank you. We'll take control of it. And oh, yes, all of this territory too. Um, so the Maritime Museum does that very well. The Docklands as well, um, at the Bank of England, where our museum is, primarily exists to inform people about the bank as the national central bank at the role in handling inflation and monetary stability and matters like that. So when we do pick our temporary exhibitions, they have to somehow come back to that. Um, we have a few ideas for the future. Different topics. As you say, there are many areas around the world that we could explore in this way. Um, but they're not fully programmed yet. But I would suggest going to the Maritime Museum. They've got excellent displays there. Um.

SPEAKER 5
Um, yeah. I mean, I think that actually, like. Yeah, it goes along nicely with the other questions, which is like, what is the link with colonialism and the Industrial Revolution and other forms of exploitation? Um, you know, like when I come across as this, like, rabid communist, uh, but imperialism is the highest age of capitalism was, you know, posited not by me. So, like, um, I think, you know, like they're doing the same thing, right? It's just it's fine to find a frontier that you think that you can like that nobody's making money off of, exploited to death. Move on to the next frontier, you know, I mean, so there's that in terms of, like, actual, you know, it starts it doesn't start with slavery. It starts with enclosure. Right. Um, and it doesn't stop when slavery stops. It moves on to other, other groups, other fields. Right. Um, and uh, and I mean, there are several moments in the like 18th and 19th century when people start to recognise that. Right, that they say like, oh, we, we did that slavery thing and now it's coming for us, right? Like, oh, we need to either reinforce it and make like make people as slaves, a much more defined class. So to protect ourselves from falling into that category, um, which is what they do in, you know, the US South, as we were talking about before, um, or, you know, and that's like a sort of racial definition, right? That's saying like, well, I'm I'll be protected from that exploitation by virtue of being white or, you know, whatever. Um. You know, where people get subsumed, and then it sort of moves on and. And people within those groups benefit, you know, so some people are always going to like, get make their way to the top. Um, and, and then they're going to push the frontier farther. Right? So I mean, yes, it's related to colonialism. It's related to the industrial revolution. Um, I would say that there has been a tendency in not in scholarship, but possibly in like popular understandings that like, it's slavery, colonialism, African poverty. Right, like that, that is like that is the natural path. And that was always going to be the path. And slavery naturally goes to colonialism. And I would just say that's not the case. Uh, the slave trade is is very bad for a lot of people in Africa, but it is not a situation in which Africa, apart from some specific places, particularly in west central Africa, it is not a situation in which, like African leaders are losing power. Right, so that the slave trade is bad for people, but it is not necessarily bad for states or for elite individuals. Colonialism is really bad for states and elite individuals. It's also bad for other people. And so, you know, there is that progression again. Um, so some people who benefited, uh, get absorbed by virtue of the expanding idea that, you know, by virtue of race, you are an underclass or whatever.

SPEAKER 0
Okay. Thank you. Um, so do we have a. I know there was a question with the gentleman with the rather jazzy top. That's a compliment, too.

SPEAKER 9
Thank you. The, uh, hopefully this is more of a fun question. It might not be, though. Um, the you mentioned the Carolinas, and that reminded me of that TV show about what's his face? Steed. Uh, pirate captain. And I was wondering if you could speak to the relationship between piracy, pirate settlements, the collapse of underground economy and slavery.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, so I also have a question which is about the kind of level of public awareness and a kind of shift that you think these kinds of exhibitions create, because when I visited the exhibition, I had a little bit of a feeling that you were kind of preaching to the choir, like the people in the exhibition were the kinds of people who might have some idea of these things and might be interested in these things. And I'm wondering whether you have a sense that this exhibition has brought in people who hadn't been aware of these kinds of things, whether you think this exhibition and other exhibitions like it might be changing broader British public awareness and opinion. So when we think about things like reparations, you know that the public view of that might shift. I know that's a very difficult question to answer, but I'm kind of I'm curious about whether there is any, um, you know, things to track that, that you collect as a museum.

SPEAKER 3
Um, so, yes, I'll answer your question first. Um, we do evaluation for our temporary exhibitions or permanent exhibitions. We do surveys of visitors who are coming in. We speak to people, we find out how they heard about the museum, the exhibition, and why they visitors. And we certainly are seeing a much more diverse range of visitors than we ever have before, because people are coming because there's something that interests them. And sure if you you're more likely to visit an exhibition on this topic if you are already interested in the topic, but people will only become interested if you can if you do it in the first place. If people see, uh, something on social media, something in the news, some article catches their attention, some advertising, uh, we ran advertising campaigns on, uh, transport networks, for example. Um, so part of the whole rationale of doing an exhibition like this is to put the information out there. It's in the museum, it's online. The resources will all be available in perpetuity, even after the exhibition goes. There are further, um, areas of research happening with the archive team and external researchers as well. Um, so. Yeah, people will visit if they already have an interest. But schools? Yep. There is a schools resource that we developed along with the Economist Educational Foundation. So that is a resource to help teach the topic in schools. It's been part of the curriculum since 2007. Uh, but it's difficult and people are wary of teaching something that they don't know about or don't have a root in to teach about. So that was another reason for creating the resource to give teachers something to work with as well. Um, it's not the only one, of course, but it's something that we could do to get the information out there. Um, so like any, any museum, any topic, any piece of research, you do it, you put it out there, you publicise it as best as you can, and you hope that further down the line that is going to contribute to a greater awareness and help inform the conversation that come after it. Um, as a as a museum team, we can't answer big questions of social inequality or reparations or some of these intensely political things, but we can put the historical aspects out there in a way that hasn't been done before. Um, so that's part of the part of the discussion.

SPEAKER 3
Yeah. Um.

SPEAKER 5
In terms of piracy, um, I don't really know much about the very early period. Um, I do know, however, that at the time when they're, uh, thinking about legislating against the slave trade, they are also thinking about legislating against Mediterranean. I mean, as legislating piracy as a sort of thing that you can, you know, attack. Right? So they're thinking like, oh, well, if we have this piracy legislation, we can sort of co-opt that to be to be applicable to the slave trade. So like, can we designate slave traders as pirates? Um, do they need to be like a separate category, or can we just roll it all under the same kinds of legislation? Um, and one of the reasons that they're doing that is, of course, because of the North African pirates, um, who are, um, like a big catalyst for how people are thinking about the slave trade. Um, as a, as a bad thing, you know, if if European merchants are getting enslaved, maybe slavery isn't such a good idea. Um, and but they know that those are pirates. So is what they're doing piracy as well, you know, so it's just sort of gets wrapped into that same kind of discourse. And then and then, um, there are lots of international meetings about whether they should be prosecuted as the, as a, you know, as the international. Piracy codes.

SPEAKER 0
Okay, well, there aren't any more questions. I think we will stop here, but I just. Oh, there is one. One little. Is it a little question? Okay. I should have said speak now.

SPEAKER 7
Sorry, I'm just still interested. Like the, uh, in justice, as in, uh. Is it? Would it be beneficial to think about to to think about these issues in terms of social class, as in, because we're talking about national guilt. But obviously, as you mentioned, not everybody benefited or lost in the same way. But why do we not? If you look at the inequality level within this country, where globally it is very clear what is the top 1%? And why don't we start from there? Because surely the benefited the most.

SPEAKER 9
Yeah.

SPEAKER 5
I mean there's like some there's some really good stuff that I'm not involved with, but I've read about like tax havens and stuff as um, as a good place to start from, from that perspective. But, um. Yeah, I don't know. I just think, I think, um, I think it's really easy to think in terms of nation state units because you can you can kind of personify them. You can think like, oh, you know, like you can give them characters and motivations and like, and internationally they sort of interact with each other like people. And so it's easy to like, imagine how the global system works if you have these units because like, we're people and we like to think about, you know, we like, you know, personify animals and stuff, of course we're going to personify nation state. Um, but I, I think that that's like I just don't think that that's the whole answer because I think that it doesn't get at the. Yeah, the complex ways that like, capitalism actually works. Um, it, it's, it's some of the way that capitalism works. Sure. Like, yeah, Britain is a lot richer than Ghana. Um, which is where a lot of the enslaved people that Britain was enslaving were coming from. Um, and so in a very crude way, it's very easy to see, like, yes, this, this place benefited and that place didn't, um, and so we could stop there. And, you know, that's fine, but I but from a historian's perspective, I'm just never satisfied with that as the answer. Right. Like there are it's more complicated than I'm realising.

SPEAKER 0
We're putting, like, the whole of the weights of the world onto your shoulders as a historian. So thank you for bearing that weight. As I said, these are things that we should also bring into our classes, you know, as well. Um, so I just want to thank you both immensely for coming and talking to us on this Friday afternoon. I mean, the conversation has gone in so many different directions from the climate, from the origins of capitalism to the role of kind of knowledge and society and the role of politics in making certain knowledge and certain issues come to the surface. So you've really treated us to a wonderful discussion. So let's thank them both for their time and their expertise. So before we close, I also want to draw our attention to next week's, uh, seminar, which will lecture, which will be the last one in person. Uh, we're making use of the visiting of professor Hong Yu. Um, she's going to be talking about Chinese digital technologies and infrastructures in Chinese development, but also in the global South. So please join us next week. Uh, after that, we're going to be shifting online. So it would be nice if our last session together is is big and lively. Uh, but thank you all for coming and staying on this Friday afternoon.