The Black Atlantic exhibition is just ending at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge UK.
It’s a kind of a mea culpa for the slave trade because a slave owner gave Cambridge University the money to build the museum. He made his money from pineapples in the Caribbean, and used slave labour to run his business.
Twelve and a half million people were transported to the New World to make money for the European entrepreneurs, often with State backing and with scientific connivance concluding that Blacks were lower in brainpower, and less human.
Ten million seven hundred thousand arrived, so almost two million died on the way.
One exhibit that caught my eye was a punch bowl from the 1760s with a motif proclaiming ‘Success to the Africa Trade’, and celebrating the voyages of George Dickinson. He made five voyages on three ships, between 1763 and 1768, transporting a total of 725 captives across the Atlantic: 97 died.
I am going to assume the numbers are typical for all voyages. In that case 725 divided by five voyages is 145 slaves.
Twelve and a half million slaves at 145 per voyage equates to over 82,000 voyages.
After Seeing The Exhibition
I wanted to resist tutt-tutting at the terrible deeds. I had to work to keep my own feelings and not be swept along with the tide of feelings that are kind of expected in a mea culpa exhibition.
So many stories, so many strands.
How should we feel? How should dyed-in-the-wool white English people feel? Many of them will have great grandparents who lived miserable toil-filled lives. They too have their stories.
In a place like Cambridge there will be more than a sprinkling of people who come from privileged families. Perhaps they will feel uncomfortable? Should they feel more uncomfortable than the poor? People from poor backgrounds might feel they are off the hook.
The truth is that if the profits were kept by the wealthy, they didn’t conduct the slave trade all by themselves. There would have been people from every class without whom the system would have ground to a halt.
How quickly did the racial stereotypes filter into the way everybody from the top to the bottom felt about Black people?
And today should ‘we’ be making amends? And how? Even if exhibitions raise awareness, they don’t pay the bills of the descendants of those who were enslaved.
And if, as it was, that the whole system was driven by money, then should ‘we’ pay money back, aand if so then how much? Europe took off like a rocket on the back of the profits from the slave trade.
What about all the compounded benefits? Should there be a discount because the world would not be in the happy place it is without the initial capital that drove technological advances in which everyone can now share?
And who is ‘we’? Aren’t we all the same – give anyone any excuse and wouldn’t we do the same? Or would we? Not now, today of course, but under the influence of the environment prevailing then. Of course we would not be cruel, but that seems a poor excuse for turning human beings into energy sources against their will.
And what about those intermediaries, the North African traders, the tribe-on-tribe enslavement? How would we allocate responsibility?
Maybe we have moved on.
Of course, no one would think it right to own slaves today. But if the environment changed? If enough people thought it was OK? Would we be drawn along. Would you? Would I? Is it absolutely clear that we do not want to go backwards?
In the short term you couldn’t argue that the world is moving from bad to good. Maybe in the longer term you could say we are moving that way.
The big question is what moves us that way. A friend thinks that it’s the natural outcome of rubbing along together that we eventually see that being nice is a better way to be. It doesn’t answer every question because if life itself is just a chance outcome of bouncing molecules, then sooner or later some people are going to want a bigger answer.