Dr. Michael Taylor: Abolition was not a fait accompli
I’m delighted to bring to you part 2 of our 3-part series on race, class and education in the UK. This week we’re joined by historian Dr Michael Taylor, author of what I’m calling ‘required reading’ & shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2021 - The Interest, How The British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery
Michael Taylor is a historian of the British Empire and the British Isles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD - and also won University Challenge. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies.
We talk about the political landscape of Britain in the 1810s and 20s how the split within the Tory party and Catholic emancipation in Ireland were key contributing factors to abolition. We talk reparations, reparations not as financial recompense for slave labour (because that would be impossible to quantify and impossible to pay back), but actually reparations as a form of restorative justice.
It wasn’t until 2015 that the UK Treasury finished paying off the loan it raised in 1835 to recompense slaveholders. To put it into context the British government at the time spent 40% of its budget - £20 million pounds - which in today’s money when Michael was writing the book amounted to about £340billion pounds. And to really understand what this means for us now, the British tax payer and particularly Black Britons of Caribbean descent have essentially been ‘paying taxes to compensate those who enslaved [their] ancestors’. (p.300 of the book)
We talk about the role of theology and how it framed both pro slavery and abolitionist narratives. We talk about the interconnectedness and muddiness of these historical abolitionist figures - that a person could be an abolitionist and a racist at the same time. We talk about whether or not to remove statues of slave holders. And we still make time to talk about music!
Guest: Dr. Michael Taylor
Title: ‘Abolition was not a fait accompli’
Twitter: @M_H_Taylor
Artists on playlist: The Cure; Beethoven & R.E.M
Buy the book
CARICOM - Website
Article in response to Treasury Tweets
Peter Fryer book, Staying Power
Quotes taken from the preface xv and pp 26 & 300
Learn more about our Season 3 sponsors Airbnb and Project Lighthouse: https://www.airbnb.co.uk/against-discrimination