A Trip to The Slavery Museum

I found recountment from activists and their own personal or familial involvement with racism to be very pointent. I'm under no illusion that there is no more racism in britain as I myself have experienced it. However this does reiterate a personal point which is to prove that those who say that racism or the ill treatment of black people fell with emancipation in 1835 a very wrong. 

These set of Yoruba Mask stuck me as well crafted with a strong sense of technique and skill. Something that to this day is ignored by westerners when talking about 'african' art, which is always seen as savage and naive suggesting that black people are unskilled and don't have the higher capabilities to be creative. Something these two masks prove wrong. 

These images along side some vocal and visual recreations really brought home the brutality of slavery. I have never felt such a gut wrenching sense of horror and disgust fill me like I had reading to methods used to mutilate black people and listening recounts of those whose captivity was documented. No amount of 'it was a different time' can ever make up for the atrocities of British slavery. Because those people felt, like we do, had thoughts like we do. And they decided to do this to other people. 

I found this statement to ring such truth in it's profanity and I feel like it links so well with what I am trying to say within my dissertation. 

The last slide really backs up the idea of how directly slavery helped finance britain as well as the concept of black people being seen as commodity and livestock to those buying and selling them.

Black Cultural Archive

While searching (extensively) How to get into contact with David Olusoga I stumbled across the BCA on his twitter. Looking further into the Bca and being to talk to their archivist I was able to find out more about the how the history of black britons has been archived in Brixton and was recommended a series of books from the archivist there about Black presence in britain. I'm thinking of visiting london to hopefully help push my research further.

The Price Of Freedom

David Olusoga's BBC series the Forgotten History of Britain's Slave Owners Has become a very important documentary which is helping to shape and formalise the initial historic background of my dissertation. Primarily focusing on the events surrounding the British Governments biggest payout to the public in history the of £17 Billion given to Slave Owners who were forced to emancipate their slaves in 1835.

Why Has LCA Blocked the Black Cultural Archives Site????

Chapter 1

"Most of us do not understand the forces that brought our ancestry together from opposite ends of the world. Nor do we fully acknowledge that these forces continue to shape our communities and our life chances” (Stuart,2012) 

This quote by Aderea Stuart reflecting on her own heritage of having family from both the white British imperial and Afro-Caribbean slave side of Colonialist history works as an almost microcosm for the way we as britons understand or acknowledge the way major cultural institutes like the Tate Galleries and Harewood House where the direct financial benefactor of British slavery. Britons financial success and cultural boom was so deeply rooted in an efficient and ever growing slave based economy that ‘for 200 hundred years it was the back bone of the British economy’ (Olusoga, 2015). But how does this all link to how it benefited the cultural sector of Britain? 

Not only did the trans atlantic slave trade and plantations allow British slave owners the ability to amass extraordinary amounts of personal wealth. But after the abolition of slavery, slave owners that wished to were compensated the largest sum of money that the British government has ever given out; at todays value of a total £17 billion. This gave British slave owners a sudden influx of financial gain which would allow them to put this new found wealth back into the British economy by financing and creating business, giving the British banking sector a financial boom and more importantly in this essay it allowed for an influx of money to be put towards developing the arts institutes in Britain. 

Throughout British History the arts have been developed for the sole focus of appeasing the upper classes. Oil paintings, as discussed by John Berger ‘Often depict things. Things which in reality are buyable’ (Berger,1972). Essentially Oil paintings, historically have been away of demonstrating ones wealth. A common historic practice amongst the British elitists, as art is both a tool exhibiting financial wealth and social standing. In the context of the financial gain from both slavery and abolition it is easy to see how the Arts sector of Britain would gain an immense financial backing from the new found personal wealth of slave owners. 

However the money that Sir Henry Tate,a man who’s financial wealth would create one of the most significant and nationally acclaimed galleries gained through sugar slavery happened after the Abolition of the slave trade.

William Wilberforce was integral to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. However slavery was still legal though the acquisition of enslaving african people was not. This allowed Britain to look closer at the assets they already had and how they could gain profits lost to the Slave trade act 1807. The British soon realised that along the river of Demerara in Guyana the soil was extremely fertile and that growing sugar cane crops in this area would yield ‘an opportunity to make bigger profits than anywhere else in the British Caribbean. And slavery was the only way to maximise these profits’ (Olusoga, 2015) similarly sugar had been called ‘white gold’ at the time, a term coined from sugar baron James Drax who claimed that ‘“white gold” transformed the British economy’ (Parker,2011).

The way they gained slaves to work the land after the abolition of the atlantic slave trade was to buy slaves off the dutch plantation owners and convert the land they worked for coffee and cotton into a sugar plantation. Guyana , where the river Demerara lies, was one of the most financially profitable islands in the west indies. It attracted a lot of British investors as a result

 ‘Guayna was able to maintain a slave population even though the slave trade had been abolished ‘cause you can only have a profitable, cultural business if you had labour. Labour and Capital were two pivotal things’ (Prof.McGowan, 2015)

subsequently a new generation of slave owners found fortune within Guyana, well after the slave trade abolition act 1807 had been passed. This brought on what the author will be referring to as the second wave of slave money or Post-Abolition Slavery. Consequently men who hadn't the aristocratic standing or coin to own Plantations before hand now could earn their wealth with help from banks who were eager to invest in the sugar cane industry. One of these banks would later become The Bank Of England which at the time had ‘Sir Richard Neave, who was the director of the bank for 48 years, was also the chairman of the Society of West India Merchants’ (Martin,2011). 

Sir Henry Tate came into the sugar business in 1859 and although the official statement from the Tate Britain has been

 “Sir Henry Tate wasn't born until 1819 and he did not start his sugar refining business until 1859, many years after the abolition of slavery and his fortune did not come from sugar production – it came instead from his embrace, as a refiner, of new technology which allowed him to modernise the distribution and commercial marketing of cane sugar in competition with sugar beet refiners in Europe. Sir Henry was merely a bulk purchaser of cane sugar and there is no evidence that his business came any closer than that to the post slavery Caribbean plantations.” (2008) (Palmer, 2014) 

This statement has since been subtracted from the Tate website which the Author believes is due to the fact that although slavery was made Illegal by 1833 it wasn't until the 1873 Slave Trade Act that there was a more effectual suppression of the Slave trade act. Furthermore the living conditions, personal treatment and ‘pay’ of black workers did not improve as ‘the planters wanted cheap, full time labourers as they had been accustomed during slavery’ (MM,2016). Even in Modern day Sugar farms the way that the sugar has to be worked is as Davis Olusoga put it ‘disturbing to see sugar cain being harvested like this because it is so deeply interwoven with the idea of slavery and the brutality of slavery’ (Olusoga, 2015). There is no doubt in the authors mind that Tate is far free from being tied to the brutality of sugar slavery when it it well documented that events such as the 1865 Morant Bay Protests which happened due to the racial biased in Jamaica after emancipation lead to the state approved execution of nearly 500 people and the public flogging of 600 more. 

Though the English Government said to punish the judge Edward John Eyre who allowed this massacre high profile members of the British Arts such as Charles Dickens and John Ruskin Supported this horrendous blood bath. This, to the author highlights the racist ideals of that the ‘intellectuals’ within the British arts scene had at the time when it came to their views of black people and slavery. On the contrary Prolific members of the Sciences such as John Bright, 

Charles Darwin and Fredric Harrison where vehemently for the prosecution of Eyre. The Author believes this highlights what could be a significant divide between the sciences and the arts within Britain. However this is not what the focus of this essay is about.

The denial of Tate & Lyle company today stating that

 ‘When Henry Tate and Abram Lyle established their businesses in 1859 and 1865 respectively, the slave trade had been illegal in Britain for more than 50 years’ (Stamp, 2007)

with the information we now know, about how though the slave trade was stopped in 1807 slavery was still legal. How even after 1833 when all slaver was banned it was really freedom in just name. We can look back on the fact that Tate’s investment into the sugar farms and the wealth he gained from it can be directly linked to the brutal labour enforced on black africans of the west indies. It is important to note that Tate did not keep his investment in sugar farms just to British owned ones but he also did occasionally buy sugar from Cuba which was known for both its cheap sugar and prominent slave based force. So although he may not have bought the slaves himself. Tate did help fund the continuation of slave labour in both the west indies and Cuba along side heavily benefiting from the prosperous sugar industry due to sugar slavery. 

The lack of acknowledgement for the Tate family and subsequently the Tate Galleries, on how the fortunes made and Galleries built all benefited from Sugar slavery. The refusal to apologise for there part in this horrendous act while gaining power and prestige in the art world as a result of this is a form of post colonial racism. This behaviour from a British institution is unsurprising however. 

‘The British government’s refusal of such an apology is squalid. Until recently, almost unbelievably, it refused even to recognise the slave trade as a crime against humanity on the grounds that it was legal at the time. It helped block an EU apology for slavery.’ (Livingstone, 2007)

All in all the British mindset both past and present about slavery is that it is never their fault. And as you have begun to see and will understand further on within this essay it the way Art is both used as a tool by the British to both dismiss slavery as well as highlight the horror of slavery.  All the while the art sector was profiting from slavery. 

John Ruskin is a prime example of a man who heavily benefited from slavery before and during his lifetime. Even going so far as to say ‘I don’t think slavery ought to have been abolished’ (Hilton, 2003) Ruskin is a prominent figure in the British arts sector. As both a Painter and art critic he was well known and highly respected within British society. And his blatant favouritism towards slavery reflected a lot of the British art industries mind set at the time. This being due to the fact that the British art industry had begun to open more galleries as result of the second wave of slavery allowing the upper and middle upper class to visit and take part in what was believed to be a high society pass time. 

The reason why men like Ruskin and other influential members of the British art society were either so supportive or active within the British slave trade and British slavery on a whole is due to 

“how pervasive slavery was in the structure of British wealth” (Ferguson, 1998) for at least 300 years the arts had partially relied on the wealth of slave merchants, slave money and the slave trade to finance the paintings commissioned within Britain. Though links between slave wealth and art were more obvious in the 1600’s with paintings depicting colonial wealth in both gold, objects and people. For example ‘Admiral De Ruyter in the Castle of Elmina’ by De Witte. Art in the 18th and 19th century still benefited from the money made form slaves. George Cruikshank was literally paid by slaveowners to create his satirical illustration ‘John Bull taking a Clear View of the Negro Slavery Question’ (Cruikshank, 1826) demeaning the plight of the caribbean slaves who where massacred without thought and forced to live in abysmal conditions. 

To conclude what has been discussed in this chapter the author would say that the Arts industry was not made off the back of slavery however it did benefit and grow exponentially as a result if the slave trade. Galleries like the Tate which are seen as National treasures did benefit from the sugar slavery in the west indies most likely Guyana. And the fact that all this ‘new money’ invested their newfound wealth from slavery into the arts isn’t a surprise as the arts are such a huge status symbol within imperial Britain. Realistically there was truly no way that the art sector of Britain was not going to have benefactors who's wealth came from slavery. Art and Slavery are so intrinsically rooted together within colonial history that there is no way Britain would have had such a huge are presence without slavery.