Following on December 2's "COP28: It Looks Like The Plan Is To Have Britain Pay For All Of Humanity's Emissions".
From The Guardian, Dec. 6:
Mia Mottley tells London audience that King Charles’s comments about slavery’s impact were welcome
King Charles’s comment that the “time has come” to acknowledge the enduring impact of slavery has been welcomed by the prime minister of Barbados as she spoke in London about the need for reparations.
Mia Mottley said Barbados was owed $4.9tn (£3.9tn) by slave-owning nations, noting that conversations over how this debt should be repaid would “be difficult and will take time”, she said on Wednesday evening.
“We’re not expecting that the reparatory damages will be paid in a year, or two, or five because the extraction of wealth and the damages took place over centuries. But we are demanding that we be seen and that we are heard,” she said....
....MUCH MORE
Working the sugar plantations on Barbados was as brutal as African slavery in the Americas could get. And some 90% of the people caught in the trans-Atlantic slave trade went to the Caribbean and South America.
In comparison the Christians enslaved by the Ottoman Muslims had it comparatively easy.
From a post just before Russia invaded Ukraine: "That Time Catherine The Great Annexed Crimea (plus the Crimean slave raids extending from Ukraine to Finland and Potemkin got a bad rap from history)":
I should probably do a separate post on the slave raids the Crimean Khanate conducted in eastern Europe (and the Barbary corsairs up to Iceland, 1624!) [also Baltimore Ireland, 1631] but the short version is that 15 years after the Muslim Turks invaded and conquered the Christians of Constantinople in 1453, the Khanate began slave raids they called ‘harvesting of the steppe', making huge bank by sending the slaves across the Black Sea to the newly renamed Istanbul:
The Turks especially like blonde women but were quite enthusiastic about buying brunettes and redheads as well. Somewhere in the neighborhood of three million people were enslaved and let's just say this history engendered a lot of bad blood. The last harvest of the steppe was in 1769 when about 20,000 people were enslaved, to be sold in Crimea and resold in Istanbul.
On the other hand, Britain was the first nation in world history to, not just outlaw slavery but actively eradicate it on the high seas:
"The Royal Navy’s Triumph over Slavery"
Slavery was practiced by people of all colors.
And had been for thousands and thousands of years.
It was a worldwide phenomena....
*****
... The most important active British anti-slavery naval force, however, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was that based in West Africa which freed slaves and took them to Freetown in Sierra Leone, a British colony founded for free black people. They could not be returned to their homes, as they would only be captured anew by fellow Africans and sold as slaves. Indeed, in 1862, Viscount Palmerston, the Prime Minister, observed:
Half the evil has been done by the time the slaves are captured in the American waters. The razzia [devastating raid] has been made in Africa, the village has been burnt, the old people and infants have been murdered, the young and the middle aged have been torn from their homes and sent to sea.
In 1834, another outgunned British ship, the HMS brigantine Buzzard, under Lieutenant Anthony William Milward, took on the well-armed and larger Spanish brig Formidable off West Africa after a chase of seven hours. In a “smart action” of forty-five minutes, the Buzzard had several injured and, as Milward reported, the “fore and maintop-mast stays were cut, running rigging and sails much damaged, flying jib-boom shot away, and bumpkin carried away in boarding”, but six of the slaver’s crew were killed. Seven hundred slaves were freed.....
....MUCH MORE
700 freed in one action.When carbon markets were all the rage—we preferred tax-and-100% rebate, less opportunity for rent-seeking and graft but a tough sell to the powers-that-be who would profit from said rent-seeking and graft— when they were all the rage one of our pithy little analogies was:
"When Britain decided to end slavery,
Wilberforce didn't set up a cap-and-trade system"
—from our October 2007 post "Cap-and-Trade Market in Babies"
It was a bit surprising how many intelligent, educated people would ask: "Who's Wilberforce?"
