More Thoughts on Slavery, Then and Now

What I said about our role in the industrialization of human misery is true, and the guilt is properly shared by Brits, Americans, and other Europeans. But I always thought it was Americans who put an end to it. Although I never believed that crap they taught us in school about states’ rights, I always thought it was our citizens, a combination of the Suffragists, Abe Lincoln, and a few pinko liberals in the North, who were determined to stop the human suffering. But not so. I recently learned it took the whole of Britain, at great personal and national sacrifice, to put an end to it. So this little piece is just an attempt on my part to be fair and historically accurate. According to Kristof and WuDunn, it was almost single-handedly a Brit named Thomas Clarkson, who was just doing a little research while a student at Cambridge. It was he who documented the actual implements of torture and gruesome restraint, and brought the information to the British public. Profiteers tried to have him killed, but he persevered and in a single decade the British people were so revolted by the facts that as a nation they demanded an end to the suffering. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and freed its slaves in 1833. France followed in 1848, and we as a nation eventually caught up.

In Half the Sky the authors also tell us that Saudi Arabia did not make slavery illegal until 1962, and Mauritania in 1981. Even if you are a teen ager now, and those dates seem waaay back, you should make them part of your basic history lesson. Maybe, as we internalize this stuff, we can find a path to make some changes in our own world. We can at least think about it.