Echoes of the past

I'm currently reading Simon Schama's magnificent Rough Crossings: Britain, The Slaves and The American Revolution. It is in equal measure the most harrowing and most uplifting book I have read for many a year. Schama's academic rigour and his seemingly natural gift for story-telling shine in this potentially most bleak of subjects. As a reviewer of his BBC series A History of Britain remarked, if all school history teachers were like Schama, we'd all be historians.

To a twenty first century lefty, the very idea that people, and thousands of people at that, could be traded as goods, stripped of all dignity and humanity is abhorrent. Britain's role in the whole sordid business is often underplayed. While the majority of slaves were taken to the southern states to work on the cotton and tabacco plantations, a large number also worked in the British owned sugar plantations in the West Indies. The actual trading of the slaves from their capture and transportation across the Atlantic to the auctions, where a 'stout Negro' could be bought for 30 guineas, while weaker ones were piled onto giant scales and literally sold by the pound, was almost entirely a British operation. We had the most advanced navy in the world, the best ships, the most cunning businessmen. Many a British stately home, including Harewood House, close to where I used to live have their foundations built upon this brutal commerce.

But how far have we come in the intervening 200 or so years? One of the most famous and most disturbing images from that time is that of the stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the Regulated Slave Trade;



nearly 300 souls crammed onto squalid shelving, chained in place. It reminded me of something. Something much more recent though just as abhorrent;



The government of land of the free and the home of the brave (sic) clearly remembers and sees fit to once again treat people as cargo, as numbers to be moved from one place to another without any thought for humanity or decency. Once again, Britain has a role in this transportation of souls from freedom to bondage, if not to slavery. The US Supreme Court has only today ruled that the Bush administration does not have the authority to try terrorism suspects [in Guantanamo] by military tribunal. It is surely time for the concentration camp at Guantanamo to be consigned to history. If it takes another revolution I am sure that it will be better received over here than the last one.