Kemi Badenoch was reported by the Guardian yesterday to have said:
It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.
They added:
Instead, she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
As I said in the tweet that I issued in response:
There is nonsense, bullshit, fabrication and then whatever it is that Kemi Badenoch has to say on any subject.
If I failed to hide my contempt, I do not apologise.
I almost felt like asking on Twitter “Whatever did the Glorious Revolution do for you?“ Apart from the suppression of Catholicism, the creation of the Bank of England, the institution of the national debt, the imposition of a monarch who believed in the importance of the navy, largely as a weapon for imperialist, colonialist inspired territorial expansion, and who paved the way for the subjection of Scotland to the whim of the English, what did the Glorious Revolution do for you, after all?
The one thing I think we can say with confidence is that it did not deliver the industrial revolution.
It did however fuel demand for income to fund royal fantasies and foibles that most definitely required the exploitation of colonies in the USA, the Caribbean, West Africa and elsewhere.
So is Badenoch wrong? In my opinion, she is not just wrong, but is actively misrepresenting the truth.
Why would she do that? Partly because she does, for her own reasons, wish to deny Britain's racist past, and present, because her denial of that racism is itself racist, in my opinion.
As significantly, she also wants to deny the role of monopoly-based rentier capitalism and exploitation as the common foundations of the wealth of this country.
She is, instead, pretending that entrepreneurial activity did deliver that wealth. But that is largely untrue. For example, those canal and coal pioneers who, if anyone did, started the industrial revolution later in the 18th century were able to do so on the basis of land ownership, wealth and property, all of which was supported by extraction of profits resulting from privilege, patronage, expropriation, rents and exploitation. Some of that undoubtedly would have been derived from colonial activity.
In that case Badenoch's commentary does not just fail; it stinks because she is denying the truth and presenting a wholly false, politically inspired narrative that is unsupportable by evidence. But when did someone like her worry about things like that?
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
The “scamming mentality” still alive and well in the UK:-
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/18/whitehall-blueprint-for-thames-water-nationalisation-could-see-state-take-on-bulk-of-15bn-debt
It is probably not one thing, but among the significant factors were (i) wealth from the expansion of the slave trade in the 18th century (not just that one limb of the triangular trade, but also the profits from slave labour on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, and the profits from good sold to Africa) and (ii) wealth appropriated from other colonies including most importantly India and (iii) a fortunate geographical inheritance of readily accessible mineral wealth (particularly coal but also tin and copper and iron and lead). Is it no accident that Liverpool and Bristol and London grew rich in this period. Or that Manchester profited from processing slave-produced cotton deep into the 19th century.
The idea that the corrupt and oligarchic pre-Reform Act Parliament was somehow solely responsible for British success sounds like a Whiggish fantasy. (Badenoch’s Tory ancestors in the 17th and 18th century favoured of an Anglo-Catholic absolute monarchy, but she would probably ignore that and revere Pitt or Walpole.)
Research suggests that a lot of the early investment in Railways came from people who had just recieved compensation from losing their slaves when slavery was abolished.
So no connection at all (not)
Looks like a terminal case of what Marx would call False Consciousness
Thank you, John.
Some City acceptance houses were also funded by slavery and later indentured labour. One firm survives. The others have consolidated. One failed in 1866 as there was a time lag between funding from the plantation and liabilities that needed to be met in the City.
HSBC, my former employer, and what became Standard Chartered were formed by the proceeds from the opium trade. The descendant of managers at both firms was PM for six years in the last decade and returned to the cabinet last year.
Badenoch’s husband works at my former employer, Deutsche. Despite what Badenoch pretends, neither he nor his missus ever worked on the banking / client facing side.
The City is a parish. It’s interesting that the stories about Sunak and Javid have not come out.
Always an interesting and insightful ‘insiders’ view from you, Colonel. Thanks. No doubt the stories about Sunak and co will emerge once they’re no longer in power (Sunak in the US by then, presumably).
As an aside – and on a somewhat related topic – many years ago I was involved with a national charity and attended several fundraising events in London at which members of the ‘great and good’ were present. One of the topics of of conversation/gossip that seemed to regularly pop up was Prince Philips (alleged) long-time affair with a certain actress. To be honest, I’d never heard of such nonsense (no royal would do such a thing, surely!) but it seemed common knowledge amongst those who circulated in certain circles. No doubt the City is much the same.
Slavery and also military muscle. The East India company, for example. A tried and tested British strategy was to co-opt local bigwigs as well as give “employment” to locals as foot-soldiers to do the enforcing.
You mention opium and of course the demand for that lead to the “Opium Wars” with China. As Clausewitz might have said, war is the continuation of extractive commerce by other means.
Scotland subjugated itself; it calculatedly gave up its Parliament for the opportunity of Empire. It was not a victim, unless you count self-inflicted injuries. The victim card doesn’t work for Scotland; it never had any purchase in Scotland save for Jacobite Romantics (and you may believe me, there was nothing Romantic about late Jacobitism), which has now been subject to a modern, sentimentalist revival (with a history better suited to the lids of shortbread tins). If you mean Scotland acquired a lot more than it bargained for, and in constitutional terms was comprehensively shafted by its imperial partner; I have no argument with that (but they knew what they were dealing with, so had no excuse). For most ordinary people in Scotland they were equally shafted, in or out of the Union, before or after.
Why? There are always lost of politicians, in every age – just like Kemi Badenoch.
John, the wealthy aristocracy subjugated ordinary Scots, in Burns phrase, for English Gold. The mass of Scots had no say because there was nothing approaching democracy and there was civil unrest in many Scottish towns. But it was ever thus and we see the millionaires in Westminster and elsewhere deciding what’s best for the rest of us, as in another thread on the BoE that doesn’t care.
Yes, but none of this has anything to do with democracy. The “English Gold” idea is very misleading. The Union was a trade-off deal by privileged interests. King William had relied heavily on Scots for his success in 1688-9, but he betrayed them badly over Darien, which ruined Scotland (it was never intended to be in Central America, but the Far East; the Crown prevented the intended IPO in London, and disaster followed).
The Union trade off was in the ‘Equivalent’, probably the most critical de facto section of the Treaty of Union (that nobody reads or understands, and overlooked by historians, because few understand the brilliance of Paterson and Gregory, who designed it). The Equivalent was principally compensation to the Darien shareholders (who were also effectively the Scottish electorate), for the Crown’s betrayal (think of it as a little like an elite level Post Office scandal). For the Scots, in which its Parliament had played a relatively smaller role in government than the Crown, Darien made the elite realise it had decisively lost all control of the Crown and the future. The loss of the Parliament was a small penalty. The elite protected the Church of Scotland, and their own power through the retention of heritable jurisdictions. Most people misread what was going on. It was a deal between elites.
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation?
There was massive unrest in Scotland at the prospect of the Act of Union. and mob violence in Edinburgh.
Apart from its poor geographic location and major problems with disease etc., Darien was also deliberately undermined by England, if not sabotaged, especially when it became obvious it was struggling to establish, simply because the English did not want any trading competition, following the mercantilist economic dogma of the times.
I am sorry I have to say this again, but some of the comments repeat a very unrealistic, but all too commonplace view of our history. Ordinary Scots were subjugated both before and after Union. The Union made little difference. The ‘people’ didn’t count, before or after. Allow me to give one example. In 1605 the Scottish Parliament passed the Colliers and Salters Act, effectively reducing colliers and salters to slavery. Scottish people in a pre-industrial society had no inclination to go underground, when Scotland began to require coal from mines for fuel, even when there was little other employment available in hard times; for very good reason, it was appalling work, and few willingly were prepared to do it*. Once there, they were trapped; and this extended to their families (women and children), from one generation it passed automatically to the next; and mining became in some places an excluded, separate world.
Unable to recruit people willingly into mining, the Scottish Parliament gave coal owners the privilege of forcing unemployed labour, vagrants, beggars, whomsoever was available, and in difficulty to work in the mines, without let or hindrance; and become the chattel property of the mine. The Act was refined by several subsequent Acts, and was not completely repealed until 1799, almost one hundred years after the Union. In the eighteenth century Scotland did not have a Parliament, but it did have considerable autonomy, to keep the subjugation intact.
We need some realism here about the nature of Scotland.
*How appalling only really registered throughout the whole of the British coal industry, with the 1842 Mines Act. As illustration, women were compulsorily replaced as carriers of coal from coalface to the surface – by pit ponies.
It was NOT a Glorious Revolution in Ireland!
Even in this era of parroting MSM – it is still astonishing that rampant ideologues like Badenoch, Frost and Sunak feel able to issue ‘black is white’ statements in the teeth of existing historical or medical knowledge – whether about sick note culture or the roots of the industrial revolution or the rise of the nazis.
I will address the sick norte culture another time…
I can see you are very busy today but I am not around for the rest of the weekend and I would like to make this point about the “sick-note” culture.
Whether in industry or teaching I found that people who asked the best questions frequently started by saying “This may be a dumb thing to ask, but why …..”
In that spirit I would like to address the following question to the Tories.
Before Margaret Thatcher I could turn-up at my local surgery without an appointment and regularly be seen by a GP within 15-30 mins.
After Margaret Thatcher it became necessary to first get an appointment and now it is next to impossible to see a doctor.
Put Party politics and Ideology aside Mr Sunak and tell us what you think has really caused that change?
@Paul Langston,
Did the “Doc Martin” type of medical practice really ever exist in the UK?
As a Yank, I have no clue so I ask.
Yes, it did – but at the time when GP’s could actually do remarkably little to help people bar give out penicillin, asprian and hold their hands as they died at home from a heart attack. Medicine has improved and demand has grown to reflect that, hence the current problems. Many more people survive now, and get care come to that.
And it is not true you cannot get a doctor’s appointnment now – it is just hard
Full disclosure: I am married to a retired GP
In Scotland we’re really short of GPs, (though we’re short of almost all surgery teams too), but I can usually arrange a phone consultation the same day, and our GP runs an island surgery on Wednesdays, so always within a week.
We don’t have the artificial internal competitive market here, as in England, and the NHS still co-ordinates reasonably well.
We do have a resident island nurse as well who I can see any day, and most are at nurse practitioner level of expertise.
I suppose that’s actually better than Doc Martin..
“In Scotland we’re really short of GPs”
If there is shortage of GPs, why not make the study of medicine “student loan free” and the payback of the “cost of education” is paid for by the newly graduate GP working “X” years 100% only for the NHS?
Something so obvious appears to be beyond our government
Instead, they also now charge nurses to train even when they are required to work in hospitals
@Richard,
My question is why not?
If a country needs healthcare workers then you subsidize the education of healthcare workers.
If a country needs teachers then you subsidize the education of teachers.
If a country needs plumbers & sparkies then you subsidize the education of plumbers & sparkies.
What kind of workforce does the powers-that-be at Westminster want?
An alienated, untrained one.
If I am a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) or I am a LPN (Licensed Practical Nurse) almost any US hospital will pay the cost of my education to become an RN (Registered Nurse) if I am willing to sign a contract to work for them for X number of years. Usually “X number of years” is 5-7 seven years.
You would think the same would happen here…..
I have felt for a while that Badenoch is probably the most dangerous Tory likely to retain a seat after the election. I suspect her ‘truth’ is based entirely on what she would like to be true, rather than having any grounding in reality. Most scary, I think she actually believes the nonsense she spouts, so total is her commitment to her fantasy world.
The idea that she could govern starting from this basis is genuinely terrifying, but given how attractive her lies are, it’s entirely possible.
@Kim SJ
You say “Most scary, I think she actually believes the nonsense she spouts, so total is her commitment to her fantasy world.
The idea that she could govern starting from this basis is genuinely terrifying, but given how attractive her lies are, it’s entirely possible.”
Alas, the same is true in spades with Keir Starmer’s bunch of Keystone Kops 4th-raters.
He and Reeves are economic ignoramuses – what I call flat-earther economists = people who have overlooked the Copernican revolution brought about by the Great Financial Crash of 2008/9 which conclusively demonstrated what nonsense Neoliberal economics is – untrue, unworkable (except for the rich) hocus pocus.
So Starmer and Reeves, with their 4th-rater flock following sheepishly behind, believe all the nonsense about fiscal rules, deficits, “there’s no magic money tree, and we’ve maxed out on our credit card”, taxpayers’s money, household budget and every other piece of incantation nonsense from the 21st century Grimms’ Fairy Tales (which at least contained mythological and psychological truth, and so weren’t utter BS, as is Starmer’s and Reeves’s economics).
I sincerely hope sufficient independent MP’s are voted into Parliament at the next GE to prevent Starmer from entering No. 10, as I regard him as the most dangerous politician in the current Westminster bubble
He’s dishonest: he “won” the Labour Leadership by dishonest means = deceit (pretending to be “Continuity Corbyn”), deception (keeping his unpleasant, dodgy funders secret until after the close of the poll), massive overfunding of his campaign via those funders, to the level where his campaign would have been penalised, had it been a statutory election) and who knows what else.
And all of this was planned in advance (see https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/24/starmer-set-up-own-labour-leadership-team-six-months-before-corbyns-2019-defeat)
He’s untrustworthy (see Peter Oborne on this at https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2023/september/25/exposed-keir-starmer-liar-murdochs-man-candidate-mi5-peter-oborne), authoritarian (again, see Peter Oborne on this at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-labour-starmer-authoritarianism-alarm-bells-ringing), and even dictatorial (he has stripped the Labour Party of its democracy, for example)
He is almost certainly a Secret Service asset (see https://novaramedia.com/2021/03/02/keir-starmer-is-a-long-time-servant-of-the-british-security-state/), and is certainly, as a “Zionist without qualification” an Israeli stooge, who ran off to ask advice of Herzog, President of Israel (??!!) and who is sending PPC’s (Prospective Parliamentary Candidates) to Israel for “training” (???!!!).
Israel is what he cares about IMO (he’s on record as saying “We stand up for Israel, we stand up for the Israeli people, we stand up for Israeli interests, and we will always put that first”), and I believe that’s why he wants to be PM = to protect Israel NOT us, the UK population.
A VERY dangerous politician, IMO.
I don’t think that Badenoch believes it for one minute.
This is part of the burgeoning exercise of ‘hypernormality’, and has always been from the myths about WW2 and the ‘special relationship’ (yep we are the USA’s forward nuclear launch pad) through to Malaya, Kenya, on to Iraq as well as the more recent Brexit, COVID and all the other rubbish spouted by most politicians. The New Right has been building a fantasy world for decades, funded principally by big business and US far right money. The vehicle is of course the MSM.
They are, badly, attempting to construct a revisionist history of the UK, seeded by ‘Britannia Unchained’ to some extent (hence ‘sick note culture’) and abetted by the useless education system in this country that has never been fit for purpose in the modern world (NB I am a teacher and one-time manager in education of MANY years standing).
The Empire is topic which easily becomes a ‘them and us’ debate and generates more heat than light. It looks to me that is what Badenoch is doing with, in her view, the proud to be British on one side and the ‘Guardian reading, tofu eating wokerati’ on the other. Headlines for the Mail and Express.
Like all sweeping generalisations there are exceptions and other views. It should not be overlooked that the British working class were often equally exploited. I doubt if she will say that. In the late 1820s before the abolition of slavery and first reform acts, there was a genuine debate whether some of the Manchester textile workers were better or worse off than the salves in the West Indies. Whereas the British might find another employer the slave owner had an interest in keeping his slaves alive, fed and healthy. The Whigs came to power in the 1830s and started the process of reform-though they also passed the Workhouse Act !
I would argue that the Empire was only part of the reason for Britain’s wealth. Spain and Portugal had the first empires and were not industrial powers. Technology can’t be kept secret and later entries could benefit. Germany had caught up with Britain by the 1880s without an Empire. Japan also industrialised before invading the mainland.
Investors raised money from many small savers, the enclosures, advances in science and education etc were all factors. I won’t bore you any more.
But they didn’t keep their slaves fit and healthy. The attrition rate was appalling (far worse than in the US slave states). The conditions and oppression so bad there were violent rebellions, even after slavery was abolished. The culture of plantations was so deep set and counterproductive the smart money cashed in on the abolition of slavery. The business model depended on a functioning slave trade (for replenishment) to work as originally designed. After The Haiti revolution the planters were terrified of their minority position of power, and couldn’t think of a way out.
If you want to know what approach Badenoch may well be employing in her revisionist approach to English/British history it’s worth watching this short clip of an arch Russian propagandist lecturing to young Russians about ‘truth’:
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1781299488105078975
As another fan of fascism once said (this time in the US context, so no doubt the lesson has spread widely amongst the right in the UK) there are facts and then there are ‘alternative facts’. And from what I’ve seen Badenoch may well have a PhD in that subject.
In this passage Badenoch’s quoted as saying “she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.” Well, Badenoch’s actually quoting from the book by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” and the actual quote is “it is not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution started in England a few decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688”. I’m reading her speech https://www.kemibadenoch.org.uk/news/thecityuk-international-conference-speech-how-smart-regulation-creates-growth and she adds “Since we are here at TheCityUK, the sections on the growth of the UK’s financial sector, are particularly relevant. I’m not here to give a history lecture, but it is interesting how the authors describe how financial services in England exploded after the Glorious Revolution and the changes brought in.”
The main economic significance of the Dutch Invasion, still hidden from us disguised as some sort of Glorious Revolution (and I remind doubters we are witnessing history being remade before our eyes today with the introduction into it of the Fauxbel Prize for Economics) was IMV surely the switch from English Finance to Dutch Finance. Let’s turn to Hugh Dunthorne for more on this (Britain and the Dutch Revolt 1560–1700) “… Britain’s so-called financial revolution was distinctive too. It is true that the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 and the introduction of a national debt funded by parliamentary taxation caused some observers to complain, rightly, that the country was being taken over by what they called ‘Dutch finance’. There was indeed a broad similarity between the system of long term public borrowing pioneered by the Dutch during their war against Spain in the sixteenth century and the one introduced into Britain by William the Third in order to fund the Nine Years War against France. Dutch investors were prominent among those subscribing loans to the British state at this time, as well as in the insurance market and on London’s stock exchange.” He goes on to point out though “while the influence of the Netherlands on England’s financial development is undeniable, it also needs to be said that the Bank of England quickly grew to be quite a different institution from the Dutch banks which had inspired its founders. Unlike those of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, it was a national rather than a municipal bank; and it issued notes and lent directly to the government, as no Dutch bank did.”
It’s noteworthy too Dunthorne later writes “… despite the differences in political structure between the two states, despite their constitutional incompatibility, there is no doubt that Britain’s rulers, in Parliament and in the country at large, did indeed follow the example of Dutch policies and institutions. We have seen already that they did so in the economic sphere, introducing ‘Dutch taxes’ and ‘Dutch finance’, and allowing merchants a greater voice in government.”
Author Mack Ott helps us distinguish between the two approaches to finance in ‘The Political Economy of Nation Building: The World’s Unfinished Business’ “”The world’s first central bank was established by Sweden, the Riksbank in 1668, but the Bank of England was next in 1684. Both embodied the notion of ‘Dutch Finance,’ the dedication of specific government revenues to service debt issues.”… “The first application of Dutch Finance in William’s financing of his Continental wars occurred in 1693 when Parliament passed an act to borrow £1million with excise duties dedicated for ninety-nine years to fund servicing of the debt. There were two innovations in this finance: First, principal would not be repaid, and lenders would only receive monthly interest payments. More generally, the principle of ‘interest-only payments’ became the cornerstone of English fiscal finance in instruments known as consols. Second, Parliament was the guarantor, not the Crown, and the adequacy of the pledged tax receipts was anticipated to make the issue attractive. These new features were unfamiliar, and since there were at the time no secondary markets, the 1693 issue was not fully subscribed; however, the act also allowed for life annuities to cover the amount not taken up, and those annuities were quite popular and were quickly taken up completing the successful issue. This was the first instance of the new Dutch Finance in England – that is, long-term finance with dedicated tax revenues to fund its servicing with arrangements guaranteed by Parliament, not the Crown. As such it was one of the first and most lasting benefits of the newly established constitutional monarchy of England. This financing marked the beginning of England’s permanent national debt, and its success led to even more revolutionary changes in the government’s finances in its next borrowing for war funding in 1694.””
It was a different way of doing things. Arguably this is what Badenoch refers to when she says (and I’m not sure if she’s meant to be quoting others again here or not) “Monarchy is bound by the rule of law, including repaying its debts and this certainty that’s given to business, as it was then, changes the economic game. Interest required on the national debt fell, private lending surges, the stock market grows rapidly, financial services takes off, property rights become embedded and eventually we have more than a social and economic revolution. We have an industrial one.”
I wonder myself, without that invasion, would we have had the industrial revolution? Without the new banking setup, where would the money have come from?
It’s worth reading https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history-in-the-making-the-glorious-revolution-of-168891-was-really-a-dutch-invasion-this-distortion-of-the-facts-reflects-our-narrow-view-of-britain-s-past-argues-jonathan-israel-1565642.html from Jonathan Israel on the overall subject of the ‘Glorious Revolution’. And if you want to get into it at a far deeper level try ‘Going Dutch’ by the late Prof Lisa Jardine. Superb stuff.
I’ve done some musings myself over at https://www.dutch-finance.co.uk and I’m just gonna say WORK IN PROGRESS so while everyone’s welcome to take a peek please don’t beat up on me too much about it 🙂
Fascinating
My thanks
I am glad that my glib version is confirmed by your much more in depth analysis
Thank you, Bill.
I was aware of some.
Some of the descendants of William III’s associates are still around.
I work for Ajax’s former sponsor in the City.
Thank you to Ivan, above.
Sunak is / was not the hot shot bankster / hedgie portrayed. His time at Goldman Sachs was brief. His marriage facilitated the rest, especially at the hedge funds.
(Former colleagues and) I regard Javid as the more dangerous, from his time at Chase Manhattan in the 1990s (particularly during the Mexico crisis of 1994) to his stint at Deutsche in the noughties. Let’s just say that Javid’s support for Bailey to become governor* was a quid pro quo. Bailey knows where the bodies are buried and how they got there. *Cummings supported Haldane. Johnson was asked to referee and was swayed by Javid.
A different explanation of the “Glorious Revolution”
The Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, acted as a means for the Stuart royal family, Charles II and James II, to finance their dictatorial rule without Parliamentary sanction, while personally enriching themselves and their associates and backers from the City of London. However, denying other City of London businessmen, as well as traders based in other cities, access to this profitable trade was one of the reasons the increasingly powerful capitalist class in England turned against Catholic King James II. It led to their support for the 1688 invasion from the Netherlands, led by Protestant William of Orange and James’s daughter Mary Stuart, resulting in the coup d’état known as the Glorious Revolution. Opposition to the monopoly of the Royal African Company also came from the owners of the slave plantations in the West Indies, whose increased wealth enabled them to buy growing influence in the British Parliament. The Royal African Company could not supply enough enslaved labourers to meet the West Indian landowners’ requirements for the growing slave-based economy. At the same time, restricting the numbers shipped by the Company enabled it to exploit its monopoly to force up the price of enslaved Africans.
Pressure from those businessmen excluded from the trade, as well as the demands of the West Indian plantation owners for ever increasing supplies of enslaved labour, forced Parliament to pass the Trade with Africa Act 1697. This opened the slave trade to all English merchants who paid a ten per cent levy to the Company.
Colonial commerce, including the business of slavery, was one of the driving forces of the capitalist economy from its earliest manifestation, encouraging the expansion of a manufacturing economy. Exports from Britain accounted for around half of all industrial production in the 18th century. Inikori tells us that, in 1770, the slave trade and the plantation economy furnished as much as fifty-five percent of gross fixed capital formation investment in Great Britain.
The increased rate of industrial growth based on exports depended on purchasing power generated by the British West Indies. Demand stemming from Africa, the Caribbean and North America based on the sugar industry was responsible for more than half of the growth of English exports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The business of slavery greatly contributed to increasing investment in the British Empire, particularly the construction of the infrastructure that such trade required. Additionally the re-export of sugar to the Europe brought enormous profits. Half of the non-agricultural workforce in England and Wales was employed in production for export, accounting for much of the growth in manufacturing output.
based on: Patrick K. O’Brien and Stanley L. Engerman, “Exports and the growth of the British economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens in Barbara Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
I was unaware of this.
Badenoch really was wrong.
Have you published this anywhere?
It is an extract from “Sir Robert Geffrye and the Business of Slavery: Why the Museum of the Home must remove the statue of Robert Geffrye and make reparations” by Steve Cushion.
https://cls-uk.org.uk/?p=1204
On the blog tomorrow.