A slave to fortune

According to the novelist, JP Hartley, the past is another country, they do things differently there. While I agree with the first half of that proposition, I'm not so sure about the latter. I hate to disagree with the author of the entirely wonderful The Go-Between but I think they largely do the same things, only wearing different clothes.

I was set to pondering this idea by the piece I wrote recently on BBC2's adaptation of the historical novel, The Gallows Pole, based on actual events in Yorkshire in the late-18th century. This in turn prompted thoughts about a story unfolding in the Yorkshire valley where I was brought up involving the unearthing, in an archaeological dig in a closed churchyard, of the remains of children and young people who had died while working in a nearby mill in the early-19th century. This provided a rare, if not unique, opportunity to examine the causes of death of dozens of so-called 'pauper apprentices'. 

The scientific study of the remains revealed in graphic detail the illnesses, injuries and premature deaths suffered by pauper children, mostly orphans, sent from parishes in urban centres to work in rural cotton, flax and silk mills for twelve hours a day, six days a week, a practice which continued as late as the 1870s. In the case of West House Mill in Blubberhouses, North Yorkshire, most of these wretched children were sent from London, particularly from Southwark and Lambeth, a distance of 200 miles, in conditions which can only be imagined, to meet their untimely deaths powering Britain's burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

In an age where the history of African slavery, and demands for reparations for it, are subjects currently being hotly debated, it's perhaps time to stop and consider, too, the uncomfortable truth (home truths in a very real sense) about the ways in which Britain treated its own working classes and what sorts of reparatory justice these might call for. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is, of course, uniquely grotesque in the industrial scale of its brutality, but in its exploitation of disempowered human beings it is, sadly, far from being a unique episode in human history.

We know that many, if not most, human societies practised slavery in some form or other, and many continue to do so under euphemisms like bonded labour. Certainly all the great empires were built by slave labour. Civilisations from ancient China, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome to the African kingdoms, Arab caliphates and Ottoman empire - not forgetting Britain's own imperial enterprise - were all beneficiaries of it. In mediaeval Europe, including England, serfdom was effectively a system of slavery, which persisted in the Russian Empire until the late-19th century. African slavery in the Southern States of the USA was only ended by a bitter civil war in the 1860s.  

But, as systems of slavery are dismantled around the world they merely seem to morph into other forms of exploitation. Neither the European and Russian serfs nor the American and British plantation slaves benefited meaningfully from abolition. Their lives continued to be nasty, brutish and short and, in some instances, may even have got worse. Russian peasants' lives were little better under Communism than under the Tsars. African slaves on Britain's Caribbean plantations, for example, were merely displaced by indentured Indian labourers, a system still flourishing in modern Arab states, as witnessed most shockingly and controversially in Qatar during the World Cup last year. And now we are increasingly aware of the phenomenon of so-called modern slavery and people trafficking.

And so it goes on; Man's inhumanity to Man seemingly knowing no bounds. Meanwhile, the planet upon which we all depend for our survival is going to hell in a handcart, pushed to the edge of destruction (and maybe over it) by human folly and greed. And let's never forget that this existential crisis all started with the CO2 emissions from the very Industrial Revolution that killed those poor young people working in that dark satanic mill on the edge of the moors in Blubberhouses and now lying in a paupers grave in the local churchyard.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong".

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