The British Crown Modernizes Slavery

The Victorian novelist Charles Dickens open his classic Tale of Two Cities with the famous words "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" ...... and so it is with us today.

Dickens wrote about the French Revolution in
The Tale of Two Cities (painting by Delacroix)

I frequently malign the British Empire (and Crown), and the stranglehold that it has exerted (and continues to exert) over the planet for the past 300+ years. Yet, every cloud has its silver lining. There is no political freedom without economic freedom, and our current system of free enterprise (under attack, as it is) owes a great and deep debt to the pioneering thought of classical British liberalists; William Shakespeare is certainly a treasure of the entire human race to enjoy; and America (somewhat obviously) owes its very existence in no small part to the philosophers and thinkers of the English Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Such are the British contributions to humanity that you are taught about in school. They qualify as that which we might very justly term "the best of times," for truly these advancements (especially those in the economic sphere) have been (very) directly responsible for bringing to a greater part of the world a quality of life that was unknown even among royalty not so very long ago. I make these comments partly because they are true, and they should therefore be known and acknowledged, and partly out of deference to the people of Britain and the victims of last week's bus bomb attacks in London.

Yet there is a much darker side to this story, a part of the story that you are deliberately not taught about in school. It's the part that describes exactly how the British Crown, operating from that tiny little island up in the North Sea, managed first to build, and now today to maintain, the greatest, most powerful and most pervasive Empire the world has ever known.

The story begins over 300 years ago with creation of the British "free trade" system, a euphamism used (to this day) in polite society to describe the far more vulgar concept of "slavery." It is, of course, (rather) well known that the British Empire was first built upon the backs of Black chattel slaves over 300 years ago. It is perhaps slightly less well known that the United States, despite winning "political" independence from Great Britain in 1783, was unable to achieve any meaningful economic independence from Britain until 1865, when President Lincoln was finally able to throw the British "free-traders" and their slave-handling ways out of this country.

Lincoln won the first major battle
against British "free trade" in 1865

What is far less well known in the Western world is that the barbarity, cruelity and malice with which the English practiced chattel slavery is without parallel in the history of recorded civilization. The ancients kept slaves, that much is true, but in the ancient world it was rare that such a "contract" extend over the course of an entire lifetime, much less was it perpetuated from one generation to the next solely upon the basis of race [1,2]. Such a system of perpetual (and racist) chattel enslavement appears to be entirely of English origin and invention.

British "contributions" to the practice of chattel slavery may be somewhat ambiguous, but what we know for a fact is that nearly every form of social collectivism created during the 19th and 20th centuries - everything from Communism to Naziism to Fabianism to the United Nations to the European Union - is (ultimately) of English invention. If you want more evidence to support such claims, keep reading this blog .. I plan on posting much more about such topics in the coming weeks and months.

In my next post, I'll discuss what all this has to do with our current topic at hand: the global terrorism that is spewed forth (daily) from London City, and what it means for those who are (still) loyal to the American Republic.

Footnotes

1. It's an interesting footnote to history that even such greats as Pythagoras and Plato had the unfortunate experience of spending various and sundry times of their lives as slaves. Pythoagoras was taken captive when the Persian ruler Cambyses invaded Egypt in 525 B.C. He was taken back to Persia, where he eventually won his freedom and proceeded to study philosophy with the Magians of Persia and the Chaldeans of Babylon. Plato was briefly taken as a slave in Italy while he was studying with the Pythagoreans, but soon obtained his freedom with the help of a Libyan friend.


2. There are a few exceptions that could be cited, for instance the plight of the Hebrews in Egypt prior to Moses, or of the Jews during the Babylonian Exile, yet concrete data concerning the extent to which "economic slavery" was a factor in these events is scant and ambiguous. There is also ample documentation from the classical era (for instance, in the biographies of Plutarch) indicating that slaves (for instance in Rome) were often treated with (relatively) decent regard and (more or less) as members of the family whom they served.