The British Campaigns Against Slavery - Prof Lawrence Goldman

Lawrence Goldman is Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He was the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography between 2004 and 2014. He read history at Jesus College, Cambridge as an undergraduate. Upon graduation he received a Harkness Fellowship, which enabled him to study the history of slavery and American Civil War at Yale University for a year. He returned to Cambridge to undertake research in Victorian social science and social policy and was elected a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College. In 1985 he moved to Oxford as a lecturer in the History Faculty and became a fellow of St. Peter’s College where he taught both British and American History in the period since 1700. He was also Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. He is the author of books on the history of workers’ education; on Victorian social science; and on the life of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. His most recent book was published by Oxford University Press in 2022: Victorians and Numbers. Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain. For many years in Oxford he taught the final year undergraduate Special Subject on ‘American Slavery, Race and the Crisis of the Union’.

Our Mission
The abuse of history for political purposes is as old as history itself. In recent years, we have seen campaigns to rewrite the history of several democratic nations in a way that undermines their solidarity as communities, their sense of achievement, even their very legitimacy.

These ‘culture wars’, pursued in the media, in public spaces, in museums, universities, schools, civil services, local government, business corporations and even churches, are particularly virulent in North America, Australasia and the United Kingdom. Activists assert that ‘facing up’ to a past presented as overwhelmingly and permanently shameful and guilt-laden is the way to a better and fairer future. We see no evidence that this is true. On the contrary, tendentious and even blatantly false readings of history are creating or aggravating divisions, resentments, and even violence. We do not take the view that our histories are uniformly praiseworthy—that would be absurd. But we reject as equally absurd the claim that they are essentially shameful.

We agree that history consists of many opinions and many voices. But this does not mean that all opinions are valid, and certainly none should be imposed as a new orthodoxy. We intend to challenge distortions of history, and to provide context, explanation and balance in a debate in which dogmatism is too often preferred to analysis, and condemnation to understanding.

Who We Are
We are an independent group of scholars with a wide range of opinions on many subjects, but with the shared conviction that history requires careful interpretation of complex evidence, and should not be a vehicle for facile propaganda. We have established the History Reclaimed group as a non-profit making company limited by guarantee; the directors and co-editors are unpaid.

00:00 - Introduction
01:24 - Lecture
35:55 - Q&A
37:04 - Are academics in other countries subjected to vitriol in the same way?
39:54 - The influence of American race culture in Britain
42:12 - How factual is our history?
44:40 - How do you distinguish between slavery, serfdom, forced labour, modern slavery etc?
47:37 - Was abolitionism self-interested?
53:11 - How were slave-owners viewed?
56:41 - Compensation for slave-owners
1:00:24 - Who was the most significant individual in Britain arguing against slavery?
1:01:54 - Do we give too much prominence to race as a lens through which to view our history?
1:06:16 - 'Britons never shall be slaves'
1:09:20 - Conclusion

[stind]

Superb lecture. I thoroughly enjoyed this and look forward to further experts.

[trevormorgan]

St Gregory of Nissan in his Homilies on the book of Ecclesiastes wrote against the whole institution of slavery as far back as the fourth century AD. However, unlike Britain, 1400 years later, he had no temporal power to end the curse.

[עמודרע]

"well of the three-quarters of world population lived and worked as slaves or forced-labor"?
could you please share the source for this?

[XPLAlN]

I'll tell you who lived in bondage: Max Mosley.