Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Apr 11, 2021 5:43 pm

Grumble wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 5:32 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:43 pm
Lew Dolby wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:17 pm
No - much more recently. Anyone alive in, say, 1200 (in England, at least) who's got descendants alive today is an ancestor of all of us (unless you're a recent immigrant or totally descended from recent immigrants)
Totally descended from Slovak immigrants, me. I expect there weren't many Slavs in the UK before the 20th century.
One branch of my ancestors came from that general area, with the surname Huss. They came over around the time of the Reformation. I think that name’s Czech rather than Slovak though. There’s a Huss Lane in Longeaton named for that branch, where they were farmers, though disappointingly it’s a light industrial area these days, not some bucolic idyll.
Jan Hus was a Bohemian theologian.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Grumble » Sun Apr 11, 2021 6:07 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 5:43 pm
Grumble wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 5:32 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:43 pm

Totally descended from Slovak immigrants, me. I expect there weren't many Slavs in the UK before the 20th century.
One branch of my ancestors came from that general area, with the surname Huss. They came over around the time of the Reformation. I think that name’s Czech rather than Slovak though. There’s a Huss Lane in Longeaton named for that branch, where they were farmers, though disappointingly it’s a light industrial area these days, not some bucolic idyll.
Jan Hus was a Bohemian theologian.
Yes, there was a family myth that we were related to him but I think my mum disproved that with her genealogical research. I know he was from an area now in Czechia, I just have no knowledge of how local the surname is.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 7:12 am

lpm wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:38 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:49 am
individualmember wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:13 am

Is it a coincidence that the British decided that slavery is wrong and should be abolished just at the time when an alternative source of power made a fundamental change to the need for manpower to get stuff done?
I think its very unlikely that it was a coincidence. To start with from the late 18th century on enormous wealth was being created by the industrial revolution. The relative political influence of the sugar industry was reduced.
individualmember wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:13 am
Did we already know that it was wrong but couldn’t contemplate ending slavery for economic reasons?
Slavery within the British Isles stopped during the period of Norman rule. As far as I know it was never explicitly made illegal, but was condemned by the Church.

By the 18th Century there were several judgements that slavery was not recognized as being lawful in England and Scotland. Yes, there were slaves present in the UK, which is a reflection of the lack of a criminal justice system to enforce laws. At the time a plaintive had to bring a case to a court, there weren't any police tasked with enforcing laws.

As soon as slavery and the slave trade started in the colonies it was opposed, particularly by Quakers and other non-conformists.

People didn't suddenly discover that slavery was wrong in the latter part of the 18th Century.
The classic view of the economics, up until around the 1960s, was basically that slavery financed the initial stages of Britain's Industrial Revolution, but then the maturing capitalist economy of Britain ended slavery. In particular, Spain got screwed because accidents of history meant it controlled gold and silver deposits, which trashed its own money supply, while Britain accidentally ended up with the Caribbean and North American colonies, winning the lucrative sugar industry and the supply of cotton. Sugar alone provided huge profits to the 1%, some of which was redirected to urban industrial enterprises - the Liverpool bankers notably came up with the full vertical enterprise from financing the slave trade to financing cotton plantations to financing the cotton mills. Under this theory, slavery in the New World caused capitalism in Britain.

Later theories reversed this, into capitalism caused slavery. The Industrial Revolution is now repositioned as a shift from rural industrialisation to urban industrialisation, running at far greater efficiency and capable of delivering export led growth. Cheap products could be shipped to the African coast to start the first leg of the triangle. Modern theories also concentrate more on the American colonies than the West Indies sugar trade - the American colonies led to far more complex economic trade (e.g. the colonies providing the West Indies plantations with goods). New England for example was born as a trading nation, leapfrogging straight to complex economics, while old England was still transitioning from old institutions to new global trade. Ship building and hence international trade became a massive north American industry, creating more long term prosperity than the tobacco and cotton plantations in the southern states.

As I said, I'm not sure what the latest "consensus" is. Slavery was inherently violent and needed a lot resources to be directed into the military (loosely defined), to control the African coast, defend the slave routes from European rivals, defend the Caribbean islands, prevent slave insurrection and enforce the various monopolies and tariffs. The New England colonies faced lower military overheads and prospered without a vast slave trade. It's no coincidence that when military resources were needed to eliminate "the merciless savages" the New Englanders objected to taxes imposed on their international trade to fund it all. Meanwhile, the powerful sugar lobby in England enacted protectionism to maintain their West Indies monopoly - leading to British consumers paying a far higher price for sugar than European neighbours. It's not clear whether the huge profits from sugar were due to the slavery system or due to good old rigging of the market to charge monopoly prices to consumers, while manipulating the government to fund the military protection - the privatise the profits, socialise the losses approach we now know so well. Those Jane Austen heroes with £10,000 a year might well have got the wealth from the exploitation of the British public rather than from the economics of the slave trade.

It's not uncommon in the economic history literature to see people concluding that Britain would have had higher GDP growth if it had lost its West Indies possessions in some war or other. And it's also often argued that cotton from the slave states was economically bad overall. There's some pretty good statistics on how labour supply reacted to the end of slavery in the American South - ex slaves immediately chose to work fewer hours per day, prioritising their leisure time over hourly pay. There was an immediate drop in labour supply by something in the region of 25% or 33% - making raw cotton more expensive. But it wasn't a crippling change. Raw materials are only part of the cost of the finished suit of clothes being bought in British shops after the cotton has been through the cotton mills. Slave labour was never free, and part of the reason why the plantation owner was so rich was because costs had been pushed to elsewhere in the economic system. An imaginary counterfactual where slaves didn't exist and wages were used to entice labour could well come out as favourable for combined UK-US GDP.

The other data point is that Britain and the USA soared economically after the end of slavery. If the slave system had been generating big economic growth it might be expected that its end would cause a road bump. There's no evidence of that, although of course it could be swamped by other factors like technological change. Slaves didn't disappear - they were still people doing labour - and there are plenty of other ways to exploit humans and get their labour for bargain-basement prices, as seen with the wage-earning but powerless workers of the 19th C in Britain's factories.

The economic impact of the slave trade are far more messy and complicated that the stuff we learned at school. Not only is it over simplified to see a National Trust house as being built with blood money - the actual profit might have been from ripping off fellow Brits with high prices - but the systematic exploitation of the poor through the Industrial Revolution might be a side effect. The counterfactual where the Atlantic slave trade never happened could well have seen a more prosperous Britain developing faster with bigger country houses for the 1% and better economic security for the urban poor.
Thanks for that lpm. Its a subject that I'd like to know more about.

In terms of wealth in the UK, the vast majority of what we see today was accrued after the abolition of slavery in 1833. But assuming that it was all down to automation and use of fossil fuels isn't enough as the sugar industry and slave trade had an important role in stimulating the industrial revolution in the first place - as we've written both in terms of providing capital that could be invested in things like coal mines and in there being a market for goods.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:27 am

When it comes to coal, a forgotten bit of history is that coal miners in Scotland were slaves.

At birth a child was bound to the owner of a coal mine through a payment to the parents, would be working from the age of 5 and could not leave the pit to find alternative work. Any miner who escaped was treated as a thief for stealing his or her master's property, i.e. him or herself. The miners were paid, but what meaning does subsistence pay have when all it gets is food and a bed in a two room cottage shared with another family? Pit owners could also seize any wandering vagabond or pick men and women from the poor house and enslave them in his mine.

There was a tradition that miners would be free if they escaped for more than a year and a day, for example by fleeing to England, but the records show miners being brought back to their owner at any time - for example if an owner closed a worked out pit and let his slaves go off to find work elsewhere, he could still recall them years later if he started a new pit.

The internet says this carried on till 1775, when nobody could be entered into slavery but existing slave miners remained bound for 7 or 10 years. However the miners were generally unaware of the change. In 1799 the slave structure was finally abolished.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:45 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:27 am
When it comes to coal, a forgotten bit of history is that coal miners in Scotland were slaves.

At birth a child was bound to the owner of a coal mine through a payment to the parents, would be working from the age of 5 and could not leave the pit to find alternative work. Any miner who escaped was treated as a thief for stealing his or her master's property, i.e. him or herself. The miners were paid, but what meaning does subsistence pay have when all it gets is food and a bed in a two room cottage shared with another family? Pit owners could also seize any wandering vagabond or pick men and women from the poor house and enslave them in his mine.

There was a tradition that miners would be free if they escaped for more than a year and a day, for example by fleeing to England, but the records show miners being brought back to their owner at any time - for example if an owner closed a worked out pit and let his slaves go off to find work elsewhere, he could still recall them years later if he started a new pit.

The internet says this carried on till 1775, when nobody could be entered into slavery but existing slave miners remained bound for 7 or 10 years. However the miners were generally unaware of the change. In 1799 the slave structure was finally abolished.
That sounds a bit like serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe which existed in some places until the 19th Centaury. Serfs were purchased along with the land they lived on, and were expected to provide free labour for the landlord.

That said, there were big differences between those conditions and the chattel slavery that existed in the New World. Serfs and presumably Scottish miners weren't individually purchased and transported elsewhere. Working conditions weren't so brutal that there needed to be a continual supply of new people to make up for those who were worked to death. Also, as you write, it was in theory possible for someone to become free, but at the cost of banishment from their home.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:26 am

Yes, like for serfs when land with coal mines were sold, the property deeds would list the number of men, women and children bound to the mine and included in the deal. It gives us a lot of historical records on how mines were run, because it lists their various roles, the ages of the children and the jobs they did, the quantity of coal that could be brought to the surface by the women and so on. Women and girls carried coal to the surface, boys shovelled and filled baskets, men swung the pick axes.

The one advantage over the New World chattel slavery was that families weren't separated and worked together, so a father would see his children when they came to carry off baskets of the coal he'd just hewn. They were pretty much worked to death, having plenty of children to replenish the supply (birth of a child was good news because the parents got a lump sum at baptism and the mother was traditionally entitled to three days off work). Women and children worked 15 hour shifts, men 10 hours because even miners couldn't swing pick axes for longer. Alcohol was readily available, unlike on the plantations, and drinking yourself to an early death was probably a sensible thing to do.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:37 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:26 am
The one advantage over the New World chattel slavery was that families weren't separated and worked together, so a father would see his children when they came to carry off baskets of the coal he'd just hewn. They were pretty much worked to death, having plenty of children to replenish the supply (birth of a child was good news because the parents got a lump sum at baptism and the mother was traditionally entitled to three days off work). Women and children worked 15 hour shifts, men 10 hours because even miners couldn't swing pick axes for longer. Alcohol was readily available, unlike on the plantations, and drinking yourself to an early death was probably a sensible thing to do.
I don't doubt that, but still, the main reason tens of thousands of enslaved people were transported to the New World each year is because numbers couldn't be replenished through childbirth (which in general they were in the US cotton industry). Conditions were very bad in the coal mines of Scotland, and catastrophic in the sugar plantations in the New World.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by tom p » Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:45 am

Brightonian wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 4:38 pm
tom p wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 4:15 pm
Lydia Gwilt wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:19 am
One of my grandmothers was a Powell of Birmingham - Shotgun makers who supplied the army, the East India Company and the slave traders, in addition to supplying the run of the mill pheasant-slaughterers. The other branches of the family were farmers, doctors and coal miners.
We might be related.
Although my brummie Powells didn't make shotguns, maybe a generation or two back there's a common ancestor
Enoch? ;)
Hahahaha. You f.cker!

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by tom p » Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:57 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:26 am
Yes, like for serfs when land with coal mines were sold, the property deeds would list the number of men, women and children bound to the mine and included in the deal. It gives us a lot of historical records on how mines were run, because it lists their various roles, the ages of the children and the jobs they did, the quantity of coal that could be brought to the surface by the women and so on. Women and girls carried coal to the surface, boys shovelled and filled baskets, men swung the pick axes.

The one advantage over the New World chattel slavery was that families weren't separated and worked together, so a father would see his children when they came to carry off baskets of the coal he'd just hewn. They were pretty much worked to death, having plenty of children to replenish the supply (birth of a child was good news because the parents got a lump sum at baptism and the mother was traditionally entitled to three days off work). Women and children worked 15 hour shifts, men 10 hours because even miners couldn't swing pick axes for longer. Alcohol was readily available, unlike on the plantations, and drinking yourself to an early death was probably a sensible thing to do.
Crumbs. I had no idea about any of this. Do you have any recommendations for good books about this?*


*yes, I could JFGI, but might end up with a sh.t (inaccurate or tedious) book & it now takes me a lot of time & a lot of money to order a book from the UK, so a recommendation would be greatly appreciated

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:08 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:37 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:26 am
The one advantage over the New World chattel slavery was that families weren't separated and worked together, so a father would see his children when they came to carry off baskets of the coal he'd just hewn. They were pretty much worked to death, having plenty of children to replenish the supply (birth of a child was good news because the parents got a lump sum at baptism and the mother was traditionally entitled to three days off work). Women and children worked 15 hour shifts, men 10 hours because even miners couldn't swing pick axes for longer. Alcohol was readily available, unlike on the plantations, and drinking yourself to an early death was probably a sensible thing to do.
I don't doubt that, but still, the main reason tens of thousands of enslaved people were transported to the New World each year is because numbers couldn't be replenished through childbirth (which in general they were in the US cotton industry). Conditions were very bad in the coal mines of Scotland, and catastrophic in the sugar plantations in the New World.
One measure of awfulness is probably to look at the frequency of insurrections. Apart from the Spanish silver mines, which mostly killed native Americans, the sugar plantations were the worst place to end up - and the Caribbean islands saw rebellions as a matter of routine. Most were local affairs lost to history, but plantation records show occasions when the slave stock had to be culled and replaced. If you were in the boiling houses in the tropical heat, risking torture and execution wasn't that much of a downside.

Larger island-wide rebellions make the history books. Some were successful, such as the Maroons in Jamaica who set up their own state, likewise establishment of ex-slave states in South America that had full-scale wars with European colonies, and eventually the revolution in Haiti. Slave owners in the West Indies never got to sleep easy in their beds.

In North America, plantation revolts happened somewhere every year, but rarely linked up to be a general uprising. Perhaps too geographically dispersed, unlike on Caribbean islands? There were still some famous uprisings such as the Turner rebellion that made white people across the south think they were about to be massacred, but generally the threat from Native American tribes was greater and caused more fear. The real opportunities to fight back came in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, when slaves escaped and organised themselves into units to fight for the British and then the North.

Coal miners are pretty tame in comparison. They pretty soon organised to get decent pay, even if they didn't get decent conditions.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:17 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:08 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:37 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:26 am
The one advantage over the New World chattel slavery was that families weren't separated and worked together, so a father would see his children when they came to carry off baskets of the coal he'd just hewn. They were pretty much worked to death, having plenty of children to replenish the supply (birth of a child was good news because the parents got a lump sum at baptism and the mother was traditionally entitled to three days off work). Women and children worked 15 hour shifts, men 10 hours because even miners couldn't swing pick axes for longer. Alcohol was readily available, unlike on the plantations, and drinking yourself to an early death was probably a sensible thing to do.
I don't doubt that, but still, the main reason tens of thousands of enslaved people were transported to the New World each year is because numbers couldn't be replenished through childbirth (which in general they were in the US cotton industry). Conditions were very bad in the coal mines of Scotland, and catastrophic in the sugar plantations in the New World.
One measure of awfulness is probably to look at the frequency of insurrections. Apart from the Spanish silver mines, which mostly killed native Americans, the sugar plantations were the worst place to end up - and the Caribbean islands saw rebellions as a matter of routine. Most were local affairs lost to history, but plantation records show occasions when the slave stock had to be culled and replaced. If you were in the boiling houses in the tropical heat, risking torture and execution wasn't that much of a downside.

Larger island-wide rebellions make the history books. Some were successful, such as the Maroons in Jamaica who set up their own state, likewise establishment of ex-slave states in South America that had full-scale wars with European colonies, and eventually the revolution in Haiti. Slave owners in the West Indies never got to sleep easy in their beds.

In North America, plantation revolts happened somewhere every year, but rarely linked up to be a general uprising. Perhaps too geographically dispersed, unlike on Caribbean islands? There were still some famous uprisings such as the Turner rebellion that made white people across the south think they were about to be massacred, but generally the threat from Native American tribes was greater and caused more fear. The real opportunities to fight back came in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, when slaves escaped and organised themselves into units to fight for the British and then the North.

Coal miners are pretty tame in comparison. They pretty soon organised to get decent pay, even if they didn't get decent conditions.
One difference between the Caribbean and what would become the US was ratio between free and enslaved people. As far as I remember the Confederate States were about 66% free people, whereas in Haiti prior to the 1791 uprising it was about 10%.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:23 am

tom p wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:57 am
Crumbs. I had no idea about any of this. Do you have any recommendations for good books about this?
I'm not sure there are any books, it's something that is ignored by history. Serfdom in Britain is supposed to have ended along with feudalism, firstly dealt a set back during the Black Death in 1350, effectively over by Elizabeth I, and officially ended in 1660 as part of the new constitution following the restoration on Charles II. But in Scotland it carried on with slave miners - hidden away in the glens far from the chattering classes in Edinburgh or London.

Walter Scott has stuff about the underclass of Scottish miners in his novels - they were seen as a sub-human race by "ordinary" Scottish citizens.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by tom p » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:30 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:23 am
tom p wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:57 am
Crumbs. I had no idea about any of this. Do you have any recommendations for good books about this?
I'm not sure there are any books, it's something that is ignored by history. Serfdom in Britain is supposed to have ended along with feudalism, firstly dealt a set back during the Black Death in 1350, effectively over by Elizabeth I, and officially ended in 1660 as part of the new constitution following the restoration on Charles II. But in Scotland it carried on with slave miners - hidden away in the glens far from the chattering classes in Edinburgh or London.

Walter Scott has stuff about the underclass of Scottish miners in his novels - they were seen as a sub-human race by "ordinary" Scottish citizens.
Ta. I like gardening, so I'll start with his one about the Russian bloke who eradicates weeds.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:38 am

There's a long article on Scottish miners here, which I don't have time to read. http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html

This book covers serfdom https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scotlands-Blac ... 184033164X

There's academic research too. This one is 'currently unavailable' on Amazon but you may be able to track it down as it covers the exact topic. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Serfdom-Speci ... B001OQ0QHG

The Scottish Mining Museum may have more info https://nationalminingmuseum.com/

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by tom p » Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:00 am

Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:38 am
There's a long article on Scottish miners here, which I don't have time to read. http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html

This book covers serfdom https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scotlands-Blac ... 184033164X

There's academic research too. This one is 'currently unavailable' on Amazon but you may be able to track it down as it covers the exact topic. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Serfdom-Speci ... B001OQ0QHG

The Scottish Mining Museum may have more info https://nationalminingmuseum.com/
Oooh, very interesting, thanks.
I think a part of my family on my maternal grandmother's side may have been scottish miners.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:02 am

tom p wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:00 am
Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:38 am
There's a long article on Scottish miners here, which I don't have time to read. http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html

This book covers serfdom https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scotlands-Blac ... 184033164X

There's academic research too. This one is 'currently unavailable' on Amazon but you may be able to track it down as it covers the exact topic. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Serfdom-Speci ... B001OQ0QHG

The Scottish Mining Museum may have more info https://nationalminingmuseum.com/
Oooh, very interesting, thanks.
I think a part of my family on my maternal grandmother's side may have been scottish miners.
That was just a very quick browse so there's probably a lot more. Some people in my family tree were miners but in the West Country, not Scotland.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by bagpuss » Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:27 am

I think that any benefit or connection any of my family had with the slave trade is only going to be at the level of everyone in the UK benefitting from the wealth generated, no specific connections that I can see or even imagine how there could be. My lot were exclusively rural and pretty much exclusively either agricultural or general labourers. The girls often went into service but where I can find the locations (ie on censuses every 10 years from 1841), it was always just in some small middle class household such as a vicar or doctor or small tradesman - and those were the fanciest places - so highly unlikely to have been for any family with slave trade connections. I did see mention of Bodiam Castle, and I have ancestors from Bodiam, so that's a faint possibility, but again an unlikely one. That said, it may be that Bodiam villagers did experience some largesse from the castle owners.

I have ancestors in Kent/Sussex, Warwickshire, Staffs/Shropshire, Cumberland (as was), Dumfriesshire (as was) and Kirkcudbrightshire (as was). None of these are places with strong connections to the slave trade, as far as I know and, as I've said, they were mostly the lowest of the low of countryside workers. The only ones who were slightly above that and actually owned land, were in Wigton in Cumberland, and they were still at the lowlier end of the land-owning scale. That family only seemed to get anywhere near really wealthy and posh after my branch had split off, but even then they were mostly vicars and very minor landowners, as far as I've looked.

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Lydia Gwilt » Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:59 am

tom p wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:00 am
Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:38 am
There's a long article on Scottish miners here, which I don't have time to read. http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html

This book covers serfdom https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scotlands-Blac ... 184033164X

There's academic research too. This one is 'currently unavailable' on Amazon but you may be able to track it down as it covers the exact topic. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Serfdom-Speci ... B001OQ0QHG

The Scottish Mining Museum may have more info https://nationalminingmuseum.com/
Oooh, very interesting, thanks.
I think a part of my family on my maternal grandmother's side may have been scottish miners.
Mine too - are you sure you're not my brother/sister?

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by tom p » Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:11 pm

Lydia Gwilt wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:59 am
tom p wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:00 am
Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:38 am
There's a long article on Scottish miners here, which I don't have time to read. http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html

This book covers serfdom https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scotlands-Blac ... 184033164X

There's academic research too. This one is 'currently unavailable' on Amazon but you may be able to track it down as it covers the exact topic. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Serfdom-Speci ... B001OQ0QHG

The Scottish Mining Museum may have more info https://nationalminingmuseum.com/
Oooh, very interesting, thanks.
I think a part of my family on my maternal grandmother's side may have been scottish miners.
Mine too - are you sure you're not my brother/sister?
*checks underwear* Yep, I'm sure I'm not your sister. But you might be mine. Is it your youngest son's birthday today?

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Lydia Gwilt » Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:17 pm

I have no offspring so probably not!

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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:57 pm

I feel a bit uncomfortable with people saying their families didn't benefit directly from slavery because they were working class or poor or rural or whatever. It sounds too much like passing the buck. People who worked on the land or in mines may well have been employed by slave owners or investors who paid their wages, for example. I'm not suggesting we all indulge in a white mea culpa here but I am a bit uneasy. That may just be me.

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Boustrophedon
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Boustrophedon » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:06 pm

Your average run of the mill Brit is probably less than six steps away from being related to our former slaves.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:10 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:57 pm
I feel a bit uncomfortable with people saying their families didn't benefit directly from slavery because they were working class or poor or rural or whatever. It sounds too much like passing the buck. People who worked on the land or in mines may well have been employed by slave owners or investors who paid their wages, for example. I'm not suggesting we all indulge in a white mea culpa here but I am a bit uneasy. That may just be me.
This is a misunderstanding of the economics. It's more complicated than that.
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:10 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:57 pm
I feel a bit uncomfortable with people saying their families didn't benefit directly from slavery because they were working class or poor or rural or whatever. It sounds too much like passing the buck. People who worked on the land or in mines may well have been employed by slave owners or investors who paid their wages, for example. I'm not suggesting we all indulge in a white mea culpa here but I am a bit uneasy. That may just be me.
True, but the question in the op was "So, can anyone else connect themselves to the trade?" One aspect of having poor ancestors is that we know very little about them. Of course someone who was a tenant farmer might have been involved in the slave trade. But we'll never know.

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Tessa K
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Re: Six degrees of separation - slave trade edition

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:13 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:10 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:57 pm
I feel a bit uncomfortable with people saying their families didn't benefit directly from slavery because they were working class or poor or rural or whatever. It sounds too much like passing the buck. People who worked on the land or in mines may well have been employed by slave owners or investors who paid their wages, for example. I'm not suggesting we all indulge in a white mea culpa here but I am a bit uneasy. That may just be me.
True, but the question in the op was "So, can anyone else connect themselves to the trade?" One aspect of having poor ancestors is that we know very little about them. Of course someone who was a tenant farmer might have been involved in the slave trade. But we'll never know.
Agreed, but some of the responses have drifted in the direction of disculpation. And yes, I do know it's economically complicated.

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