For 200 years slavery was a powerful engine that drove the British economy. It allowed Britain’s slave owners to amass extraordinary personal wealth. The abolition of slavery in 1834 is often remembered as a great triumph of British liberalism. But new research based on a vast collection of documents at the National Archives is revealing a darker side to the story of abolition. David Olosoga, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners II
The slave owners lived all over Britain … Britain’s slave owners waged a decades-long battle against the forces of abolition. ibid.
The slaves hurled themselves into the struggle for freedom. ibid.
The slave owners had lost the moral argument. They were facing defeat and economic ruin. So they turned to their other argument – compensation. ibid.
The slaves themselves – they would receive no compensation. ibid.
This is a very bureaucratic process imposed on society. ibid.
Something grubby about this part of the process. ibid.
The Slave Compensation Records also show how slave-generated wealth built many of the great estates that shape our countryside. ibid.
The profits from slavery helped build modern Britain. ibid.
Slavery is part of our national story. ibid.
There is a moment in which the union of nations and the creation of Britain was almost stopped before it had begun. It began one night in the winter of 1605 when a man was arrested in London and taken to the Tower … Guy Fawkes. Union with David Olusoga I, BBC 2023
What Fawkes and the others intended to do was to present their act of terrorism as having saved England from what was then the key political project of King James which was a union between his kingdoms, England and Wales and Scotland. ibid.
But that history has always been one of rival competing identities, loyalties and nationalist passions. ibid.
A vast social experiment was under way. Ireland was another kingdom ruled by King James. But it was overwhelmingly a Catholic country. In 1610 a new project was launched to colonise the northern province of Ulster. ibid.
The English and Scottish Protestant settlers set about fulfilling the terms upon which they had been granted their land. ibid.
The legacy of the plantation of Ulster continues today. ibid.
The Glorious Revolution … was anything but bloodless in Ireland. ibid.
Two really important moments in the story of the Union: not just the Battle of Trafalgar but also Nelson’s funeral. Union with David Olusoga II: Creating Britishness
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a state that made Nelson into a national hero in 1805 was then just four years old. Its immediate origins lay in two Unions: one of 1801 that had united Britain and Ireland, and an earlier Act of Union in 1707 that had brought England and Wales together with Scotland. ibid.
This long history of Union and Disunion continues to define how people see themselves and the country today. ibid.
Are we slowly approaching the end of the Union … or will the Union survive? ibid.
The Jacobites were supported by Britain’s Catholic enemies, France and Spain. ibid.
The 1707 Act of Union had been designed to prevent the French from using Scotland as a bridgehead for invasion; the 1801 Act had been intended to stop Ireland being used in the same way. ibid.
In the middle of the 19th century the new Palace of Westminster, home to parliament, was approaching completion. The new buildings had been decorated with the ancient symbols of the four nations that made up a state that was then only half a century old. Union with David Olusoga III: The Two Nations
The United Kingdom was the world’s first and pre-eminent industrial nation. It was at the same time the world’s greatest trading nation … The largest empire the world had ever seen. ibid.
The Old Corruption, the alliance of landowners and the big merchants, used their political power not just to further their economic interests. In the years after Waterloo, they also used the law to repress opposition from working people campaigning for their rights. ibid.
In 1838, 6 years after what many saw as the betrayal of the Reform Act, working-class reformers launched a new movement to fight for the vote and political rights. That movement, Chartism, was the first to spread across the nations, and the first in which people defined themselves not by their nationality or their religion but by their social class. ibid.
The King who went mad. Yet George III reigned longer than any king in British history through tumultuous change. He was the last king of America and the first of Australia … A champion of science, art and music. Robert Hardman, George III – The Genius of the Mad King, BBC 2017
George III was halfway though his reign when his first bout of mental illness began: it lasted four months. ibid.
He arranged his own marriage to Charlotte – the German princess he had never met who bore him fifteen children. He was driven by his sense of duty to his family and his country. ibid.
Travel back two hundred and fifty years and witness a Britain openly, gloriously and often shockingly rude. Rude Britannia I: A History Most Satirical, Bawdy, Lewd and Offensive
We had a fierce belief in our right to be rude. ibid.
The first chronicler of Georgian rude: William Hogarth. ibid.
Hogarth made Southwark Fair a portrait of the city. ibid.
The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. ibid.
Henry Fielding – these attacks on political sleaze were even more direct than Gay in The Beggar’s Opera. ibid.
The Law allowed literary bitchin’ to flourish. ibid.
A master of rude words ... Alexander Pope. ibid.
Bawdy humour was at the heart of the success of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman. ibid.
This was the colourful world of satirical and humorous prints. ibid.
A poet with the rudest reputation in Regency Britain – the devilish Lord Byron. ibid.
There would always be a different, ruder country. In Rude Britannia life was celebrated in music halls with bawdy humour and lewd songs. Rude Britannia II: Presents Bawdy Songs & Lewd Photographs
The shock of the rude nude photograph. ibid.
The cheeky carnival of the seaside. ibid.
The alliance of toffs and prolls and a racy night out was a serious threat to Victorian values. ibid.
On the stage rude stars were created. ibid.
Music hall had a tradition of bawdy humour and song that went back centuries. ibid.
A new technology to further undermine Victorian values: photography. ibid.
Rude photographs became affordable and available. ibid.
Someone with a genius for the rude innuendo now needed was Victoria superstar Marie Lloyd. ibid.
Victorian moral reformers argued that music halls linked to prostitution were part of an exploitation of women undermining the morals of the nation. ibid.
By the Edwardian era there was a new kind of peep-show – the Mutoscope. ibid.
Legend has it that King George III, the grandfather of Queen Victoria, had a secret wife and three children before his official marriage. If it’s true, every monarch since then has been a pretender to the throne. The Real King & Queen
The evidence that Hannah married George appears to exist in the form of a marriage certificate. ibid.
The first King of all Britain: is name is James, and if his early years were traumatic, they were only a taste of what was to come for his remarkable family. In the coming century seven members of this dynasty will rule the three separate kingdoms. Clare Jackson, The Stuarts I: And I Will Make Them One Nation, BBC 2018
James made his official entry into London in early 1604. ibid.
Ireland was James’s Catholic kingdom. ibid.
Between 1603 and 1714 the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland were ruled by a royal family that more than any other shaped modern Britain. Clare Jackson, The Stuarts II: A King Without a Crown, BBC 2014
Prince James was son to King James II of England and VII of Scotland. Clare Jackson, The Stuarts III: A Family at War
Across the three kingdoms there was huge paranoia about the Catholic threat. ibid
History has rewritten William’s landing in England … This was the last successful military invasion of the British Isles. ibid.
In Britain today many people still feel that they have one quality in common – for many Britons a stiff upper lip remains a badge of national pride. Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain I, BBC 2012
Those who embraced the cult of sensibility weren’t always thinking of others. ibid.
Never before had feeling been so fashionable. ibid.
Mary Wollstonecraft – in 1772 this novelist, historian and thinker, produced the first book on female liberation – A Vindication Of The Rights of Woman. ibid.
The first national icon of the nineteenth century – Admiral Horatio Nelson. ibid.
It was the sober example of Wellington that now spoke most directly to the priorities of Victorian Britain. ibid.