Daily writing prompt
What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?
Great Britain has a chequered history ranging from the blackest evil to the best and I think that best was the Abolition of Slavery and then the creation of the West Africa Squadron to rescue captured Africans.
The clip above is from the film Amistad (1997) which is a film I can not watch without crying. It is heart breaking but the end of the film shows the West Africa Squadron attacking and destroying a slave fortress which I would argue is the correct and best use of weapons.
Furthermore I have skin in this game because Thomas Clarkson the abolitionist is a relative.
Historytalker 
5 replies on “The Abolition of Slavery, 1833”
They owe reparations just like America
I agree. I would not have done so a few years ago but I do now. The British of the second half of the 19th century worked hard to undo the evil that they had done with slavery but did not go far enough. Obviously they went very far – I personally have paid, through my taxes, for the Abolition of Slavery because the debt of getting rid of that abomination was only paid off in 2015 – with the West Africa squadron, putting pressure on slave states like Brazil to abolish the trade and disrupting (but never completely effectively) the Arab slave trade.
I have a blood line in the UK and yet you need a passport to claim to find out, part of my family was in Virginia which was a colonised state and yet nobody talks about that aspect of history, they took and profited off of it, yet locked bottom lip, however code is code where ever you go when you are black, they say class I say that’s a fancy word for privilege.
The whole monarchy thing was built off it and while they ended Slavery in 1833 the slave masters got the money, the civil war was a joke because to fight for freedom in lands they never claim you is insane, peace
Interesting thank you.
A great great grandmother and how a relationship went down between the UK and USA between a Black man and white woman in that time is amazing