As an Englishman I had no idea that Barbary Coast slavers (that I had heard of) raided on land in the UK. As this was taking place at the same time as those communities were involved in the Africa / Americas trade just seems to say you cannot contain evil.
Isn't the line in "Rule Britannia" that Britons never shall be slaves meant quite literally?
Muslim slavers went as far north as Iceland. IDK why this isn't being taught, it is a part of history like any other.
(Central Europe OTOH had its own share of trauma with Ottoman slave raids. The northernmost Habsburg fortress that was built to contain them was in Těšín/Cieszyn. Look the city up on the map!)
As I understand it yes. That line had nothing to do with the atlantic slave trade and everything to do with the barbary one.
At the time that song was written, the Royal Navy did not in fact rule the waves at all (we were latecomers to the colonial game relatively speaking). It was a song designed to exhort people to the goal of ruling the waves, and so (amongst other things) protecting the UK from pirate raids.
Royal Navy manpower needs vastly exceeded volunteers, so press gangs (impressment into naval service, essentially conscription) was used. If someone had some sailing experience, for example serving on a merchant vessel, they were liable to be conscripted into the navy.
Conditions on longer voyages were pretty terrible. According to everything I've read, scientific minds figured out scurvy quite some time before the same solution penetrated the skulls of the admiralty. So on long voyages there was potentially a high fatality rate of up to 50%.
My reading of this is that they needed to maintain morale. Barbary Slave raids were a credible threat everyone faced, particularly as if you were likely to be pressed (by virtue of not being useless on a ship) you were also likely to live near the coast (where there are ships). So even if you weren't particularly bothered about ruling the waves for trading or imperial reasons, preventing slave raids would be something to feel good about.
The discovery of the causes of scurvy is an interesting one. The issue was not as simple as smart scientists Vs dumb military brass. Actually science was pretty terrible at this due to what appears to be an in built bias towards wanting diseases to be caused by infectious pathogens. At the time they knew about bacteria and wanted to explain everything this way. Scurvy looks superficially like it might be caused by bacteria: there are localized outbreaks that start with one person and it rapidly "spreads" to others. The true cause was repeatedly discovered and then forgotten or dismissed by physicians invested in the bacterial hypothesis. It took several independent rediscoveries before the navy saw through the confusion.
Where does this bias come from, probably, it feels much better to be battling an external enemy than to "blame the victim" as we'd say these days.
Beriberi was studied by the Japanese at a time when the theory of infections germs was developed by the Germans, and the Tokio University bought fully into this theory. There was another guy called Kanehiro Takaki who proved that it was actually caused by bad nutrition, but the Japanese army chose to ignore his findings until the Russo-Japanese war which cost so many lives due to beriberi that they were forced to adapt a better diet.
The UK has a fairly insane amount of history, something is bound to get missed. I grew up in Scotland and in school we didn't even learn much what about went on down in England pre-union. Even fairly huge things like Oliver Cromwell weren't covered (mentioned in passing, but not studied) there's just that much to cover.
I heard of this through folk music. Fishing villages along the Cornish
coast, South of Ireland, Devon, Somerset and Dorset were wary of
attacks by "swarthy types", and that history is remembered through
songs.
I don't think this person is trying to say "these are exactly the same". Only the hardest-right people try to diminish the transatlantic slave trade by saying that other groups did it than the white colonial powers. The comment to me seemed more "Huh, today I learned..." than that.
No, that's pretty normal for moderate people to say or believe but of course if you always attack them by claiming they're extremists, they aren't going talk to you about it are they?
The scale thing is irrelevant because the morality of it isn't related to scale. It's just a consequence of larger populations at the time and bigger differences in tech levels. It's clear from history that the Barbary pirates etc weren't saying to themselves, well this much slavery is ok, but that much would be immoral so we won't do it. They were just a few centuries earlier when there were far fewer people around.
Yes, that was my intention… but the comment got downvoted so I learned today also that probably commenting here now is not what it used to be a while ago.
There's a chilling effect at the moment where you can't say "huh, today I learned" about anything that might be a right-wing talking point without risk of being treated as some kind of White supremacist yourself.
It's not so chilling or new - people have been misunderstanding each other for millenia. And here on HN at least, if commenters follow the comment guidelines we should be alright.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
