← This Guy Sucked
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
Claire
Hi there. It's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. But now let's talk about why you think this memory needs to be adjusted somewhat. So what's your main problem with him? Like, what's the main thing that you think is. Is an issue here?
- [00:29]
Henry
So there are a couple of things that I want to mention. So the first is that one of the things that Dundas did, even though he kind of had this history that would seem, I think, to be kind of fairly progressive on the question of slavery abolition, is that when he became an influential member of the Pitt government, he did a great deal of work to try to delay abolition and sort of delay the institutionalization of the British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade against sort of the. The efforts of many, many movement activists, both people of African descent, as well as white British people, especially people who were connected to religious movements like Quakerism, who, in this period of the 1780s and then into the 1790s, were doing a huge amount of work to lobby Parliament to actually abolish the slave trade. In Henry's case, he was sort of somebody who wanted to. Who thought that actually this should be deferred because he feared. He always put sort of the interests of British merchants, the merchants who were making an enormous amount of money from the transatlantic slave trade first. We have to remember, although it's in some ways kind of maybe hard for people to see it today, that, I mean, the slave trade in Britain was an enormously encompassing institution. So many of both the mercantile community and the financial institutions that exist in Britain and indeed still exist today in Britain, made huge amounts of profit from transatlantic slave trade. One example is Barclays bank, which exists today. I mean, many of you, some listeners, may even have an account with Barclays. Barclays, as well as a number of other banks that exist today in Britain, had all kinds of links to the slave trade that helped finance finance ships by giving loans to enslavers, who then use that money to purchase enslaved people and transport them across the Atlantic. So there are lots of ways in which many of the institutions that still exist in Britain today were really tied up with that. And in some sense, Dundas, as a kind of protector of the institutional order, was somebody who didn't want to see those institutions lose their profits as a result. And so he wanted to kind of delay the institutionalization of abolition in order to maintain sort of the power of British capital.
- [03:24]
Claire
Yeah. And so one of the things that he argues, so like you said, he becomes an mp, and while that's happening, he still claims to be against slavery, like, ideologically opposed to it, but then actively stymies it's total abolition. So it's not like this is a passive thing that he's doing. He is very actively making decisions that prevent abolition from occurring across. Across both Britain and its sort of broader empire. So he does this by repeatedly tabling parliamentary motions that call for abolition. Like, this is a choice he's making. And he, in other cases, actively abstains, which sounds stupid, but he, like, chooses to abstain from voting as early as 1792. And when he does speak in favor of abolition, he says it should be abolished by what he calls moderate measures. So what he says is that it needed to happen gradually via like, ending hereditary slavery, so that people are not born enslaved. Again, the issue here, for people who, like, maybe want this to be put together a little bit more clearly, the issue here is that there are still enslaved people while this is happening, and while he's hemming and hawing over the right way to offer them freedom, they are still enslaved. He also offers something kind of like what we would call the gun argument in the US where he says, look, if we just abolish slavery full stop, bad people are still going to enslave others, but they'll just do it in a secret way that we can't control or regulate. So we need to find a way to make those enslavers and potential enslavers comfortable to ease the transition for them. All the while the people they're subjugating remain enslaved. The human cost, at least to me, again, not as an expert in this, but someone who's just looking at it from the perspective of a historian. The human cost being considered here is not exclusively that of the enslaved people, which, again, should be at the center of this, but it's also the. The cost to the poor plantation owners in the West Indies who will be distressed at the loss of their slaves and merchants who will lose money on them rather than, again, the people being subjugated.
- [05:30]
Henry
Yes, and. And Dundas actually spent a great deal of time sort of corresponding with West India merchants and was very receptive to the. To the lobbying arguments of what was known at the time as the kind of the West India Interest, which was sort of a kind of transatlantic pro slavery lobbying effort that involved British enslavers in the West Indies, plantation owners and their kind of political allies in Britain who worked together to lobby Parliament in order to try to delay, delay abolition and eventually to also try to push for restitution and payments to slave owners for the so called costs of abolishing the slave trade. And Dundas was kind of like the politician who was sort of facilitating and helping them make their arguments and their case in Parliament. And so he very much kind of took this side, which was very clearly the wrong side of history when it came to slavery.
- [06:41]
Claire
Yeah. So it's, I mean, it is interesting because sometimes we'll see, like when we make these episodes, we'll see people who have, aren't aware necessarily of what the outcome of their decisions will be. Right. Like they make a decision or they do something and then it creates a long term legacy that we now would find sort of like morally repulsive or that we see some sort of problem with. This is not one of those cases where he makes a decision that he can't foresee the outcome. Like, the decision that he's making has a very foreseeable outcome, which is he prevents something from changing. Like he makes a decision that, or makes several decisions, a series of decisions, including to protect certain people, to defend certain ideological orientations in order to even just like agreeing with the idea of the sort of economic quantification of humans. He does that. And there's a very foreseeable outcome here. And all it does is delay what abolitionists say is inevitable.
- [07:45]
Henry
Yes. And it's important to point out, I think, to add to that, that one of the things that sometimes we hear when we're talking about bad people in the past is that, oh, you know, this person was like a man of his time or a woman of his time or this person was, you know, they just, they, they. It's not fair to judge them by, you know, our contemporary standards. But in this case, what we need to remember is that at this point in the 1790s, I mean, abolition wasn't some, like, what it was, you know, like 30, 40 years ago, a kind of fringe idea that was only being adopted by say, you know, religious radicals. I mean, abolition is a big, it's a huge political movement. And of course we also need to remember that the enslaved people themselves were always pro abolition. Right. They, you know, we're talking about a huge part of the number of people in the empire, indeed the people who were producing the wealth of the Empire did not, you know, were against the institution of slavery. And so, I mean, he was a man of his time. And in that time, abolition was a very was was very much a prominent political position. So one thing that often we hear when we talk about bad people in the past is that we should, to some extent, excuse their actions, because there was no way of thinking differently at the time. But the fact is that when Dennis was alive, there was a very prominent different way of thinking about labor and about how you treat other people. And the abolition of slavery was absolutely a an important, prominent and recognized position at this time. So he was absolutely on the wrong side of history, and he was on the wrong side of what a growing number of people in Britain, in the British Empire at this time were recognizing as a genuinely evil institution that needed to be abolished.