Claire (0:00)

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?

Henry (0:29)

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.

Claire (3:24)

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.