Music was a galvanising force, creating a powerful sense of identity in the new nation state of Great Britain. Suzy Klein, ‘Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century’ III
Working people across Britain who started using music as an escape from the toil of daily life. ibid.
Handel was in a unique position to harness the forces of Protestantism, nationhood and communal singing. ibid.
Most people think of Italy ... The Renaissance is supposed to have passed us by. But that isn't true. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance, BBC 2014
A handful of brilliant European artists brought the new ideas of the Renaissance to Britain. ibid.
[Pietro] Torrigiano’s tomb marked a turning point in British art. It brought a modern style to a medieval country. ibid.
Hans Holbein arrived in England in the autumn of 1526. ibid.
The art of a people obsessed with secrets. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance II: The Elizabethan Code
A distinctive native art-form emerged. ibid.
[Nicholas] Hilliard’s little miniatures ... intimate, private, coded. ibid.
Rich and clever and sophisticated – art for an urbane and educated society. ibid.
John Dee: the man who led the country out of its isolation ... a renaissance man. ibid.
By the early 1600s Britain had undergone a cultural revolution; the medieval world had been left behind. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance III: Whose Renaissance?
It was less about fantasies of ideal beauty and more about looking at new ways of reality. ibid.
The Duke of Wellington was the most famous Briton in the first half of the nineteenth century. His victory over Napoleon in 1815 changed the course of history. Wellington: The Iron Duke Unmasked, BBC 2015
‘The mark of a great general is to know when to retreat and have the courage to do it.’ ibid.
It’s time to tell the history of Britain in black and well as white. It’s the story of people who came here to make a better life. The story of people who were carried here by force. It’s a history written into the landscape and into the faces of the people who live here. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History I: First Encounters, BBC 2016
Remembering the full story of how we got here is now more urgent than ever. ibid.
Hadrian’s Wall was the northern limit of a multiracial empire that stretches as far as north Africa. ibid.
We just don’t know exactly how many black people were living in Britain in the eighteenth century when Francis Barber was living here in this house [Samuel Johnson]. But there are estimates from the time and they put the figure at between 10,000 and 15,000. ibid.
Among the men who served under Admiral Nelson were a hundred black sailors. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History II: Freedom *****
One of the most dramatic and shocking chapters in the history of black Britain. ibid.
Sierra Leone, West Africa: here beneath the trees are the ruins of a slave fortress. The first fortress was built here in the seventeenth century. It’s lain abandoned, forgotten, for almost two centuries. It was in places like this that the British slave trade began. Slaves were bought, sold and imprisoned here before being shipped to British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. ibid.
The British were masters of the slave trade. In total Britain transported more than three million people in slavery. ibid.
Some of them, and this included the children, had DY, or Duke of York, burned into their chest. ibid.
Tobacco is an extremely labour-intensive crop. It requires constant care and attention. And each leaf is picked by hand. At first these fields were worked by indentured servants … But there was never enough labor to satisfy demand. ibid.
This law makes it legal to kill a black person. ibid.
This [British] offer of freedom encouraged thousands of American slaves to escape, risking their lives to reach a fleet of ships waiting on the James River. ibid.
‘This was the first mass liberation of slaves in the British empire … Britain paradoxically was still the world’s largest slave trader.’ ibid.
A man who went on to take Georgian Britain by storm. One of the former slaves who managed to get out of America was a teenage boxer from Staten Island called Bill Richmond … And then in his early ’40s he made the most bizarre decision: he gave it all up [high social status] to become a bare-knuckle boxer in London … He was challenged to a fight: it was the spark that set him on course to become a boxing star, and one of Georgian Britain’s most famous celebrities. The world of prize-fighting, of bare-knuckle boxing, was special to the British in a way that no other sport was, because the fighter was said to be the embodiment of the national characteristics of bravery and manliness and resilience, all the things the British liked to believe made them who they were. Now, these were the same days when Britain was the biggest slave-trading nation power in the world, and yet by entering into this world, [Repton club], into this sport, Bill Richmond, a black guy, a former slave, was able to become not just a star but a national hero. ibid.
After fifty years of campaigning by the abolitionists and after centuries of rebellion and resistance by the slaves themselves, slavery in the British empire was finally over. As the moment of abolition approached, the slave owners had no idea what would happen next … They’d started to believe their own propaganda. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History III: A Moral Mission
The new Victorians saw the abolition of slavery as the dawn of a new age of progress and enlightenment for Britain and its empire. ibid.
Within thirty years this Victorian sense of moral superiority would come crashing down. ibid.
The adopted daughter of Queen Victoria … The Queen agreed to become Sarah’s protector … A royal protégé … Sarah had taken her place in Victorian high society … part of the Victorian elite. ibid.
The main focus of the Victorian moral mission was America. ibid.
‘I came here because slavery is the common enemy of mankind … Rise up and crush this demon of iniquity.’ ibid. Frederick Douglass
The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is relatively simple … Uncle Tom is murdered … every bit as famous as Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. They’ve been forgotten today but at the time everybody knew who they were. ibid.
Britain was making a fortune from cotton grown by enslaved Africans. ibid.
In Memory of the Rochdale Millworkers who supported the struggle against slavery during the American Civil War 1861-5. ibid. plaque
Hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had no work and no land. To make matters worst Jamaica suffered the worst drought that anyone can remember. ibid.
At that point the militia opened fire on the crowds … The army was unleashed … Some were executed. It was a brutal act of vengeance even by the low standards of the nineteenth century. ibid.
In memory of over 1000 Jamaicans brutalised or killed following the Morant Bay Rebellion. ibid. plaque
The great battle of ideas that divided country and empire. ibid.
I was fourteen when my family were attacked in a house; one night bricks came through the window and on one of the bricks was an elastic band, was a note that said, ‘Wogs, go home’. And then a few nights later the same thing happened. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History IV: The Homecoming
The Victorian era when the empire was nearing its height, an age in which skin colour separated the coloniser from the colonised, the ruler from the ruled. ibid.
Rhodes got rich in the South African rush for gold and diamonds. ibid.
Rhodes was sowing the seeds of racial segregation. ibid.
There’s been a black community in Liverpool since the 1700s due largely to the shipping industry and the slave trade. ibid.
In the aftermath of [WWI] war there were similar outbreaks of violence in Glasgow, London, Newport, Cardiff and on Tyneside. They brought a underlying racism on to the streets of Britain. ibid.
Leslie Hutchinson: an air of exotic mystery … Hutch was a star but he could never escape racism. ibid.
By 1944 over a million US soldiers had landed in Britain. And around 130,000 were black GIs. ibid.
White GIs would regularly attack black allied soldiers. ibid.
These Georgian terraces in the heart of London convey a forgotten chapter in Britain’s history: a new study of a government archive from the 1830s reveals that many of these houses were once the homes of Britain’s slave owners … These records transform our image of the slave owner; they reveal that thousands of them lived all over Britain, and they show how the profits from slave ownership ran deep in British society. David Olusoga, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners I: Profit & Loss, BBC 2018
A huge sum of money was raised by the British government: that money – the modern equivalent of £17 billion – was paid out in compensation not to the slaves but to the slave owners. ibid.
Their money helped lay the foundation of our modern world. ibid.
1834: These are the files from the Slave Compensation Commission: they record all the claims for compensation. ibid.
46,000 slave owners came forward. ibid.
The slave system was ruthlessly enforced right from the start. ibid.
It details the slave owners’ reprisals for acts of resistance. ibid.
It was a system based on terror; it was a system that was medieval in its mentality. ibid.
Women accounted for more than 40% of the slave owners found in these records. ibid.
A nation as addicted to cheap sugar as it was to the profits of slavery. ibid.
Above all the slave system made Britain wealthy. ibid.