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From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the America
by oh_sigh 6y ago
From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the Americas. His statements imply knowledge that slavery actually existed in some form in England:
> When I was studying law, there were three key dates. There was a legal case in which it was established, I think in the seventeen-hundreds, that slavery was wrong in the U.K. Then there was the slave trade, which I’m proud to say William Wilberforce and the Quakers did a great deal to stop. And then there was the final thing about actually using slaves in the Caribbean territories, which stopped quite some time before [the United States]. So the idea of slavery is not as carved into our conscious and unconscious as it is into an American’s.
- rsynnott 6y agoYes, he goes on to contradict himself a bit. The initial statement is clearly incorrect, though. And while it might be true that slavery isn't as much a part of the national psyche in the UK as in the US, it, er, probably _should_ be. 30 years isn't that much of a difference. There are plenty of practical reason that it _isn't_; the ending was of course far less dramatic, and it was far away. But I do think there's a tendency to de-emphasise it a bit too much. > From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the Americas Only if you discount the colonies. (It probably is fair to say that British colonial slavery tended to be a _little_ less nasty than American slavery, mind you).