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>> Good afternoon everyone.
Can you hear me okay?
Welcome to the Museum of London Dockland.
In a slight change to the advertised schedule,
I am not Dr. Tom Wareim [phonetic].
You may be able to tell.
My name's Georgina.
I'm the Senior Creator of Contemporary History
at the Museum of London Dockland and I'd
like to welcome you here today.
Do take the opportunity to look
around our galleries while you're here,
including the London Sugar and Slavery Gallery
to which Professor Catherine Hall contributed
around six years ago now.
It doesn't matter that Tom's not here because the star
of the day's Catherine.
And she's going to be talking today about her work
on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership
which is a huge research project that's been going
for three years now and thankfully has funding
to continue for another three years.
So they'll be more to come.
And Catherine's a Professor of History
at University College London.
And I'm going to just let her tell you
about her work rather than me telling you.
[Applause ]
>> Catherine Hall: Thank you very much.
I'm always really pleased to be here in this building.
I'm connected with this museum and this project here.
So it's a pleasure to be hopefully,
hopefully feeding your minds at lunchtime today.
Well, here we are then, in the-gathered together in part
of the warehouse of the original West India Dock Company.
The West India Dock was built in 1802 and it was established
by a group of west India merchants who were concerned
about the ways in which their shipping
and their business was being impeded
by other people's business, and they wanted a dock of their own.
And so they established a company
and this dock was constructed.
It was a major construction plan as you can image in 1800, 1801.
So it was a point of disembarkation
for slave-produced goods.
The goods they-- traffic--
the ships coming in from the West Indies bringing the sugar
that sweetened the tea of the British public,
and made West India merchants rich.
And for a short time it was also the point of embarkation
for London's slave ships.
London was of course a key site for the ships leaving
for the West African coast and then travelling
on that terrible journey -
the Middle Passage - to the Caribbean.
So when you're -- you know, when you're out there
and there you are surrounded by all
of these very nice looking restaurants - all empty I have
to say, but anyway - there they all are.
All along the side of the dock buildings.
And then the DLR station at the end of the road which is perhaps
where you came in, West India Dock, you know, how many people
who disembarked from those trains are actually wondering
about why it's called West India Dock?
What sense do they have of that really, deeply,
troubling history that is connected with this place?
Maybe you also came, possibly, you came through Hibbert's Gate.
I don't expect you did.
It's the gate at the back.
And it's the old gate -
the memorial gate - to the dock itself.
And if you haven't had a look at it, do go and have a look at it.
It's named after George Hibbert who was the chair
of the West India Dock Company
who was a leading West India merchant,
probably the leading West India merchant in London
in the early 1800s, who was a strong supporter
of the slave trade and slavery, whose family, his uncle
and his brother, were making fortunes for the family
in the Caribbean, in Jamaica,
where they had extensive plantations.
And George Hibbert organized the businesses of sugar factor
and merchant in London, working from the city.
And if you haven't been to it yet and you have the time,
do go into the London sugar and slavery gallery
which is right next door.
And you will see the extremely, imposing portrait done
by the great portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence of Hibbert,
looking a very, very benevolent merchant looking
like a prosperous, untroubled man.
And then just think about the business
that he was actually involved with.
And if you have the time to go and look,
you'll see the very interesting way
in which his portrait has been hung
which might give you some thoughts.
Okay so, you might also have noticed possibly as you came in,
the statue standing just opposite the entrance
to the museum.
And that statue is a statue of Robert Milligan
who was George Hibbert's co-director
of the West India Dock Company,
another very prominent West India merchant.
And he's standing on a - you know - on a [inaudible]
and what the [inaudible] shows is an allegorical scene telling
us about the way in which commerce brings prosperity
to Britannia.
So yet again, think of what that commerce was
and about the exploitation and the violence which lay
at the heart of that prosperity.
Well then you come to this occasion and you come
into the Wilberforce Room.
And Wilberforce of course is the name that everybody remembers.
The name associated with abolition, the abolition
of both the slave trade and slavery.
The saintly Wilberforce as he's often described.
And it is that memory of abolition which is strong
in British culture, rather than the memory
of the slave trade and slavery.
And the work that we've been doing at University College
for the last few years and which I want to tell you a little bit
about today is trying to - as many other people are -
trying to rejig that way of thinking about.
Reconfigure that way of thinking about Britain's history.
Remembering what came before abolition
and why abolition mattered so much.
And what the legacies of that slave trade
and slavery have been for Britain.
So, four years ago,
we established a publicly-funded project at UCL
which is concerned
with remembering Britain's intimate involvement
with slavery, what Britains have owed to the wealth produced
by slavery, what the legacies of slavery are for modern Britain,
and how have we tackled this?
Obviously there are many possibly ways
of approaching this subject.
But we've done it through a focus on slave ownership.
And our logo, which you can see here, is of the --
well, I'll explain it in a minute
because it's a little bit complicated, what it is,
but I will explain it.
So, we're going in through the lens of slave ownership.
And obviously the slavery business -
the whole slavery business -
had huge tentacles in British society.
It's not just the plantation owners - the absentees
as they were called - who lived here
and who were living off the fruits of that business.
It's also the people involved with the navy, ship building,
sugar refining, metal manufacture, toy manufacture,
textiles, finance capital.
I mean we can trace all the ways in which the slavery business,
the tentacles of it, went deep into British society.
So not a superficial matter at all -
employing as the slave owners wanted everyone to know -
employing hundreds of thousands of people in different ways.
But we're focusing then on this question of the owners.
And we're doing that because when slavery was abolished
in 1833 in the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape --
not in the rest of the British Empire remember,
so it's not just blanket abolition.
The power of the West India interest -
of the West India merchants - was such that they were able
to drive a very hard bargain with the government in order
to get the legislation through Parliament.
The West India interest was well-represented both
in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords,
and their support was needed to insure
that abolition would be past.
And so a negotiation went on - a tough negotiation went on -
in the period before abolition
between the West India committee and the government.
And what they managed to achieve was
that the government would raise 20 million in taxpayers' money
which would be paid to the slave owners for the loss
of quotes "their property."
So enslaved people who were being freed,
were viewed as the legitimate property of the slave owners
and they were to be compensated for them.
So John Bull here - the British taxpayer -
is having the 20 million taken out of his pocket by one
of the very content slave owners.
Now in addition to that 20 million which they got
as an outright gift, that's probably equivalent we estimate
to about 16 billion in today's money, and it is kind of ironic
that last week as you may have seen,
the victims of British torture and internment
in Kenya were granted 20 million in compensation
for what they had suffered.
Twenty million today of course - each of those people -
was going to get three thousand pounds for the --
for what they suffered in that period.
And so it's just kind of ironic that 20 million now
which of course is worth you know --
maybe it's worth 20 houses in London
since we know now what property in London costs as opposed
to the 16 billion that went to the slave owners.
So just think of those two figures next to each other.
So in addition to the 20 billion -- 20 million, which was divided
up between the slave owners.
They also forced through an agreement that the enslaved
who were supposedly being freed, would have to do between four
and six years free labor for their owners
which was called apprenticeship.
So the - you know - the description was
that these people would have to learn how to labor.
Now of course they'd been learning --
they'd been laboring on the plantations all their lives,
but now they were to be apprenticed
so they would learn how to be free labor.
So after abolition, there was then a long campaign in order
to abolish apprenticeship.
So, 1833 was in no way the end of the story.
Well, in order to get their hands on this 20 million,
each of the slave owners had to put in a claim to a committee
which was established, a commission
which was established, and all those claims where recorded
and very careful documents were prepared by all the claims,
who they came from, how many enslaved people they were
claiming for, which of the islands,
which of the territories they were claiming for and so on.
And all those, that whole archive -
including what money each of these people got -
is in queue in the National Archives.
And up to very recently, nobody had the capacity to work
on the detail of these documents.
It needed first of all, computers and computer skills
and then it needed a team of people to work on it.
And that's what we've been doing.
So we've used the compensation records as they're called,
as our starting point for our work.
And then what we've tried to do is to follow the legacies
of these people who were in Britain, not all the claimants
because there were -- there were 47 thousand claimants
who we've documented in our database
which you can go ahead and look at.
I'm just going to -- this was of course --
this was the basis of the public campaign for abolition that men
and women should not be thought of as the property
of other men and women.
Am I not a man and a brother?
Men and women should not be thought
of as the property of others.
Nevertheless, although that was the moral basis of the campaign,
what happened was that the slave owners got compensated
for the loss of their property.
So there's a fundamental contradiction in the way
in which these two things happened.
So when the claims were made, this is the form
in which they were shown to Parliament.
A whole listing was made of all the claimants
and the money they had got.
So this is the first sort of set of records that we worked
from which are then backed up in the National Archives
by all the manuscript materials,
which this is a kind of condensational.
And I just chose this one to show you
because you can see here the name of John Adams Wood.
And John Adams Wood was the owner of Mary Prince who some
of you may know the history of Mary Prince
which is the one story that we have recorded
by an enslaved black, British woman who told her story
to [inaudible] who wrote it down and it was published
as "The History of Mary Prince," and published as part
of the propaganda campaign by the abolitionists.
So John Adams Wood, the particular interest in him is
that he was the owner of Mary Prince.
And he was claiming here for enslaved people in Antigua.
So then this is just to show you the database -
the encyclopedia - which we have created which you can go into.
It's publicly accessible online: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs which stands
for the "Legacies of British Slave Ownership."
And you can simply put in a name or a place
and you can start checking the work that we've done.
And I have to tell you, that we have had in the first fortnight
after this database came online,
we had over a hundred thousand hits because people are
so interested in tracking their family histories,
looking for the connections that they or people they know
or places they're interested how.
So all that material is there for you to look at.
Well, of the 20 million pounds,
nearly half of that money stayed in Britain.
In other words, it went to absentees:
people who had ownership of enslaved people
in the Caribbean, nearly all in the Caribbean.
A few in Mauritius, a few in the Cape, but the vast majority
of the money came from the Caribbean.
And that doesn't mean that those people have necessarily spent
time in the Caribbean.
Often, they were simply owners or they might have been banks
who had received mortgaged property because of the problems
that the slave owners were facing in relation to debt
and all the difficulties which they faced
in running plantations.
So we've been tracking the people who got the money here
and that's about three thousand people.
And we have created, insofar as we can, biographical material
about who they were, what they did with the money,
what they did politically, what they were --
what their influence was culturally,
the things they wrote.
All those kinds of things that we can find out about them.
And it's all there, available on the -- in the encyclopedia.
So what I wanted to just tell you about briefly today
in the short time that I have left, I wanted to talk
about one particular family.
Because family stories are just
such a fascinating part of this material.
And of course, one of the things that people are discovering,
is that all kinds of people who thought they had no connection
at all with slave owning are discovering
that they do have connections.
And of course this is a very, entangled history
between African-Caribbean and white British people
so that all the illegitimate children, who are mixed
up in these records are of course parts of the lineage
of the entangled histories which we share
in Britain today with the Caribbean.
Entangled histories.
This is not to do with pointing fingers and saying,
"This person was a nasty slave owner."
It's to do with trying to understand the ways
in which we are all implicated in this history
which is a shared history.
And the West India Dock is just such a wonderful symbol of that.
You know, the water going out, the Thames going
out to the Atlantic and making that connection.
And of course hardly anybody goes by ship these days,
but still, it's still a symbol of the connection.
And this building itself is a symbol of the connection
of the connected histories that we share.
Well the family that I thought I'd tell you a little bit
about is the family of the Kingsleys.
And this particular family story - just the little bit
that I'm going to tell you of it - connects Barbados, Jamaica,
Australia and of course England.
Well some of you may have heard of Charles Kingsley.
Here he is.
Charles Kingsley, very well-known writer, intellectual,
historian, Christian socialist, novelist, [inaudible] reformer,
a member of the Victorian intellectual elite involved
in all kinds of public controversies,
wrote his most popular novel, was a novel called,
"Westward Ho" which probably none of you have read.
Maybe somebody who's a bit older might have read it,
but in the 19th Century, it was republished 92 times.
It was an amazingly popular book.
Charles Kingsley was a very, very well-known figure.
And he was a patriot and an imperialist.
He was the professor of history at Cambridge for a while.
He was involved with endless different public enterprises.
Well Kingsley's maternal grandfather was a judge
in Barbados, called Charles Nathan Lucas.
And one of the things that we've been turning
up in this work is how important marriage is,
how important family is in all these histories.
The ways in which marriages are so critical
in linking one family with another, how the patterns
of inheritance work across families, and so on.
So imperial families, the families who operate across --
you know, often the new colonies of white settlement, India,
the Caribbean, moving out from England, Scotland, Ireland
and Wales to all these different sites, these whole patterns
of migration in the 18th and 19th Century.
This is an imperial story.
It's a global story that stretches all
around these different sites of the world.
Well Charles Kingsley's maternal grandfather then was a judge
in Barbados.
And the Lucas family had been in Barbados for five generations.
So they're an old, Bajan family.
And he also owned property in Demerara
which became British [inaudible].
Demerara was the new colony at the beginning
of the 19th Century which was tremendously prosperous
because it was new land
that hadn't been planted for sugar previously.
And people in the 1800s
and 1810s were making huge fortunes from Demerara.
Most spectacularly John Gladstone -
William Gladstone's father - who made a fantastic fortune
in Guyana as it became.
Well when compensation happened, the Lucas family,
got over 3 thousand pounds for 157 enslaved men
and women on their properties.
And Charles Kingsley who was the son of course of the --
he's the grandson of the actual slave owner.
Charles Kingsley later told one of his close friends that,
"Emancipation ruined me.
The loss of those West India properties was a terrible,
terrible loss," in his mind.
Well Kingsley was very influenced by Darwin
and he was convinced of the power of hereditary.
And he believed that it was descent on his mother's side
from a pure West Indian family --
you understand, within the 18th and 19th Century,
"West Indian" means "white."
It's only in the 1950s when Caribbean migrants start coming
in significant numbers to Britain,
that "West Indian" starts to mean "black."
It's one of those terms
that just has a rather dramatic change.
So when I talk about the West Indians
and the West Indian [inaudible], I'm not talking
about black people at all.
I'm talking about white people.
So Kingsley thought this white West Indian family was
where he got his strength, his manliness, his vigor,
his courage, all the things that he believed in.
And Kingsley was particularly associated with a form
of Christian manliness.
Christian muscularity.
Associated with his friend Tom Hughes' book,
"Tom Brown's School Days."
You know, the ways in which boys should be trained to go out
and conquer the empire.
And Kingsley was very, very critical of what he saw
as the [inaudible], feminized weakness that he saw all
around him in Britain.
You know, not enough cold showers, not enough cold baths,
people weren't clean enough,
not enough manly exercise of any kind.
I mean I could go on and on about what was manly,
but I think you probably get the idea.
Well as a boy, Kingsley was very influenced by his grandfather
and he loved his grandfather's stories which stayed in his mind
and grandfather stories often do.
And he particularly loved a story which his grandpa told him
about the time when there was a terrible earthquake
in Saint Vincent.
And Saint Vincent is not that far from Barbados.
And the waves from the earthquake
in Saint Vincent were felt in Barbados.
And according to grandpa,
everybody in Barbados except him, panicked.
All the Negroes - as he calls them -
were rushing along the streets, screaming at in hysterical,
jabbering in hysterical and terrified.
And all the whites who never went to church, suddenly fell
on their knees and started praying.
But he, remained calm.
He sat in his study and he studied natural science
to understand what the nature of these waves was
and what would happen next.
So a belief in resolution and courage and staying firm,
these were the messages
that Kingsley took from his grandfather.
And Nathan Lucas had been with Admiral Rodney on his ship,
"The Formidable," when Admiral Rodney conquered the French
in 1782 and saved the British West Indies from the French
who were trying to seize it from them at that time.
There are endless wars at the end of the 18th Century
and struggles between the British and the French.
So Admiral Rodney is a very, very important figure
in white Caribbean history.
His statue stands.
There's a glorious statue to him in the main square
in Spanish Town, the old capital of Jamaica.
So this connection between Rodney and the conquest
of the French and so
on is another very important thing for Kingsley.
National pride.
So, well this is my next picture
which is Charles Kingsley's statue in Bideford.
And Bideford is where the family came from in Devon.
They're an old Devonian family on his father's side.
And Bideford of course is on the sea and his novel,
"Westward Ho," this extraordinarily popular,
patriotic novel, the hero sets out from Bideford
on his way to the Caribbean.
Now Kingsley's brother-in-law -
I told you how important families are -
Kingsley's brother-in-law was a historian called James Antony
Froude who was later to write a deeply, horrible book
about the West Indies when he went there.
But Froude was tremendously influenced by Thomas Carlyle.
And Thomas Carlyle was of course the great prophet of the 1820s
and 30s, the man who was warning everyone from his hypes
about the terrible issues which England faced, about the dangers
of mechanization and industrialization,
about the whole what was called the
"condition of England question."
What's wrong with England?
I think we could do with a "What's wrong with Britain?"
kind of question now.
But now with a Carlyle to answer it.
So Froude and Kingsley were both very influenced by Carlyle
who was later to write at the end of the 1840s,
a terrible diatribe against Africans.
And Froude took from Carlyle this story of England's decay
and the need to recover important [inaudible] of power
and glory and courage again.
And Froude looked to the Tudor period as the formation
of the great global -- England's great global empire.
So he wrote a 16-volume history of England
which is all about the Tudors.
Now, maybe some of you are into the Tudors now.
I certainly am because I love Hilary Mantell.
And so you know we all know that Anne Boleyn is
on television like every other day.
So there's great interest in the Tudors now,
but when Froude wrote his history,
there was no interest in the Tudors at all.
They were seen as a very retrograde lot.
And Froude rescued them.
And he represented Henry VIII as a great monarch
who formed the new nation state.
And Elizabeth I, as the conquering queen
who encouraged colonization and expansion.
And of course, this is the period when Drake,
Rally [phonetic], Hawkins, all go out to the Caribbean
and slave trading starts and the Caribbean empire begins
to be formed.
So the heroes for Froude are indeed Hawkins, Drake and Rally
who he sees as simply heroic figures.
And so "Westward Ho" is a romantic version
of Froude's history.
It's a colonial romance about beautiful, blonde,
[inaudible] Devonian lads, you know with their blonde locks
and their white skin, going out and finding the savagery
and barbarism of the Caribbean
and bringing civilization in their wake.
So here are the Galion's [phonetic] going
out which is the story that Kingsley tells.
First, he tells the story of the conquest of Ireland
and then of the Caribbean.
So now Kingsley as I said, was a very well-known public figure.
And in the 1850s and 60s, he was always involved
with different public causes and all kinds of things going on.
So he appeared in the press a lot.
Now in 1865, there was a rebellion in Jamaica.
A rebellion at Morant Bay in Jamaica.
And at that time, this man Edward John Eyre,
who didn't look quite as grizzled in 1865.
This is a portrait of him from rather later on.
Eyre was the governor of Jamaica.
And when this rebellion happened
in Jamaica amongst country people
in an area called Saint Thomas, Eyre was convinced
that it was a major black wall and that the aim was
to overthrow all whites as indeed were many
of the white population in Jamaica.
So he responded with absolute vigor and brutality.
And in the wake of the rebellion,
many people were executed, many people were whipped,
many people were tried and under martial law.
And gradually, the news got back to England
about what had happened.
The Draconian response to what was initially a very,
very minor set of events.
And for two years, there was a big public debate in England
about the rights and wrongs of what Governor Eyre had done.
And the Victorian intelligence there divided up between those
who supported Eyre, leading figure were John Stuart Mill
and other scientists.
Darwin, Lyle [phonetic], they supported --
they were on the side of Eyre
and thought justice had not been done.
And those who defended Eyre were led by Carlyle
and included the Dickens, Ruskin and Kingsley.
And Kingsley in fact encountered Eyre just when he'd arrived back
in South Hampton and just by chance, Kingsley was
in South Hampton and he welcomed Eyre
and was then rather horrified at the huge, public response
in South Hampton when a large crowd of working class men
and women attacked him for his support of Eyre.
So Kingsley's support of Eyre and his support
of slavery during the American Civil War -
he supported the South during the American Civil War -
began to label him as a particular kind of --
having a particular kind of politics.
So this is just a representation
of the Morant Bay Rebellion there.
Well now meanwhile, while all this is going on
and Kingsley has become a very controversial figure
and has become very troubled in fact by the way
in which attention has been drawn
to his extremely reactionary position on Morant Bay,
his brother Henry Kingsley, had done what a lot
of other children from families
that had been West Indian families did.
He went to New South Wales because West Indian families
who saw that the West Indies was no longer going to be a source
of great prosperity, instead of sending their youngest sons
to the Caribbean, now started sending them to Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and the Cape.
These are all areas that are being settled.
There's a huge wave, expansion of settlement in the 1830s.
What a historian called James Belich calls
"The Settler Explosion" of the 1830s.
And numerous West Indian connected families -
people from those families -
go to these new colonies of white settlement.
And we've been tracking some of them
on our encyclopedia on our database.
So Henry Kingsley went off to seek his fortune -
not in Barbados where you know his grandmother's family had
been for ages - but in New South Wales.
And he tried sheep farming and he was no good at that.
He tried gold digging because this was
when the gold rush happened in Australia.
He wasn't much good at that either.
And he came home an unsuccessful migrant and he ended
up in his brother's back garden, in a small cottage
with a half-finished novel about Australia.
And he never made a go of it financially
for the rest of his life.
He was a bit of a burden to the rest of the family.
But he did write two very successful novels,
both about Australia.
And what's interesting about these novels is the ways
in which they represent indigenous people in Australia:
the Aboriginal population in Australia.
Because they're all about white settlement
and he regards Aboriginal people as it was conventional
to regard them at that time as a dying race.
They're represented in this novels
as steadily moving towards extinction.
They're savage, they're barbaric,
they're hopeless, they're ugly.
I mean the descriptions of them are very ugly descriptions
and again, we get the comparison between the beautiful,
blonde white settlers that his brother has described,
who his brother describes in comparison
with indigenous peoples and Africans in the Caribbean.
For Henry Kingsley, it's Aboriginal people
in Australia that he's describing.
So these descriptions, these stories about the peoples
of the empire, are being percolated through these novels
that these brothers are writing.
Well in 1865, Henry Kingsley published an essay about Eyre.
And he obviously, at the time that he published it,
he didn't know what had happened in Jamaica.
It came out that summer.
And it was a story about how Eyre was a brilliant explorer
in Australia and how he was a protector
and defender of Aboriginal people.
So this was a -- this essay was published
in Millin's [phonetic] Magazine and the evidence
from this essay was used in the controversies
about what kind of person Eyre was.
You know, was he a brutal tyrant
or was he really a kind protector
of indigenous and native peoples?
So there's whole correspondence in "The Times" about this
with one side saying he was this
and the other side saying he was that.
So Henry Kingsley too is right in the middle
of all these controversies.
Well the last drama in this particular [inaudible]
of this family's story, which you've got
about three minutes for, is that Charles Kingsley eventually
in 1870 went on a journey to the West Indies
which he'd always wanted to do.
He loved the romance of the West Indies as he saw it,
which had nothing to do with slavery and the plantations.
It had to do with buccaneers and pirates, and the conquest
of the French, and you know these pure West Indian families,
and to the good things that they had done.
So in 1870, off he went on a 6-month journey.
And he wrote a journal about it which was then cleaned
up for publication
but fortunately we have both versions of what he wrote:
the throws of letters to his mother and the cleaned
up version which he then wrote.
And he spent most of his time in Trinidad and he was conducted
around Trinidad by the then governor of Trinidad.
And the big problem that the plantocracy faced in the wake
of emancipation - you know, the days in the decades
after slavery - was who was going
to work on the plantations?
They could no longer rely on African labor,
so what was going to happen?
And the answer to this was seen in bringing
in Indian indentured labor.
And large numbers of Indian indentured laborers were brought
in to Trinidad and Guyana particularly.
So that that's why the populations of both Trinidad
and Guyana are now about half and half of African descent,
half and half of [inaudible] descent.
So going round Trinidad, Kingsley argues
that of course the real hope
for this country is more white migrants.
What we need is more people like those men
who settled in the past.
Men like him.
Men who would you know do hard work,
and discipline their neighbor,
and organize themselves, and so on.
"They could be," he says, "little centers of civilization
for the rest [inaudible]."
But then in the hierarchy of how people might function
in this society, then come the Indians, the "Coolies"
as everyone called them because Coolies he thought were much
more industrious and docile than Africans.
They came from a society which had been civilized.
It was stagnate.
It had -- its civilization was long, long ago
but they could be rescued.
It was true they had terrible superstitions
and ridiculous religious beliefs, but they could --
there was more hope of rescuing them.
And also they had proper family lives with domesticated wives.
And they, he argued, could educate black people.
So Coolies would educate black people and bring them slowly,
slowly, slowly, slowly into civilization.
So this is the story that Kingsley tells in his last book
which is called, "At Last."
It's a story of a hierarchy of races with whites
as the civilizing agents, Coolies as the next layer down,
and Africans as the ones who might, might,
might eventually enter civilized society fully.
So these are the stories
which the Kingsley brothers are telling -
not just the British public - but a global public.
These books sell large numbers in Australia,
in United States and so on.
These are the ways in which slave owning families are
passing on stories about what race means.
These are the reconfigurations of racial thought
which are going on in the period after emancipation
and which demonstrate to us how nothing ended with abolition.
Something else happened, but the something else left huge
legacies of inequality which we are still living with today
and we still need to address.
Thank you very much.