Daniel Hannan Quotes

The proceedings of this House in 1790, in reference to petitions on the matter of the slave trade, and of slavery in the States, have been cited. It has been said that those petitions were not received.

The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in 'Capitalism and Slavery,' made the case.

In England, there's no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.

It is manifestly vital to the success of the anti-slavery cause, that the authority and influence of proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers should be destroyed.

The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.

At the time the United States government acquired the territory of California from Mexico, slavery had been abolished there nearly twenty years

Royal African Company

The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.

Abraham Lincoln is the most powerful slave catcher in America.

God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners

The various American charters were entered into and granted by the king for himself only …. No mention is made in them of the parliament.

… twice as big as Germany and France together. The worst forms of misgovernment existed over this vast tract of country.... The rich soil on the banks of the [Nile] river, which had a few years since been highly cultivated, was abandoned. There was not a dog to howl for a lost master. Industry had vanished; oppression had driven the inhabitants from the soil.... The entire country was leased out to piratical slave-hunters and traders, under the name of traders, by the Khartoum Government. It was against the “Christian” morals of most English to capture and enslave residents of African villages. However, if the Blacks were already enslaved, most had little compunction to buying slaves, and reselling them in the Carribean or America. Almost all the Aftical slaves were originally captured and enslaved by Arab Slave Traders who could not enslave fellow Moslems but could do so for animists. The Englsh in control of the Sudan would look with askance at the “primitive” and “immoral” Arab slave traders, but would make money by the enslavement process by licencing Slave traders in the Sudan and of course charging a high fee.]

The men of this country, therefore, who desire that all men, black, white and brown, shall at the earliest period enjoy perfect freedom of thought, speech, action, and trade, will find, on full consideration, that duty to themselves and to their fellow-men requires that they should advocate efficient protection, as the true and only mode of abolishing the domestic trade in slaves, whether black or white.

The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when they were made slaves? The profit to Great Britain from the trade of her colonies, through all its branches, is two millions a year. This is the price that America pays you for your protection;

I have never been able to procure sufficient slaves to cultivate my lands and that of any guilt that attached to this trade we [planters] were at most but partners with the Parliament which tolerated it, and the country which profited so much from it.

Even before the expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West, slavery was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade, and insurance companies underwrote it.

The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.

Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.

Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.

For America, 1812 became the war in which it had finally gained its independence. For Britain, 1812 became the skirmish it had contained, while winning the real war against its greatest nemesis, Napoleon.

We are not quitters. Britain has always gone out there; we have probably been more influential than any other country in shaping our world and the way it has thought about itself, the way we interact as nations.

Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888.

We've yet to deal with the uncomfortable history of England being involved in the transatlantic slave trade, whereas America has at least made some movies dealing with its racial history.

In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.