Anyone watch 'Britain's Lost Slave Owners' on the BBC recently

[Stanwix England]

I think the last episode of two aired last night.

I thought it was a really good documentary and I certainly learnt a lot about the topic. Very sobering and of great interest to genealogists I thought.

[mientajb]

It was superb and very interesting. As many of my ancestors were wealthy Mariners, I did look on the web site to see if they had been slave owners. Thankfully they had not.

The presenter seemed a little bitter in the first episode but he did raise some difficult questions about our views on people.

[LizzieW]

I didn't watch it, but I did see the presenter interviewed recently when he was asked his opinion of slave owners.  He said it was a difficult question as he'd found out that some of his own ancestors had been slave owners.

[Redroger]

I understand his difficulty, but believe it is both futile and wrong to judge the past by today's ethos.My wife was very agitated when it appeared that an ancestor of hers lived in the house of a slave owner resident in Yorkshire. Luckily I was able to show that the lady concerned was not in the direct line, but most likely a cousin and quite likely illegitimate,

[LizzieW]

I agree Roger - but it seems to be very PC to judge the past by today's standards, especially when the PC people only seem to be judging the British past and ignoring what happened elsewhere.

Lizzie

[Redroger]

Full agreement on this Lizzie. I believe it is important to move on except when the past has a direct bearing on the present situation; and sadly there are very many of those world wide, ranging from colonial peoples' relics in Western Museums through the Elgin Marbles and Ethnic massacres from ancient history in some cases to more recent atrocities.

[Skoosh]

There has been too much smoke n mirrors on this issue, Britain became the world power on the back of the slave-trade, where I live was the former estate of a sugar planter in Jamaica, probably nobody in my street knows that? not for nothing did Glasgow erect the first monument to Nelson, his fleeet chased the French out of the Sugar Islands and saved the city's economy, built originally on tobacco. Scandalously, slavery is still with us, even here & now.

Skoosh.

[Stanwix England]

I have a distant relative who was a slave owner, not in this country but in the Caribbean. I do see what people say about judging by the standard of the time, not by our own standard. Yet at the same time I can't help but feel disappointed in him and that what he did was pretty horrendous. I think what particularly grates on me is the fact that he was a surgeon. He'd more than likely cut people open and he knew that we were all the same underneath the skin with the same bones and blood, yet he was willing to imprison people simply because of the colour of their skin.

The thing that for me undermines the idea that slave owners, I'm referring to those who actually lived with their slaves, were just acting by the standards of their day is the hypocrisy in how they acted. Some claim that slave owners were able to have slaves without feeling guilty because they saw the slaves as being racially inferior to the point of being subhuman. They had a paternalistic attitude towards them and so on and so on.  Yet at the same time many male slave owners were happy to have sexual intercourse with their slaves. How can you have sexual intercourse with someone you see as being little better than an animal? Maybe a lot didn't but it was a well known practice and I've never seen any evidence that slave owners who didn't rape their slaves looked down on the ones who did. It suggests to me that they adjusted their thinking in order to fit in with what was convenient for them at the time, possibly on an hourly basis. I really believe that they knew on some level that what they were doing was wrong, but they closed their minds to it.

I have more understanding for those who inherited slaves. I suppose if your parents had slaves it would have seemed normal.

[ThrelfallYorky]

It's certainly a very difficult subject, and I can see why some would feel very upset - but it's a historical fact, even if we don't like it today, that it happened.
We should just try to ensure that it doesn't continue today, albeit in slightly different forms.
 I found a distant link with a slave-owner, and it does make you feel a bit soiled, to say the least - but I feel just as soiled by the link with one or two factory owners when I read how they treated employees.
We are fortunate to live when we do, and fortunate to be able to look back and learn from our ancestors and their behaviour.