The British Constitution (Part II) 

@@Renaissance_Kamikaze That would be his father, also known as Charles Grey, 1st Earl Grey. He's most known as 'No Flint Grey' during the American Revolutionary War, where during an infiltration of a fort, he told his soldiers to not use the flint in their muskets and instead their bayonets, reducing the noise and light by the muskets. In the end he claimed the fort.

He also became tea

Good guy, awful tea.

@@loading9110 what makes you say that

Hooray for Earl grey

The women voters bar had me in tears😂

was going to comment this but ah well

I didn't know Dutch was actually a fantasy language.

Neat, until you said Dutch it sounded like a villain from a sci-fi universe, but I now immediately see the relationship to German "Sorgen", which has the same meanings.

@@seneca983 Tolkein created the dutch language

@@ekszentrik also sorrow in english has the same root and a somewhat similar meaning. also zong would be sang in english and german

Off with your head

Actually his long awaited sequel is The Woodrow Wilson Hate Day series.

@@goldenhair don't worry, it's coming. Probably.

Now we gotta tune in next month, and the next month, and the next month and the next month

oh god it's the crossover of the century

Same, looking forward to your next radiohead reference

ahhhhhhhhhh... time to wait

Who would've guessed that actual research and script writing takes time?

@@tiagoprado7001at least quality of video would surely skyrocket

a little bit more waiting

I didn't learn about any of this until I did my law degree, not even in A-level law was this ever mentioned.

yea coffee is better ;)

@@davidelabarile1634 heresy.

@@TheHorseOutside no yuo are heretic yuo dont know how good is italian coffee... and also horses in my town are a speciality so... yuo look so deliciuos to me;)

@@davidelabarile1634 you look illiterate to me mate

@@TheHorseOutside Don't shame his very specific dyslexia! Yuo wuoldn't understand!!

shame they are still in power today lol

You do realise it’s the Tories who abolished slavery right?

@@martychisnall That is a really reductive and uninformed take.

@@martychisnall Abolished by 2nd Earl Grey, a Whig not a Tory.

@@martychisnall they didn't. It literally says it in the video

You are correct, in all corners of the world The concept of slavery existed in one way or another, as you said it is not exclusively European. All people in all of the continents practiced slavery even the africans enslaved other africans that’s before the scramble for Arica.

Same

Fantastic suggestion.

He's been gone for 2 weeks

denmark do it before 1807 so....

@@davidelabarile1634 Fair enough, I take your point. Still, it was more intrinsic to the economy of the British Empire than to the Danes

@@Connor-vj7vf hey... denmark do it in 1803 and for everthing being the first state to abolish slavery and is trade...its true..its true i im not saying that denmark do more work to abolish slavery but just arrive first... and also denmark as colonies in africa and in the wes indies and thats territory were slavery was there...

Thing is, these were piecemeal decisions that were meant not to ban slavery, but to lay the groundwork for a gradual abolition of it in the 1880s. The Liberals and the Emperor weren't at all happy about that, but the landowners weren't yet happy to give up their slaves until the latter half of the 1880s

@@---675 That's a debated point. I actually researched the earliest evidence of race as a social construct in anticipation for a Masters that I was going to be doing in the slave trade (covid and ill health have put it on hold alas). But, I found that it went back far further than the modern narrative believes. Yes, the conventional wisdom was that ideas about race were to legitimize mistreating the slaves, because obviously when you admit somebody is a human being like yourself, you have to consider how much you'd like somebody to do to you what you are doing to them. The easiest way to get around that is dehumanisation, and that's a method that people have used for centuries to excuse their behavior towards their enemies. So the theory is sound to some degree. The conventional narrative says that dehumanisation by race was something Europeans came up with to excuse what they were doing, as it didn't fit in their moral framework. (Europe was mostly slave-free before they engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, because of that moral framework frowning on slavery). The conventional narrative also makes a big thing of the fact that it was believed that the Greco-Roman civilization didn't really have the same idea of race as we do. Instead Romans' attitude to how 'human' you were was down to how culturally like a Roman you were. As a result, anybody could be considered a civilized person, it was just down to education. A wealthy sub-Saharan African Roman citizen was just as valid a person as a wealthy Italian. Or so the idea goes. The way they dehumanised their slaves was to view them as 'barbarians'/savages: people who lacked skills and refinement, and therefore deserving of conquest and enslavement, to civilize them. The problem I found with this view, is that the history of anti-black racism goes back a lot further than this theory proposes. Firstly we find it in the Islamic slave trade (which was in some senses even worse than the trans-Atlantic trade). When the Europeans went to Africa, they encountered the pre-existing slave trade. Greedily they decided to get involved. The Arab traders didn't just teach them how to trade in slaves, they shared with them their attitudes about the African slaves. Most of the racist themes and ideas we find expressed by Europeans in the 19th Century about black people, we find in the Islamic record going back at least to the 8th-9th Century. The idea that black skin was a curse from God so that Arabs would know who was a slave and who was a free man comes directly from the History of the World by Al Tabari. The idea that black people were intrinsically stupid, also appears in numerous early Islamic sources. But the Arabs were not the source of this attitude. They had picked it up from obscure Talmudic Jewish works in Babylon which early Muslims used for supplementary spiritual guidance. Judaism was not responsible for it either. Rather, back when the Talmud was being written in the 200-300 AD era, it seems to have been a pervasive attitude in North Africa, the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire as far east as Iraq today. In fact we see a famous black Christian monk in 200 AD bemoaning his ugliness and his worthlessness at being born black. And claiming that to be black was to be sub-human. So we see that in the mid-Roman period, this idea that black skin made you inferior was already pervasive enough to have found its way into Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources. (Even though this is where we find the examples, they won't have been the only places such views were expressed. Instead, these are the sources most likely to survive, because their religious communities preserved them, where other texts were not prized. Nor would everybody have agreed with them obviously; they are just examples). We do find it in the pagan Roman physician Galen's works, he describes how people with dark skin are naturally cheerful but stupid. But he assigned similar negative traits to every possible human feature you could imagine, from straight nose to squat shoulders, to straight hair, to pink cheeks...etc etc. So quite how and why this one idea clung on when all the other ideas about facial features didn't, I don't know, and I've yet to find a solid reason in the historical record. I may never find one, because the further back in history you go, the fewer texts survive. All I can say for certain, is that the idea that anti-black racism is a recent, European idea, is false, and it seems to have been a pervasive racist stereotype for a very, very long time.

@@---675 It was surprising to me too. As to the reason, it's not an easy thing to establish, because I cannot get inside a person's head now, let alone when they lived 1000-2000 years ago. So we can only guess based on the clues that they left us. But if we don't know the origin of the idea, because it's lost to history, I can at least say that the perpetuation of the anti-black racism seems to have been down to religion. I do not mean that any religion, or group of religious people, had it as a central tenet of their faith that black people were inferior. Nor do I think that the average person who followed any of the religions believed that black people were inferior. Instead what I mean, is that when you make an idea religious, it holds power in a way that other ideas do not. Consider if you are a devout follower of a religion, and you read in the opinions of the religious sages that black people are stupid or inferior, or even cursed by God, what would you do? If you say "I don't agree with that" you are potentially going against your god. Your God may not agree with this idea that black people are inferior, but as an ordinary follower you have limited (or no) way of knowing that. You're not a sage yourself. So you read this sage saying black people are inferior and cursed by God, and suddenly there's a pressure on you to believe it, lest you go against your God. The idea may be completely false but already it's got a hold on you. "Thus sayeth the Lord" is the most potent and dangerous weapon in history. I sometimes feel it has caused more damage and wars than anything else. You tell people "God says so" and any person who believes in the same god is trapped. (side note: I am still researching, so if I focus on Islam for this example, it's just because that's where the majority of my expertise is until I study more.) This seems to have been what happened at least in Islam. Islam believes that the writings of the Jews and Christians are sacred. So early Islamic scholars searched the Jewish and Christian writings for nuggets of wisdom. They searched works that the Jews and Christians themselves wouldn't have seen as sacred, such as the Talmud and the late gnostic writings. But early Islamic scholars assumed these were the sacred works and so took them far more seriously than any Jew or Christian would have. So in the Talmud there is a discussion about the son of Noah, who is called Ham (his name means 'hot' in Hebrew). Ham committed a sin by mocking his father Noah when Noah was naked, (this story is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible). And Noah actually puts a curse on Ham's son, and says that one of Ham's sons will be a slave to his uncles (Ham's brothers), because of the crime Ham committed. In the Talmud (the encyclopaedia of Jewish debates and discussions), several Rabbis make a sort of joke about Ham's cheeks burning "hot as coals" in embarrassment at his crime. Ham = hot. It's just a funny play on words. But here's where the "thus sayeth the Lord" begins to muddy the waters. Later Rabbis in the Talmud seem to have taken this seriously, not understanding perhaps that it was a joke, and instead of seeing red cheeks blushing, they see the word 'coals' and think that means that Noah's curse made Ham's skin black. It's just an obscure debate over an obscure verse, and it's doubtful most Jews even knew the Talmud discussion on this subject even existed. The Talmud is huge, in size it would be like browsing wikipedia. An obscure discussion on a minor wikipedia page wouldn't draw much attention. But the Muslim scholars are reading the Talmud looking for wisdom, and they find this statement about Ham's family being slaves, and Ham's skin being black through a curse, and they assume that means that black people are cursed into being destined to be slaves. Because it's in what they think is sacred writing, they took this statement even more seriously than the confused Jewish rabbis did. This must be from God. So they now feel a pressure to believe it. Add to that some things that Muhammad said: For example he said the devil looked like a black man called Nabtal ibn al-Harith. It seems doubtful he meant the man's physical appearance. The man in question regularly mocked Muhammad and took his sayings back to Muhammad's enemies so that they could laugh at him. So, if you take it figuratively, Muhammad is saying "this double-crossing guy is like the devil" and not "this is what the devil's physical appearance is". But again, like the Rabbis, the further removed you are from the person who originally made the statement, the harder it is to figure out if the comment is in jest, or figurative, and so later on Islamic scholars took Muhammad literally, and assumed he meant the skin color. He also said that anything black was evil, because that was the symbolic color of darkness, and as a result told people they should not wear black clothes, and they should kill black dogs. There's no evidence he extended this to humans, it was essentially an overly simplistic symbolism of light vs darkness, good vs evil, that he spread to cover pigment too. But the danger of making the inference from white=good, black=bad; to white skin=good, black skin=bad is considerable. Some people obviously made that logic leap, whether Muhammad intended them to or not. To the extent that after Muhammad's death, a devout Muslim leader declared that anybody who said Muhammad was not white skinned should be put to death. How could he be dark skinned if dark things like black clothes were evil? Fear and literalism, and religious fervour again making a mess. Shortly after the emergence of Islam there is a very sad quote from an African convert in the Middle East, where he basically bemoans the fact that before Islam Arabs let black men marry their daughters, and now under this new religion they do not. And how he is viewed as a second-class citizen in spite being a Muslim himself. So this idea spread fast. Now, all three religions contain anti-racist statements, about the equality of all humans, and how it's wrong to discriminate. So again, this is not a core belief in any religion. But it was a vein of poison that some people picked up on, and it spread through the culture like a toxin through the body. Sufficient people believed it for racism to spread, and because it had the backing of "thus sayeth the Lord", it was hard to stomp it out, no matter how many egalitarian all-people-are-equal statements any given religious leader promoted. I'm sorry that was such a long read. I don't often get to talk about this research, it's a very delicate topic, and it's not easy to outline it gently. If I use fewer words I fear that I may be misunderstood.

@@---675 Yeah, I find that religion is generally a force for good, in history. Some of our most dominant egalitarian ideas developed out of religions. Anti-slavery and Abolition came from religion as well. But all too frequently people have used religion as a manipulation tool, or simply misunderstood it, and when that happens, it can do considerable damage.

@@---675 there's no question that religions have caused a lot of damage. They are a very easy way to unify people under some kind of tribalistic banner. Humans have an instinct towards tribalism; "us vs them". Religion is an easy go-to for tribalistic tendencies in humans. But there are many others; race and ethnicity, culture, and political ideology being the most obvious. Humans are very good at thinking of "us" as human and "them" as less-human, regardless of what originally unified their group. In any case, I think perhaps you'd find the work of Tom Holland (not the actor, the historian) interesting. He explores the effects of religion on history in his book Dominion. It's really an eye-opening book.

Dang it you beat me too it >:D

The whole "kidnapping was illegal" things is so stupid when most slaves were purchased from slavers in Africa. I read a French document where they justified slavery because they assumed that all slaves were prisoners of war and therefore they were doing them a favour by letting them live in slavery rather than die in battle. In reality the demand for slaves drove slave raids but nobody wanted to admit that/didn't actually know how it worked.

Famously the coal miners and salt workers of Scotland. Native Scots born to slavery. vagrants could also be forced into slavery.

I mean arguably this ruling says that it always was illegal just not properly challenged until that point.

Trafficking and slavery still goes on today. Just because something happened doesn’t mean it was ever legal.