If I say slavery what image comes to your mind?
If you live in the Western world, then even if I'd presented a blank
screen here, your mind's eye would probably have conjured an image very much like this one,
and with it, a whole basket of attitudes, opinions and pre-judgements that linger.
Am I right?
But today I'm going to ask you to think differently. Can you do that?
Because in this video, I want to illustrate that slavery is not black and white
neither, is it black and white.
So let's reset for a moment.
Racial hatred doesn't make sense. There seems to be a group who hate Jewish people
AND black people. Why both?
It's like saying, I don't like raspberries, so, naturally I don't eat shellfish or lamb either.
I say that because I hate raspberries and shellfish and lamb,
but I don't imagine for a minute that I'm part of a large subset on a Venn diagram.
I mean the Jewish people are probably with me on the shellfish, but not the raspberries.
Are raspberries kosher?
As a tour guide, I once had a Jewish family on tour. Now the only reason that I knew they were Jewish
was that I bought them Tunnocks teacakes and they refused them
Apparently raspberries, shellfish, pork and Tunnocks teacakes.
I asked lots of questions that I'm sure were way more intrusive than appropriate,
one of which was, why? What's with the hating Jewish people thing.
I don t get it. Not only that it seems
to have been a recurring theme for a long time. Hating Jewish folk just didn't make sense to me,
until they refused the Tunnocks teacakes, obviously.
I explained that I understood racism that a diminishing number of white folks
have towards black folks, even in the 21st Century.
You see there was a time when it was essential for some white folks to see black people as less than human
in order to justify Trans-Atlantic slavery. People had to learn racism, because
financial gain depended on it, so the idea was promulgated
until it became ingrained in society. It's why we in the western world are used to
thinking about slavery in the context of race. I don't see the same logic for the Jews.
One of the ladies said: Ah, but Jews were the original slaves.
No they weren't. It wasn't like
Ramses came into his advisers one day and said: I was walking in the park and I saw these folk
Jews I think they were called, and it gave me an idea,
and I've invented a thing called slavery, and the good news is,
it gets our pyramids built faster as well. Slaves already existed.
I didn't question her on whether Jews had ever owned slaves.
I've brought you to Culross before, to tell you how it was used in Outlander, and to tell you the tale
of Thomas Cochrane, Sea Wolf. Today
I've brought you here to talk to you about slavery, so if you're interested in the people, places and
events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe
button at the bottom right of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you the story.
Sir George Bruce built Culross Palace behind me around the turn of the 17th Century.
His big success was coal mining,
and what often went with it, salt pans.
Coal was becoming an ever more vital part of the economy.
Coal workers were a unique breed. They often worked in families.
The husband would go down the mine and hew the coal,
his wife, would carry the coal to the surface. The kids would probably be involved as well.
Spending all that day down a mine as a family, brought the social limitations of a solitary career,
and the stigma of the career choice itself.
Was it choice? You weren't forced into it,
but you didn't get kids saying: Dad, when I grow up,
I want to dig coal. That's a good career choice son,
because I'm pretty certain you'll achieve your goal.
But owners of a coal mine they had problems as well. If workers left your mine to go and work for
another .
The 1597 Poor Laws in Scotland said that somebody who'd
been sentenced as a vagrant could be given in servitude to anyone who would
keep him in employment and he, and his children, could be kept in lifelong bondage.
Well, vagrants yes. Serves them right for not having proper jobs,
eh? Ten years later, in 1606,
the Anent Coalyers and Salters Act passed into law.
It said that if you had a job as a coal miner, or worked in the salt pans
you couldn't leave your employer without a written testimonial.
You were bound to him for life.
Abandoning your role, or taking up other employment without permission,
was a criminal offence of theft from your employer,
and you could be hunted down, and if captured within a year and one day, you could get a flogging.
If you were a coal miner things had just changed.
Before 1606 you were notionally free with all the real-life restrictions
of being born a poor collier compared to being born a coal owner,
but now that notional freedom was gone . and things got worse,
because as courts applied the law a year and a day seemed to get longer.
In the case of Wallace of Craigie and William Cunningham of Brownhill, coal workers who had left
Craigie's mine eight years before, were forcibly returned to their owner.
The ratchet had clicked another notch. A new law in 1641 extended servitude to,
not just colliers themselves, but to surface workers and ancillary roles
The legislation also extended to workers in manufacturing,
although this wasn't strictly enforced. This law also banned coalminers from
customary holidays, other than one day at Christmas, and it demanded a six-day week.
What about the collier children?
The School Establishment Act 1616 required publicly funded,
Church-supervised schools to be established in every parish in Scotland,
but not for the children of coal miners. Slavery would be hereditary.
Often a coal owner would pay a fee to bring somebody into bondage as a coal worker.
It might be the gift of a pair of shoes, it might be more,
but now it was limited to 20 merks. Now coal owners would use this custom
to give an existing coal worker's new born a baptism gift,
so even as the minister gave the child to God for eternity,
the coal owner was saying, in life that child belongs to me.
The dad was responsible for paying costs of recovery if one of their children ran away.
Another Act in 1672, gave coal-masters the right of apprehending vagabonds and their children
without the need of a trial in a court of law. Coal workers were included in the inventory
of sale of land or property. In Fife a collier wasn't even allowed to be
buried in the same grounds as a free man. Now, I've called them slaves.
It was the term often used at the time, and in general and legal documents,
but you might reasonably say that as the ratchet tightened
on men who had started off nominally free, the Caribbean and the Americas were full of black
men and women in far worse conditions . and you'd be right.
Colliers were paid a wage, sometimes as much as three
times that of a general labourer. They could own property, they could
pass that property on to their children, they could even stand for the burgh council
but they couldn't leave their master or choose a different life for themselves or their family.
They weren't chattel slaves, transported across an ocean, subjected to horrific conditions,
punishments, torture, or murder, the conditions weren't great, but the women
weren't systematically raped by the mine owners. People often comment about ancestors who crossed
the Atlantic having been sold into or having sold themselves into indentured servitude,
and that's not the same thing either, but slavery isn't black and white.
It's not digital, it's analogue.
At one end you're notionally free, but have freedoms restricted by employers or others.
You might even have to get vaccinated for the greater good.
At the very other extreme, is life under the lash
in cotton fields or a sugar plantation. Each click of the ratchet turns the screw
that little bit higher until
This is the image of Scottish mining that I grew up with.
Hard working noble men, not children,
who put in a day's shift at the pithead and lived as members of a free society.
So how did the change happen? I've brought you to Scotland's
National Mining Museum at Newton Grange, which is worth a visit when you can incidentally,
and I've brought you here, to take you back to the 1770s
and another look at the freeman/slave continuum. In 1769
John Wedderburn came home to Perthshire having made a bucket load of cash as
a plantation owner in Jamaica. Seven years earlier
he had bought a young slave boy, from a ship's captain newly arrived from the Guinea Coast.
Wedderburn brought the slave, Joseph Knight, back with him to serve in his home in Perthshire,
where he was baptised, but when young Joseph got jiggy
with Anne Thompson, one of the other servants, Wedderburn refused to let him leave to live
with his now wife and child. When Knight left anyway,
his master had him arrested. Now,
Knight knew that a couple of years earlier another slave, had landed in England,
claimed his freedom, and it had been judged that slavery
was unsupported by common law in England. Joseph Knight too won his case in Perthshire,
but his master appealed, and the case went all the way through the various stages of
the Scottish Court up to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and the court decided that
The state of slavery is not recognised in the laws of this kingdom, and is
inconsistent with the principles thereof. The slave owner's appeal was thrown out
by the Court of Session because "we sit here to enforce right
not to enforce wrong". "Although, in the plantations, they have laid
hold of the poor blacks, and made slaves of them, yet I do not think that that is agreeable to
humanity, not to say to the Christian religion. Is a man a slave because he is black? No.
He is our brother; and he is a man
he is in this land of liberty, with his wife and child:
let him remain there." The Court thus held that
the dominion assumed over this Negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust,
could not be supported in this country to any extent,
unless he was thinking of working down the pit. The court also held
that Joseph Knight was protected from being unjustly arrested for leaving his master
under the Habeas Corpus rights conferred by an Act of 1701
Rights which the Act specifically denied to coal miners.
It was while all this was going on that an Emancipation Act for coal miners
passed through the Scottish parliament, so that anyone becoming a coal miner
was no longer bound to servitude, but if you were already a coal miner
then, depending on your age, you had to wait 3-10 years before you were entitled to freedom.
These terms could be extended if no replacement was found for you,
oh and by the way it wasn't just given to you, you'd have to have the time and
wherewithal to take the matter to court. So, years after the slave Joseph Knight was freed,
many coal miners were not. Plus,
the emancipation of miners didn't come because of an outcry for Christian values.
It came because coal owners needed to find a way to persuade people to go and work in their mines,
as it turns out, higher wages in exchange for serfdom and slavery
somehow hadn't worked. The final parliamentary Act
liberating Coal Miners came in 1799, but let me make three quick points.
One, slavery isn't digital.
Coal miners were moved little by little up that increasing slope of slavery
as their rights were eroded by each succeeding Act of Parliament,
and there's maybe a lesson in that for us all. Two;
men like Joseph Knight may have been higher up that slope,
but slavery isn't black and white. If anything, the true colour of slavery
is green, and one last point,
by the time this was in full swing as a modern working colliery
coal slavery was gone and I don't remember anybody looking
down on people because they were coal miners. So if, 250 years after Knight v Wedderburn,
you do still look down on people because of their colour
maybe it's time to join the 21st Century. I've got video about Slavery and the Scottish
church coming up on screen now. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.