The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Demerara Rebellion of 1823 was an uprising of over ten thousand enslaved people in the Crown colony of Demerara-Essequibo (now part of Guyana) on the coast of South America. Having grown tired of their servitude, the enslaved sought to resist in the most direct way they could. The rebellion took place on August 18, 1823, and grew to become a key trigger in the abolition of slavery across the empire.

Author Thomas Harding joins Dan on the podcast to chart the lead-up to the uprising in the British colony, right through to the courtroom drama that came about as a consequence. They also discuss vital questions about the legacy that the British have been left with and whether generations of those who benefited from slavery need to acknowledge and take responsibility for White Debt.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, and welcome to Dance Know's history.
0:02.8	About Thomas Harding on the pod, bestselling author, we're talking about what he calls
0:06.7	White Debt, we're talking about Restitution, and we're talking about one of the more remarkable
0:11.2	uprising enslaved people in the Atlantic world.
0:14.2	The colony of Demerera, the British colony of Demerera, was shaken to its core by an uprising
0:20.8	of something like 12,000 enslaved people from 37 plantations in August 1823.
0:27.5	It was put down with great brutality and bloodshed by the British authorities.
0:33.2	He wrote this book, he wrote this new history partly because of some discoveries he'd
0:37.8	made within his family history recently.
0:41.4	He is Jewish, he's the descendant from Germans who fled the Holocaust, but he has family
0:45.9	members that were killed in that atrocity, and he has received money from the German
0:51.2	government, Restitution.
0:52.2	And as he said, if I was willing to identify as a victim in my father's family to receive
0:57.2	reparations from the German government, then surely I'd better understand Britain's
1:01.8	role in slavery because he discovered that other members of his family stretching back
1:05.5	200 years were involved in slave-grown cash crops.
1:11.0	If he's taking money from the German government, should he be giving money to the descendants
1:15.7	of the slaves whose work, whose labor, his family benefited from?
1:20.6	Difficult stuff folks, difficult stuff.
1:22.7	So we're here to talk about Restitution, we're here to talk about the Demerera uprising,
1:26.1	it's going to be interesting, you can listen to other podcasts about the Atlantic world
1:29.6	about slavery, about the Holocaust here at History Hit TV.
	...

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