History Video Creator, focus on Colonialism and the British Empire
Joined March 2023
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Happy Birthday Captain Cook
Staithes, Yorkshire, where the young James Cook was apprenticed to a shopkeeper before turning his ambitions to the sea:
Are you a British King/Hanoverian Elector with a problem? And no one else can help? Maybe you can send… a French Protestant General!
Remember, remember! The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes, champion of England against the Scottish menace.
Just kidding, I'm glad they got him, but his anti-Scottish sentiment is not a widely told part of the story.
I certainly do question it, though I don't claim slavery as my strongest area of expertise.
I can believe the British figure is approximately 34%, but how is the French and especially the Portuguese figures so far behind the British?
The data below is not complete, but in fact given it excludes the 17th century I would expect it to undercount Portuguese involvement.
Adding West and Central Africa together you can see Portugal is by no means a distant second to Britain in this period.
Britain, Portugal and France were the big three of the Atlantic slave trade.
Much is made of British military decline. While the numbers are indeed depressing, we've actually gone through this before, from being a major military state in medieval Europe to a military near-nonentity by the end of the 17th century.
Yet, quickly, this was turned around.
