Hashtag Activism

In 1706 Sir John Holt proclaimed "One may be a villein in England, but not a slave."  This marked the beginning of journey that, in a sense, ended with the UN Declaration of Human Rights imposing a global ban on slavery in 1948...

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During those intervening 240 years the British Empire paid a great price in blood and treasure to threaten, bribe and outright force, first the suppression and then the abolition of the slave trade. Britain wasn't the first nation to ban slavery within its borders, in fact it took us until 1807 to pass an Abolition Bill, almost three hundred years after the first such legislation is recorded.  But it was the British, from their position as a global superpower, that decided the trade would end not just within their borders, but globally - and having made that decision it was pursued not just with words and speeches, but with actions...

1807: The West African Squadron is established to patrol the African coast and seize slaving ships. Over the course of its existence the Squadron would free 160,000 slaves, capture over 1,000 slaving ships, and at its peak accounted for a sixth of the Royal Navy. In relative terms around £4 billion a year would have been needed to support the Squadron, and 1,587 men lost their lives while serving aboard its ships between 1830 and 186.

1815: The British pay the Portuguese £750,000 to end their pursuit of the slave trade north of the equator (approximately £5.6 billion relative to today).  Also in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna the British use their influence as part of the victorious coalition against Napoleon to have the condemnation of the slave trade written into international law.

1817: The British pay the Spanish £400,000 (£2.98 billion, 2014) to end the slave trade to the Caribbean islands.

1834: Slavery is abolished not just in Britain, but throughout the Empire, freeing 750,000 slaves throughout Africa. As other territories are annexed by the British, the ban on slavery extends.

1839: The Britain and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society is founded, the world's oldest international human rights lobby group.

1842: British pushes for an extension of the ban on Portuguese slave trading to include south of the equator (pass if this implies you could sail along the equator directly and avoid both treaties.)

1845: The West African Squadron reaches its peak with the addition of 36 extra ships - making it one of the largest fleets in the world.

1847: The British force the Ottoman Empire, itself a virtual superpower, into a ban on the slave trade from Africa.

1850: Brazil is forced into adopt a law criminalizing the transportation of slaves.

In addition to the above there were also treaties and annexations virtually every year from 1830 onwards either extending the ban on the slave trade or outright abolishing it. Each of these was no doubt accompanied by financial incentives and military threats. While I haven't had the time to investigate each and every territorial acquisition of the British Empire, I'm fairly confident at least some few were undertaken from an anti-slavery perspective, which took on an almost religious status amongst the British liberal elite. This was to be one of the great achievements of the Pax Britannia, a legacy to the world of enlightened imperialism.

Suffice to say Britain spent tens, perhaps even hundreds, of billions of pounds in today's money, and lost thousands of lives to end the slave trade, and while politics, presentation and bluster had their place in this achievement it was blood and gold that ultimately did the deed.

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So... to the point of all this (and where the title of this piece comes in)... this is not, as some may have expected, simply a show-and-tell of a little taught, and less appreciated, historical fact. In fact it relates to a summit meeting that has been taking place at the ExCel center in London this week - the End Sexual Violence in Conflict summit. This "high profile" event has been headlined by William Hague Esq (Foreign Secretary) and Angelina Jolie who, according to the Evening Standard, has the (dubious) special ability of 'being able to speak and have world leader's listen' (to paraphrase). By this I assume they mean the leaders of the largely anglophone developed world. Places such as America, the UK, Australia and Canada - i.e. places where ongoing civil wars rife with sexual violence are not prevalent.

Over five days of talks, speeches, workshop and demonstrations various members of the political and media circles will " ... [create] irreversible momentum against sexual violence in conflict and practical action that impacts those on the ground." So far the main achievement appears to have been the launch of the 'hash tag' "#TimeToAct, though the arrival of Brad Pitt has apparently produced more media attention than anything else to date.

My point here is not to trivialize violence in conflict, or even to comment on war crimes (or war or crimes) in general. But rather to remind people exactly what it takes to bring about a global change. It requires hundreds of billions of pounds of funding, it requires fleets and armies and airforces, it requires hundreds of thousands of men willing to go to war for an idea, and thousands of families willing to see their sons, brothers and fathers come home in a body bag. A few million trendy urban-elites in New York, London and Washington spending 10 seconds "re-tweeting" a platitude will achieve absolutely nothing.

At the opening ceremony of the summit Jolie made a threat to those who engage in sexual violence in conflict, "We will come for you," she said (and added somewhat less threateningly "in an organized manner"), but who is the "we" in this? Angelina Jolie, for all her Holywood star power, does not control any of the world's military power, and all her personal wealth amounts to a drop in the ocean in terms of governments and global power politics. When William Wilberforce stood before Parliament in 1791 and declared;

"Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country."

Not only did he display a mastery of the English language which escapes the majority of modern day parliamentarians, he also knew exactly who he meant by "we". "We" was the British Empire, army, money, fleets, soft and hard power. While it may have taken another decade for Parliament to finally agree with Wilberforce and his Saints, when it did, it did so with the full intention of action not merely of noise.

A comparable event occurred recently with the kidnapping of 180 school children by the Boko Haram militia. To listen to the media and political ramblings on this subject you would have thought the US had assembled a hundred thousand man invasion force, descend on the jungles of Nigeria with fire and brimstone, and was on the verge of returning all of the captured children along with the barely identifiable remains of their kidnappers. We had apparently shown "resolution" against this crime, we had acted "decisively" and the US had "lead global opinion." What they actually meant was a few famous people had posted a selfie under the hastag #FreeOurGirls.

This is not diplomacy, it is not global leadership, it is self-centered blabbering supported by a common culture which has got confused between action and talking about action. And while it lasts the world will continue to tumble down its current trajectory of chaos, extremism and ethnic violence. As Theodore Roosevelt once said "Speak softly and carry a big stick," I can only imagine what our equivalent today is "Shriek incoherently and forget you ever had a stick?"

/Z