Dr. Jenny Bulstrode, a University College London lecturer accused of besmirching a hero of the Industrial Revolution, has now derided the notion that Britain eradicated slavery. The Telegraph has the story.
Dr. Jenny Bulstrode of University College London has already prompted a weeks-long academic dispute over her claim that Henry Cort stole his groundbreaking iron-making process from Jamaican slaves, with Oxbridge professors dismissing her account as a “fairy tale” and a correction subsequently being issued by the prestigious journal that published her work.
Now, another war of words has flared over her “historically stupid” suggestion that Britain did not abolish the slave trade, in an interview to promote her controversial paper.
She told the Context of White Supremacy podcast earlier this year, while laughing: “In the U.K. we have the British Government saying ‘well we abolished slavery’, again the shock – you tell a Jamaican that the British abolished slavery and they will tell you something back.
“We know that this wasn’t gifted, this was something that people fought for and civil rights movements fought for – it’s completely extraordinary and what was brought in instead, the indenture, the sharecropping and extraction and theft under different names, different guises of the same system.”
It has raised questions about whether her research – which claimed that Mr. Cort’s patent in 1784 for processing scrap iron into high-quality wrought iron was “theft… from black metallurgists in Jamaica” – was influenced by her views.
The latest esteemed historian to criticise the paper, Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and an expert on colonialism, said her comment about abolition was “ridiculous”.
Worth reading in full.
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Try watching The Jones Plantation. Someone convinces the slaves that they are free. Then take a fresh look at our world.
Without exactly knowing what you’re alluding to, in the uprun to the US civil war, there were calls (by Southerners, obviously) to enslave factory workers in the North instead of forcing them to work under the condition they were forced to work under as this would be a net benefit to them. But that’s still a different situation: The Norton Anthology of American Literature has a story (written by himself) about a skilled black labourer making a living by working as contractor. But that’s just a privilege his owner granted him out of financial self-interest said owner could withdraw at any time for no particular reason.
To allude to the US constitution, that’s someone who didn’t have a right to pursuit happiness on his own, just a limited semi-independence privilege because someone else believed this to be beneficial to him. A communist will tell you that this makes absolutely no difference. But it does.
A short 12 minute summary of the story is available here.
Appropriate to our current times, a film was released in August this year here.
I found that myself yesterday. But that’s so obviously a communist/ post-marxist project that I didn’t feel like paying a lot of attention to it.
Blinded by hate, or brainwashed? Either way, what a cretin and UCL is tarnished by association.
Probably neither of both: Just another liar with a political agenda in the business of policy-based evidence-making.
Certainly blind as she will have walked or cycled past many examples of modern day slavery in London on her way to UCL. What about a paper on them and the businesses that employ them.
Stupid bugger is after publicity and a job with Mariana.
Why is what an obscure lecturer at UCL has to say about the history of slavery worthy of mention in the Telegraph?
It feels like playing to the crowd with the sole purpose of stirring it up.
UCL get a lot of taxpayers money no doubt, and also they are in a position of influence over the young people who study there. So for me that makes it newsworthy
This non-lady is – insofar she hasn’t already achieved this – obviously aiming for a teaching position and she’ll students exactly what she has published and publically said so far, presumably more as her private convictions are almost certainly grosser than that. Hence, it’s imperative to call attention to this in the hope to stop her from becoming Susan Michie II.
Tell-tale sign: Mentioning the civil rights movement. That wasn’t British but something which happened in the USA after the second world war and sought, ultimatively successfully, to get rid of the segregation laws. To these people, this makes no difference. They have their heads plugged into America in exactly the same way ostriches are said to plug their heads into the sand to avoid seeing things they don’t want to see. Same for Bulsrode. She simply doesn’t want to take note of the fact that US history isn’t global history because that’s all she cares for.
If it’s not in the Marxist curriculum, it apparently didn’t happen.
Here’s a surprise.
Dr Bulstrode (her PhD) was funded by us, the taxpayer via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
AHRC funded the Antislavery Usable Past (Oh for heavens sake!) project
‘The Antislavery Usable Past project is an AHRC-funded project (£1.84 million, 2014-2019) led by the University of Nottingham, in partnership with the Universities of Hull and Queen’s Belfast.’
‘….researching how the public was mobilised to oppose slavery in the past and uncovering how this could help galvanise change today……’
Galvanise change today……there you go……a nice bit of ‘positive action’ research funding.
We are doing all this to ourselves….
Follow the money.
P.S. ‘More generally, Jenny is interested in historical perspectives on questions of social justice in climate science’
Just another cloud botherer…..
She’s clearly ill and needs sectioning.
It is long past the time that Universities taught anything useful, or even taught truth. Shut them all down. Sack all the staff and let them get real jobs. Reality would hit very hard indeed.
Oh the British the most horrible people? ———-But Germans are all sweetness and light. The British can NEVER be forgiven but the Germans are never constantly reminded what they did 80 years ago. We appreciate Germans as hard working people who have created a lovey clean, prosperous and functioning country. ———-But the British are terrible and should be constantly reminded of what they did 250years ago and the statue of the man who helped defeat the efficient nice Germans should be toppled over.
Is it really possible to suffer from selective blindness in a that serious way? Despite all the recent “Antisemitism in Germany again on the rise!” noises? Despite women who worked for a short time as secretary in a concentration camp when they were 18 being publically sentenced as accomplice to thousand-fold murders? Despite German OAPs being arrested as right-wing terrorists for privately discussing politics? And – last but not least – the constant “All Germans will forever be Nazis!” assertations which keep being made here at least a few times per week?
Yes I understand what you are saying and the examples you give eg the 18 year old girl working in a concentration camp etc. ——-What I am referring to is people in the UK tearing strips off their own country while having nothing to say about other countries. Always bleating about the Empire and the slave trade as if other countries never did any wrong. All countries took slaves including Arabs, and the reason there are no black people over there is because they were all castrated.. The Spanish Portuguese and French all had Empires but all I hear is self flagellating woke crap
She seems to be an attention seeker …. so best ignored.
.
‘Dr’ Jenny Bullshit has obviously never heard of the struggles of Wilberforce or the loss of life incurred by seamen in the Royal Navy enforcing the end of slavery throughout the Anglosphere.
How do these people get their dodgy degrees and doctorates? By spouting faddish propaganda and nonsense, apparently, in order to cause controversy and get themselves a bit of publicity to brag about.
Shallow pseudo-scholars and mountebanks.