who built the city?

A comment on the Brecht poem in this post reminded me about thoughts that sometimes cross my mind when I’m wandering around London looking at the buildings. Like in the City, where there are many big old buildings and some impressive new ones too.

They were built by slaves.

I don’t mean that the people who put the buildings up were personally enslaved. But look down years at the older institutions and finance houses there, and the foundations of their wealth came from the profits of the Atlantic slave trade and from the unpaid forced labour of enslaved people in America and the Caribbean.

Follow the money and you end up at a big stone edifice, or a soaring steel and glass tower in London. The men, women and children who were torn from Africa by the slavers might not have laid the stones, but those buildings are raised from their blood and sweat. Here are just a few with slave trade links.

Clockwise from top left: Bank of England, Lloyd’s of London, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange.

I think about this when I occasionally wander through those City streets not because it is a cheery thought, but because I would like to in some way recognise and remember the enslaved people’s labour – and the conditions under which it was extracted – as well as the builders who laid the stones or lifted the shining steel. And I look at the fine buildings and say silently to an unknown person from long ago: this is yours, this huge stone monument, you built it.

I thought I’d look up a bit of detail for this post, and found that the Museum in Docklands has got an interactive map thingie that is a bit clunky to use, but has some handy information on it if you persist. Here’s some stuff from the museum about the buildings pictured above:

Bank of England

It was instrumental in the funding of plantation slavery and the slave trade, and in financing the British in European wars for dominance in the Caribbean and possession of their slave-owing plantation economies… Its members – from the governor to the directors – were directly involved in the slave trade. Humphrey Morice [director in 1716 and governor of the bank after 1727] was known as the ‘foremost London slave merchant of his time.’ He was involved in trading as an owner of ships, as an insurer and consignor of slave ships.

Lloyd’s of London

The organisation of a business in insuring ships evolved from Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in Lombard Street in 1688. The coffee house was used by many different people, including marine underwriters, who would insure all manner of ships, including those engaged in the slave and West India trades.

The Guildhall – HQ of the Corporation of London, the body that runs the City. It’s members included many with slave trade interests.

Shareholders in the Royal African Company included 15 Lord Mayors, 25 sheriffs and 38 aldermen of the City of London. The most famous individual associated with the Guildhall and with slavery was Sir William Beckford, the owner of slave plantations in Jamaica. Beckford was Lord Mayor twice and there is a statue of him in the Guildhall.

The Guildhall building I think predates the slave trade, but plenty of blood money will have found its way in at some point.

Royal Exchange – where London’s merchants met to transact business.

The building played a vital role in London’s slave and West India trading activities, because it provided a focus not only for the trading of commodities, but also for finding shippers, insurance underwriters, financiers etc.

It turns out that the museum actually does a walking guide, with a map, and round it pictures and descriptions of the buildings. It’s too big to paste in. But I’ve cut a bit out of the map, and turned it sideways below. Don’t think I like the chain graphics much…

If you live in Britain, or read the news from here, that map might look quite familiar – and so might the buildings. We have been seeing a lot of them recently. Here’s another map.

Those City streets are the scene of the G20 demo – and where Ian Tomlinson died after the police shoved him to the ground. The G20 protests were there because it’s where capitalism’s banking arm lives. And the loony economic system that is driving us all to hell in a handcart is shown at its maddest by the financial crisis and the bank bailouts that have cost us billions.

The Bank of England is now the UK’s central bank, the Royal Exchange is actually now a swanky shopping centre, Lloyd’s is an enormous insurance market. The Square Mile is stacked with banks and trading houses of all kinds. The stock exchange is just down the road.

And the forces of the state are there to defend all that. Recognise the buildings in this pic?

When we think about the legacy of slavery, we usually think of racism. Generations of degradation, suffering, discrimination – and the whole twisted ideology of it. And that is a legacy of slavery, one that millions of black people have to face every day, with discrimination in employment, housing, education, the so-called “justice” system. It scars whole continents.

But there is another legacy from slavery too. Modern capitalism is built upon it. The ill-gotten gains from slavery made up a massive chunk of the money the British ruling class used to kick start industrial development. Now there is a global system that chomps through the daily lives of billions of people for the benefit of a tiny number at the the top. That is a legacy only a very few people have inherited.