Church of England’s £100m Slavery Reparations Based on Mistake, Says Historian
Last year, the Church of England declared that it had invested the equivalent of £440 million today in the slave trade between 1720 and 1740 and thus would be paying out £100 million in a programme of reparations. However, a historian of the period, Professor Richard Dale, has now said that this is based on a mistake: the church did not invest anywhere near such sums in the slave trade and did not profit from it. Charles Moore has written about the debacle in the Telegraph.
But is the history contained in the [Church of England’s] report true? In a recent article in the Church Times, Prof. Richard Dale, a business historian of the famous “South Sea Bubble” of 1720, suggests it is not. I telephoned him to find out more.
This is the fact that, in 1723 – three years after the South Sea Bubble had burst – Parliament passed a statute splitting the South Sea Company in two. One was the trading company. The other was the company which sold what was in effect Government debt, paying interest on annuities.
The Commissioners’ report says that “anyone investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in these [slave-trading] voyages”. Prof. Dale says the opposite was the case. Those buying the annuities were consciously not investing in slavery. The statute’s purpose was to make this possible by what is now called ‘ring-fencing’, preventing any financial or legal relationship between the trading and the annuities. This was done, it seems, because the trading (of which slaves formed a big part, but not the whole) was high-risk. The smash of 1720 had showed how toxic the mixture of Government debt with high risk could be.
After the Act, [the Church of England’s] Queen Anne’s Bounty put all its money into the annuities – just the sort of lower but safer return you would expect a sober ecclesiastical organisation to seek. Once the split had taken place, it bought no shares in anything connected with slavery.
Between 1720 and 1723, it is true, the Bounty did invest £14,000 (about £2.4 million today) in the unsplit company and so, for a time, could have profited from slavery. As it happened, however, it did not. When Parliament divided the South Sea Company in 1723, it split the Bounty’s shares equally, too. The Bounty sold off its trading company shares quite quickly but retained and greatly expanded its annuities.
Will the woke ever get their history right?
Worth reading in full.
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The woke are not interested in getting anything right, they just want to make up stuff as cover story for them stealing all the money they can lay their hands on.
Is Welby plain stupid or simply evil?
He’s certainly complicit in plundering the CoE to further so-called left-wing political causes. It doesn’t really matter if that’s due to incompetence or malice (or both).
Welby sold out. He is about as close to Christianity as one of the religion of peace child molesters nominally trading as acolytes of Allah.
The guy has instaded a commission which ‘recommends’ that the CoE apologizes for spreading the Gospel in Africa to the detriment of diverse African religious belief systems, ie, paganism. This means he’s considerably more remote from Christianity than any muslim as there are a lot of shared teachings between all three religions of the book. If Welby’s not an atheist, he must be an agent of
Tony BlairSatan.He could be both. I think that’s the most likely explanation.
I won’t get going on Welby because I won’t be able to stop, but talking of religious people, remember the Bishop who was stabbed by the psycho Muslim recently? If you’ve not already seen him in action here he is speaking during the Scamdemic years. What an awesome man he is. Take note Covidiot traitor, Welby ( <2mins );
”Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was brutally knife attacked just over a week ago.
When other religious leaders were complicit with covid crimes, Bishop Emmanuel spoke out.
Like my dad listening to Churchill on an outlawed radio behind enemy lines in WW2 ( in occupied Holland ),
the Bishop brought hope to those who love freedom.”
https://twitter.com/dragonfishy/status/1782708990918742478
I see what you mean, fair play to him.
This is fantastic news! Well done to Prof. Richard Dale for discovering the truth, well done to Charles Moore for giving that truth wider publicity, and thanks to Will Jones & the DS for publishing this extract for those of us without access to the Telegraph.
In all fairness, it could be that the Archbishop was kept in the dark by the Commissioners who wrote the report, and it could also be that the Commissioners were themselves deceived by those among them hoping for a huge pay-out in “reparations”, like the Ethnic African chairwoman of the “Independent Oversight Group” that produced the report, most of whom are also Ethnic Africans, as you can see here, with details by scrolling down the page:
Oversight Group – The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice (hrjfund.org)
So no bias there, then, or any sense of “We’re all going to be quids in!”
We call for the Church of England to apologise publicly […] for seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems.
That is, ‘they’ are calling for the Church of England to apologize for spreading Christianity in Africa¹. The CoE is thus obviously being ‘overseen’ by atheistic antichristians. And that’s the charitable explanation. The theological one would be that they’re false apostles of the Antichrist.
¹ Obviously, there won’t be any calls to anyone to apologize for spreading Islam in Africa.
I got an envelope through the door today from the local CofE church, stating that they’re short of cash, desperately need donations, urging support of all their fund raising activities, etc, plus a (hopeful) standing order mandate. Much as I appreciate the importance and value of ancient buildings as part of a rich national and spiritual heritage, while their leaders continue to go down this anti-Christian, anti-human and fundamentally corrupt ideological path, I’m afraid the answer is a resounding – No.
Charles Moore’s piece is a terrific read. What will the CofE do now? Probably ignore it and keep shelling out.
The people seeking to asset-strip the CoE will certainly ignore this and keep going, maybe a bit faster as the bonanza might not last for as long as they had hoped. The recommendation of this oversight group are sufficient to know what’s going on here. Welby cannot be so stupid that he doesn’t understand that making the church apologize for what very reason for its existence happens to be, namely, spread the Gospel to ensure that more people will reap eternal salvation, because this was detrimental to diverse African belief systems basically means abolishing it as Christian institution. The name of the game is hostile takeover followed by plundering whatever can be plundered and telling whichever lies might be useful to keep this process going for as long as possible.
There are no mistakes here. It’s conjectured that the victims, ie, the people whose church is being dismantled, are just a shrinking group of OAPs of the pre-boomer generation and the boomer vultures mean to take them out.