The journal’s investigation found that “the historical record does not provide again any immediate proof that Cort knew about what was going on at Reeder’s foundry”, where Dr Bulstrode said Cort’s idea began. The co-editors of the journal, who have a history of activism in the US, accused the Oxbridge professors critiquing Dr Bulstrode’s alleged lack of evidence of “white domination” in an editorial, prompting them to respond that the journal was “pillaging history for the use of present-day activism”. The row over Dr Bulstrode’s slavery comments comes after History and Technology, a prestigious Taylor & Francis journal, defended her Cort paper but issued a rare correction for one of her sources. a prejudice against the notion that white Britons were capable of genuinely humanitarian motivation and that the 50-year campaign to abolish slavery doesn’t deserve admiration.” ‘Pillaging history’ “There does seem to be on Dr Bulstrode’s part a kind of racist prejudice against white people just because they’re white. “So to pretend that Britain didn’t abolish slavery is just historically stupid and, set in context, whilst Africans had been raiding and capturing and trading other Africans to the Romans and then the Arabs and Europeans for over a millennium, the British were amongst the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish it. Every member of the British parliament who voted to abolish slavery were white Britons. He added: “But the movement for the abolition of slavery in Britain preceded the revolt in Saint-Domingue, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787, before the revolt, and most who signed popular petitions to parliament were, as it happens, white Britons. He told The Telegraph that “black agency had a role” such as in the slavery revolts in the 1790s and the campaign by the freed slave Olaudah Equiano in Britain. 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”. It has raised questions about whether her research – which claimed that 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. “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.” She told the Context of White Supremacy podcast earlier this year, while laughing: “In the UK 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. 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. An under-fire lecturer who was accused of besmirching a hero of the Industrial Revolution has mocked the idea that Britain abolished slavery.ĭr Jenny Bulstrode of University College London (UCL) 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.
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