|
Recently, the Brattle Group, a respected global financial consultancy, produced a landmark report that attempted to quantify the amount of reparations that should be payable for the violations of international law arising from and caused by transatlantic chattel slavery. That refers to the trade in human beings, the enforced labour and the breeding of generations of people born into captivity. As you’d expect, it was an enormous job, involving researching the enslavement of 19 million people over four centuries, involving what the report referred to as “802 million years of life to be compensated”.
The report estimated that Britain’s share in that compensation would amount to £18.5 trillion. My mind boggling at this, I looked up some figures and worked out this is just less than twice what the UK – its land, infrastructure and everything in it was worth in 2022 as estimated by the Office for National Statistics. But when you consider that the wealth this created built much of the UK’s prosperity and enriched many people beyond belief, it puts things into some context at least. Paul Lashmar has spent three years researching a book about one family whose 17th-century ancestors benefited considerably from that wealth.
Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are two groups it is hard not to have an opinion about. For many, they are a pain in the neck, disrupting traffic, transport systems, and sports events. But others (and I’m beginning to be inclined this way) regard them as the 21st-century equivalent of the suffragettes. People who are prepared to be pains in the neck because somebody has to. Like the suffragettes before them, the issue is just too important not to do something about it. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people – including political leaders of all stripes – from taking the populist way out and condemning what they are doing, rather than why they are doing it.
One of the most powerful books I own is essentially a book of cartoons. Of course, that does it a vast disservice: Maus is a gripping and at times disturbing and upsetting graphic novel which tells the story of the Holocaust representing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The novel tells the story of the author Art Spiegelman’s father and his experiences as a Polish Jew during that terrible period. It’s the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize – but it’s just one brilliant moment in the best part of a century of spellbinding stories told via comic books by Jewish artists and writers.
This week we also marvelled at the cardboard drones, assembled from flatpacks, which were used by Ukraine to attack a Russian airfield. We considered whether Rishi Sunak can fairly be seen as a “lame duck” prime minister. And, as part
of our continuing series Women’s Health Matters, we learned that many women still feel they aren’t being listened to when they give birth - and suggested how that could be changed.
From our friends and colleagues in the global network, we have this review of a “masterful” new biography of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, a terrific piece looking at the body clock and how it reacts to our environment. And, from the US,
why Donald Trump’s mugshot will go down in history as an important cultural artefact.
|
