War History [and other related things]

Mark Grimsley ["War Historian"] over at Ohio State is blogging up a storm over the Churchill affair. Lots of good stuff here.

Oh, and for you military buffs out there, today's Times has a nice review of the latest on Waterloo. [Waterloo: Napoleon's Lost Gamble, by Andrew Roberts (Harper Collins)]. Check it out here.

The Times also reviews a new book on Caribbean slavery: Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains (Macmillan). So far as I can tell from the review there is nothing new here for professional historians, but it should be an eye-opener for a general public educated in American schools.

Hochschild reminds us that only about one in twenty of those persons transported into slavery via the "middle passage" went to the colonies that became the United States (the Caribbean, not the American South, was the real "powerhouse" of eighteenth century slavery) and that slavery outside the American South could be far more brutal than within it. Over time, the 400,000 slaves imported into the South grew to a population of more than 4 million; while at the same time in the Caribbean an imported population of 2 million shrunk to a quarter that number.

If Britain was in the forefront of the slavery business, it was also the first nation to take definite steps to end that business. Abolitionism was, Hochschild argues, the "First International Human Rights Movement" and makes the point, often neglected in popular accounts, that slavery did not originate in the west, but "abolition and the idea of humanitarian intervention" did. Nor, the article points out,

...can the emancipatory impulse so easily be separated from the fiscal-military and hegemonic tradition that has made possible the rise of the great democracies. It was the Royal Navy that more or less destroyed the international slave trade in the early 19th century, and it was not particular about maritime rights in the process. It required the whole might of the Union Army, and 600,000 deaths, for the American abolitionists to end slavery in the South; their mandate would not have survived scrutiny by the international lawyers of the UN.

There are many points to quibble here, but the main one is worthy of consideration. Great good has at times been achieved by extralegal means, and might not have been achievable in any other way. It's something to think about especially in these days.