Colonisation

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

The Vikings never really went away

For many people, the mental picture of a Viking is of a blond giant in a horned helmet leaping out of a sharp-prowed longboat to pillage and slaughter the terrified inhabitants of the nearest village or monastery. The horned helmet is a myth, but the Vikings were, in general, red-haired or blond and taller than the Anglo-Saxons (Scandinavians are still, on average, an inch or so taller than Britons) and for almost 100 years raiding the English coast was what they did. As ‘heathens’, the Vikingsconsidered neither monasteries nor churches sacred Thanks to their unrivalled expertise in boat-building, they were unmatched as pirates – looting, taking prisoners for slavery or

Sunday

Nigel Biggar

Britain’s slave trade and the problem with ‘decolonisation’

Colonialism and slavery. There is, of course, a connection between them. Yet the reason for our present interest in the topic assumes something stronger – not merely a connection, but an equation. That is why we are told we have to ‘decolonise’ ourselves. Because until we do, the vicious racism that slavery incarnated will continue to be our own. The assumption, however, is mistaken. It is true that the British were heavily involved in trading slaves across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of North America, mostly between 1660 and 1807. Britain transported around 3 million Africans in conditions that were infamously dreadful, with human