Hi Folks,

A lot of wisdom in this thread – I wish more people could read it. The level of historical ignorance displayed by many people today - including not a few politicians - is very depressing.   I say this not just as a history teacher, but as a concerned citizen. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana.)

On the subject of slavery and guilt – many people don't realise that for centuries this was very much a two-way street. For example, in the largest church in Reykjavik, you can see a plaque commemorating 25 Icelanders who were kidnapped by Moorish pirates, and eventually ransomed by the King of Denmark.   

It's a long row from Morocco to Iceland, and the Corsairs rarely got that far. But throughout the middle ages, and well into the 1600s, they regularly raided English coastal villages and carried off anyone they could catch to sell in the slave markets of North Africa. Prisoners who had rich or influential relatives usually got ransomed – the rest stayed. Some historians estimate that, over a period of several centuries, almost half a million English people were enslaved in this way. (Though I've not read than any of them picked cotton.)

People with legitimate grievances in the here and now have every right to seek redress, but in my opinion they do themselves no favours by invoking the sufferings of their remote forbears in attempts to monopolise the moral high ground. All of us, if we look back far enough, have ancestors whose behaviour we would now see as regrettable, as well as ancestors who suffered injustices at the hands of others.

Wassail!