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| Sir Hans Sloane Square, Killyleagh, county Down, Northern Ireland. |
for his Philanthropy
with statues
and squares named after him
in London and (more recently) in a little
Loyalist-British village in the county Down
where he was born an instrument
of local colonial oppression,
Sir Hans Sloane
used some of his large fortune
made from slave-breeding
and hideous slave-labour
without compassion or discretion
in sugar-virulent Jamaica
to found the British Museum -
itself a soul-numbing monument
to empire and possession.
2 comments:
Fascinating bit of history--how infamy slides into oblivion. The British Caribbean colonies could not ultimately sustain slavery because the slaves would not/could not reproduce, like most slave economies, with the exception of the US South and its colonial century. Historians have puzzled over this anomaly. Nice information about the British Museum, previously unknown to me. Even as a young man of 22, I was appalled at the British looting of Greece and Mesopotamia.
HOWEVER - had the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish (collectively if misleadingly termed 'British') not'looted' (i.e. spirited away) ancient sites, the objects and architectural masterpieces would probably have disappeared. The Germans were similarly appreciative of Hellenic ruins. When Elgin took his marbles, they were considered worthless not only by the Ottomans but also by the Greeks, who had (ironically) to be taught nationalism by the English, notably Lord Byron.
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