Even Steam Engines are "racist" it seems

You rightly identify that difficult ethical issues can arise over the restitution of stolen property, particularly if taken a long time in the past. Such issues may be even more difficult when it is land and territory that has been taken, sometimes by people who have themselves been forced out of somewhere else.

This has of course been going on throughout human history, including the Anglo-Saxon displacement of Celts and no doubt similar events earlier in British history. The World witnessed multiple occurrences of very large-scale "ethnic cleansing" during the 20th Century. In the Colonial environment, it was possibly Native Americans who suffered the worst at the hands of Colonists, due to massacres, enslavement, European diseases, etc. Under President Jackson in 1830, the US Congress passed the "Indian Removal Act" to facilitate ethnic cleansing in parts of the country. How do you make restitution for that? It is hardly practical to give back huge areas of territory.

 

I think this conversation started around the subject of the possible return of individual items to the modern representatives of their original culture, extending it to cover colonial land grabs is a whole new ball-game ! Obviously it raises all sorts of problems and we only have to see the complications following from the Jewish claim to the geographic region of Palestine to realise just how complex it can get. However it is interesting to note that both the New Zealand and Australian governments are attempting, with some success, to address some of the issues by negotiating with tribal representatives to find agreeable solutions. These may involve the return of some land, exchange for other assets, recognition of traditional rights or outright payment. Canada, also, is starting to work on this issue. Obviously not an easy matter to address but worth attempting if it can help reduce the understandable resentment of the colonised population.

 

Then you would make financial restitution. You would do something about the residential schools, murdered women and so on, and the continuing legacies of structural racism that colonial rule embedded, in short you would stop treating the First Nations as second class citizens.

I can think of examples in the US and Canada where territory has been returned to the first nations, albeit small pieces of land.

I find the 'too difficult' argument a bit too close to an excuse for doing nothing. There is no perfect solution for resolving injustice (for example you can not give a wrongly convicted prisoner back the years of their life they have lost). Restorative justice and openness about what has happened is critical, and where possible (if it is recent enough) perpetrators punished. If nothing else, the perpetrators should not be hagiographically venerated.

The lack of progress is more down to lack of willingness because people and institutions don't like to confront the sins of the past.

 

Such issues are to be found close to home of course. Many very rich British families owe their wealth of today to such as the Enclosure Acts, or, further back, the dissolution of the monasteries, or the Norman conquest. The common feature running throughout our history, whether at home or abroad, is that those with power and wealth took from those without.

 

I agree. Which is why, however challenging it is to achieve, some finality is required to allow certainty in today’s world.


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This actually takes us back to the SVR, the navvies, poaching and the severe punishments being given out such as hard labour for some rabbits. There is a very good book by E.P.Thompson 'Whigs and hunters: the origins of the Black Act' which looks at the process of enclosure and the use the law and arbitrary power against the local population in the C18 culminating in the Black Act that made the shooting of red and fallow deer, and the exercise of many long-standing common and customary rights in and around the forest, punishable by death, without the benefit of clergy. The legacies of that use of power by the elite (look at the cases it is always poaching on gentry land) against those at the bottom was in action during the building of the SVR.

 

The mind boggles… they haven't even got opposable thumbs…

Simon

 

Wasn't the "Black Act" repealed by Peel's ministry in 1823, somewhat before the railway era, and well before the building of the SVR?

 

But if one of them was called Johnson the idea would be right.

 

It was, but it is more the way in which acts such as that embedded and re-enforced power structures, so even after the act had been repealed the institutional culture of disproportionate punishments for poaching etc remained. We can observe this in action when we see the treatment that navvies received from state institutions.

The wider point is that just because something ceases to exist on paper does not mean that it ceases to exist in practice, which takes us all the way back to the points about the structurally embedded consequences of empire, colonialism, racism etc.

 

(See also for contemporary reference - stop and search disproportionately used by race abolished, but the powers and usage perpetuated in the Public Order Act etc)

 

Personally, I rather think these clowns are mentally ill.

 

It sounds as though everyone wins…

Simon

 

I infer you mean ‘People with whom I disagree must hold their views due to mental illness’?

To me that would be both wrong and nasty

Patrick


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No worries fella. I infer absolutely nothing. What I state, loud and clear is if people wish to connect an inanimate object such as a steam locomotive with some form of racism, xenophobia or whatever then I am happy to maintain that they are probably suffering from some kind of mental illness. If that also includes yourself Patrick, then please feel free to seek some kind of assistance. There's plenty to be had - perhaps the NRM could assist you?

 

If you skim read the thread you should recognise that’s not what the research project is about, and your misapprehensions are baseless

Patrick


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"man on internet gets angry for something he only imagines is happening and no longer wants to visit the NRM because it could be true"

Please tell me that some postings on NP are from parody accounts? As a disclaimer, I don't refer to anyone who disagrees with me or things I may say that may be completely made-up, as being mentally ill!

 

TBF I imagine the NRM will be absolutely gutted at the loss they make on his admission ticket.....

Its great isn't it, in 24 hours we have a discussion about the extreme sexism and misogyny in the heritage movement and then rapidly move onto flippant remarks about mental health, this forum must do wonders for the attraction of volunteers!

 

Man gets angry because of ridiculous virtue signalling and 'cancel culture', in effect an attempt to gloss over the past/rewrite history to something more palatable for the easily offended - of which there seems to be an abundance of.

As for the NRM, they lost the plot years ago. That place appears to be turning into some kind of theme park but ran by social workers. Not for me thanks. Let them investigate racist troublesome trucks etc - doubt they're too busy with serious historians these days.

Cheers.

 

Hi Alan,

We’ve not met before, but may I assure you that the following isn’t personal to you: but you could stand to read it.

My mothers heritage is French-Caribbean, specifically through the island of Grenada, and slave trade stock from Nigeria, of which my late grandmother was a direct product of slavery and a British colonial plantation on the island.

I am here because of the slave trade and its wide reaching effects on global society.

Doing a research project into studying what links railways have into slavery interests me greatly because potentially myself, and others like me, may have links to said history.

Trying to silence or nullify attempts to do research on history is effectively telling people who may have been affected by it that they don’t matter in the grand scheme of the world.

Put simply, there’s nothing wrong with doing historical research into any given topic. There will undoubtedly be difficult questions to answer and some unhappy, unpalatable truths for many. But it is in that, that we grow in our understanding of history and, crucially, make sure we don’t make those mistakes again.

I am sorry you personally feel attacked by the idea of someone out there doing research. I personally felt thrilled and felt for the first time in a long time that someone might be doing historical research that might explain a lot of where people like myself come from. Identity being a powerful thing, it’s reasonable for people to want to know how they got here.