James Stout

you know, the people who won are still involved in the slaving industry.

No one has attained any additional rights.

No one's ruled that enslaved people are human beings.

They're still the same as cargo, right?

How is this?

You could see someone, especially like a political radical at the time being like, this is the worst kind of incrementalism.

You've achieved nothing, right?

You can see how someone might think that.

That is not the case.

And in fact, part of why I think the story's important

is it illustrates how critical small and seemingly pyrrhic victories can be in pursuit of sweeping social change.

First off, while there's no second trial, the fact that a retrial was granted means that slave merchants had been given a warning, you can't just kill people and claim their insurance money on them, right?

And then as Siddharth Kara writes in the Zorg, even if just for a moment, the Africans who lay at the bottom of the ocean thousands away were seen as people, not property.

And Kara's arguing that this causes kind of a perceptual shift in a lot of people who can't help, as they're hearing how horrible what this is, sympathize with these people who are still legally just property, and that that's an important shift.

But the larger victory in the case was that it had started the process of gathering together and galvanizing great legal minds, writers, and agitators towards pursuing an end to the slave trade in an organized fashion.

And that's what we're going to talk about in Part 3.

But I should conclude today by saying a little about our main villains for these episodes, William Gregson and Robert Stubbs.

During the first case, Stubbs had high hopes of getting a job with the syndicate and perhaps even support to regain his lost gold by helping Gregson make good on the slaves that they'd killed.

When this failed, he gets cut loose.

Now Stubbs never makes it back to Africa.