We start this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807, the enslaved were 'emancipated' in 1833. (R)

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Most of those executed for their beliefs under Philip and Mary 1555-58 came from places with a long history of religious dissidence. It matches European evidence that many – perhaps most – of those burned at the stake were not Protestants, but ‘anabaptists’ or people with similar beliefs – usually poor - whom both Protestants and Catholics were persecuting. The government of Edward VI had already begun before Mary came to the throne. But why so many in England? We discover literature appearing from the late 1540s that openly encouraged dissenters to die for their beliefs. And we explore the possibility that so many died because the English uniquely insisted on public hearings, in which there was no room for quiet, face-saving compromises. (R)

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Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any potential causes of unrest – including any remaining shreds of die-hard Protestantism - and promptly. We also discover, that the majority of those who were burned were not Protestants at all, but followers of much older, rural religions. (R)

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Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No, again. Cranmer was tried by the pope and Mary had no power to spare him. As for Mary’s Privy Council, they turn out to have been more interested in pirates than heretics. Much more important was Bartolomé Carranza, a Spanish friar, King Philip’s trusted eyes and ears at the English Court, but he was later accused of heresy by the pope for being too lenient. Finally the campaign in England was distinctively English, not Spanish. That points the finger for responsibility at Philip’s own select council of veteran English courtiers. But almost all of them had for years been Protestants. What was going on? (R)

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England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism. (R)

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Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians, mainly using Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ written by an Elizabethan Protestant. We look at why Foxe exclusively blames Mary and why he’s wrong. (R)

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A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R)

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We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon.

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Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile.

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Neoliberalism was welcomed, finally, as a way to tackle what seemed to be a breakdown in American society in the late 1960s. Big business and FBI under J Edgar Hoover felt threatened by Keynsian consensus on welfare and the eradication of poverty. They had plenty to gain by provoking the extremism, and clearing the way for Milton Friedman. 

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