This attack on historical artifacts in the British Library is being portrayed as a mere “relabelling” of history, but it is obvious that this is little more than a precursor to eliminating it entirely.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are to be relabelled in the British Library to explain how it once came to be owned by a slave-trading family.
The relabelling of the collection is part of the institution’s ‘anti-racism action plan’ which was put in place after the Black Lives Matter protests last year, internal documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph reveal.
It will see an overhaul of all 210 items in the library’s public-facing Treasures Collection which includes invaluable literary artefacts such as Shakespeare’s First Folio, some of which have links to the slave trade in their history.
Labels will explain how the item came to be in the country and if it has at any point changed hands via dubious means, i.e. being ‘taken, captured, seized or looted’.
For the case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400 – before the Portuguese started the Atlantic slave trade – it will be explained how the book came to be owned by the Harley family of slave-traders around 300 years later.
The family became wealthy through the exploits of Robert Harley (1661 – 1724) who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, established the South Sea Company in 1711 and was connected to plantations in Barbados, Antigua and Surinam.
The South Sea Company was responsible for the transportation of around 64,000 enslaved Africans between 1715 and 1731 to Spanish plantations in Central and Southern America.
First they label your history bad. Then they revise it. After that, they eliminate it. Then they eliminate everyone with glasses.
They always seek Zero History.