Taking on Daniel Hannan is so easy it seems like sadism. But just because a target is easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hit it. The slave trade was opposed at the time. Not just by abolitionists but – and this may shock Hannan to learn – by the enslaved themselves

As I say in the Observer today, the conservative line that “you can’t judge the past by the standard of the present” is historically illiterate. Rhodes& #39;s private army had to fight two wars in the 1890s to subjugate what is now Zimbabwe https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/13/blacking-up-was-of-a-piece-with-comedy-that-dealt-in-contempt?CMP=share_btn_tw">https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...

An astonished Mark Twain said Rhodes “raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it”.

I am not saying that past is the mirror image of the present, simply that, from the Enlightenment onwards, what we see as scandalous now was contested then, and only a self-satisfied, under-educated panderer to his readers’ prejudices would think otherwise.