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'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

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.