The Daleks were always an allegory about racism and Nazism, probably never more so than in "Genesis of the Daleks." I think "The Sensorites" was something of an allegory on racism and colonialism, since the benevolent Sensorites were being murdered by humans who saw them as monsters.
Well, slavery has been a thing throughout most of history, but it wasn't usually linked to beliefs in racial superiority until after Shakespeare's day. According to what I learned in school, Europeans at that time saw Africans as exotic, but not inferior. The really virulent modern kind of racism was basically invented by rich plantation owners in the Americas. The labor conditions necessary to make cotton plantations profitable were brutal and murderous even by the conventional standards of slavery (since traditionally slaves were still considered human and were often able to earn their freedom and be treated as equal members of society), so the plantation owners promulgated the idea that Africans were subhuman so that they could justify working them to death like animals.
Here's an article I found:
http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/2016/11/how-did-shakespeare-think-about-the-issue-of-race/
That's a good point about England not being a global power yet. The idea that whites were superior to all other races couldn't really emerge until Europe had become a dominant world power, allowing its people to think that they'd come out on top because of intrinsic superiority.
England was not the beginning of that specific slave trade, it was a more...continental affair at first.
I could be mistaken, but in terms of Shakespeare Code etc, Slavery was actually pretty much always illegal in Britain itself. The bits and pieces of the Empire, usually through ‘private’ companies rather than direct governmental or royal input, that had to do with the Slave Trade would always launder their money as it were....buy some slaves off the Tribes in Africa that did the capturing (or steal them etc from the European Catholic Empire dealers...though that’s a complex bit of history in itself...) take them to the American colonies (including the Caribbean, though again, complex history there as to who was in charge of any given chunk at which time) sell them off, buy something nice and handy like cotton or spices etc to sell back in the home markets. Eventually, the Crown and Government declare it illegal even off the British mainland,and promptly use naval power to shut the whole thing down sort of from the inside. They called it the Triangle when we were taught it schools. It’s a very very complex chain of events, and really ties into all sorts of bits of mid twentieth century history.
America of course didn’t fully get slavery off its books till the end of the twentieth century or early twenty first. I forget which, there was a documentary covering its last days...Michael Moore possibly.
The idea of ‘racial superiority’ only kicks in after Britain declared the trade illegal, because it comes out of all that nasty pseudo science floating around the late nineteenth and early twentieth century...Marie stopes and the eugenicists, Darwinists even, and of course the Nazi’s. Prior to that, things are very different, especially with global travel not exactly being easy and for Britain things like the existing class system and feudal hangovers (as well as existing slavery laws) meant that ‘slavery’ as we tend to think of it had its own cousins here (servant is usually a nice gloss over a very similar sort of behaviour towards fellow humans) not to mention things like ‘transportation’ etc. There were of course white slaves mixed in to the colonies because of things like this. Nasty period of history, a real ‘darkest before the dawn’ sort of moment, when it was finally done away with.
Most of this is from memory of what we were taught in the nineties history and geography syllabus, so I am a bit rusty. It’s not a nice easy ‘goodies and baddies’ narrative sadly. Anne Rice did an interesting job writing about some of the French and American history in her straight historical novels set in New Orleans, but I can’t speak as to their historical accuracy either.
These days, there is still very much a fight against modern slavery...either the off the books kind with horrific stuff to do with people smuggling or the more obvious kinds you see in bits of North Africa and the Gulf States. It’s deeply unpleasant, and the more governments can get behind actually sorting the abhorrent practice out once and for all the better.
Edit: mid nineteenth century history. That’s when the beginning of the end was for the Slave Trade as such.
It strongly predates the British Empire as to its beginnings, and Europe was already a dominant world power...for a given definition...for thousands of years before that. The Greek and Roman Empires sort of segueing with each other and the Egyptian Empire...then what we used to call the Dark Ages, where the Middle Eastern empires brush up against (and very far into) European Nations, before we get to The Age Of Empires, with basically every nation formerly conquered (and enslaved, naturally) by the Antiquity Empires having a go at Empire Bulding. Slavery doesn’t feature as such until the Spanish, Portuguese etc start making inroads in trade etc with Africa. Then you get to the triangle period. That’s it for my knowledge as far as the European and Classical sides of it go. Most else is a bit sketchy and more off topic. Who doesn’t really cover it much, no. Ghost Light and Remembrance do very decent stuff around some the underlying ideas of the racial purity nastiness, but it’s not really directly correlated.
Segregation and it’s brand of evil is more about perverted science and ideology rather than the direct result of the slave trade, except in the obvious manner as to how America ended up with an ethnically diverse population in the first place.
