Mick Hartley

Historian Robert Tombs in the Telegraph:

Britain’s Prime Minister rose to address a packed House on the subject of Atlantic slavery. He was not a man to put his emotions on display, but this was a subject on which he felt deeply. The trade, he said, was “the curse of mankind … the greatest practical evil that ever has afflicted the human race … the most extensive calamity recorded in the history of the world”. He recognised Britain’s share in this “curse”, and declared that the country should “atone” for this “long and cruel injustice”.

Those campaigners who complain that Britain has never officially apologised or recognised its part in the slave trade have probably never read this speech by William Pitt more than two centuries ago. Yet much of their own rhetoric echoes his. The phrase “crime against humanity” had not been coined, but that is what Pitt was talking about.

The King has acknowledged “the great suffering of the past”, but he will almost certainly not go as far as William Pitt. The issue has ceased to be about moral responsibility, expressions of regret or indeed about action to stop slavery today – when, according to the Global Slavery Index there are more people enslaved than ever in history. It now centres on attempts by campaigners to extract a certain form of words to provide a legal pretext for demanding hard cash….

The problem of reparations is less one of theory than of practice. Who exactly should receive them, and who exactly should pay them? Some conscience-stricken descendants of slave-owning families have made substantial donations to Caribbean charities. But this is not what is being demanded. Governments of several states are demanding trillions of pounds unconditionally from the British taxpayer for themselves, however undemocratic, incompetent and corrupt they may be.

Leading the international campaign – which is, in effect, being directed only against Britain – is Ghana. This in itself shows the cynicism of the whole operation. Ghana was one of the biggest slave-trading countries, and many of its people took part in the traffic. It is now demanding, in fact, to be compensated for its own crimes against humanity. It was West African countries that enslaved and sold people, and made big profits. This was the original act of violence, which made human beings into property.

As for those who exploited the people thus enslaved, the Muslim world was probably the biggest and arguably the cruellest: it made women into sex slaves and castrated men to be servants (many young boys died in agony from the effects). In the Atlantic world the biggest buyers were Brazil, France (in its colony of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti) and the United States. If reparations are due, all these should pay them.

William Pitt believed that Britain had to “atone … for this long and cruel injustice”. I believe it did, to the best of its ability. One benefit of this otherwise depressing controversy is that we are getting to know our own history better. For reasons not fully understood, the British of Pitt’s generation suddenly turned en masse against the slave trade and slavery. No other people in the world did so. Even former slaves accepted slavery – at least, they were willing to own slaves themselves.

But Britain banned the slave trade – not just in words, like the Americans, but in deeds. It forced other states to agree in principle (very reluctantly) to phase out the trade. The Royal Navy made this mean something. Britain then emancipated all slaves in its empire, and the empire gradually stamped it out. (Reparations campaigners condemn both slavery and empire – they can’t have it both ways!)

British taxpayers, we are endlessly told, only paid compensation to slave owners, not to slaves. But they also paid compensation to other European and African slave-traders. Bribery was the quickest way to end the trade. When that did not work – for slave trading and slavery remained hugely profitable – British governments occasionally used force. In Lagos, for example, and in Rio de Janeiro. The diplomatic campaign against slavery continued for decades, well into the 20th century, and Britain today has some of the toughest laws against modern slavery.

Does this unique historic effort “atone”? Reparations campaigners will of course say no: they want money now. But when the King expresses our national regret, I hope he might also find a moment to recall publicly those who fought tirelessly to end “the curse of mankind”.

Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, by Adam Hochschild, is a good history of the abolitionist movement – the “first sustained mass campaign anywhere on behalf of someone else’s rights”.