Reparations game relies on simplistic tale of whites exploiting blacks
There is a vital lesson for Australia from morally unfair calls for Britain to pay reparations for slavery.
Nigel Biggar
Anthony Albanese, it seems, would rather not be in the Caribbean this week. Reports have it that he’s only attending the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua because King Charles personally twisted his arm.
In principle, the Commonwealth could be an exciting forum for the building of relationships, exchange of ideas and cooperative endeavour on such things as climate change and education across the globe. It comprises 56 nations from six of the world’s seven continents, many of whom share common traditions of English law and parliamentary democracy. And while the majority of members were formerly parts of the British Empire, the most recent entrants were not. Rwanda, Mozambique, Togo and Gabon – colonised variously by the Germans, Belgians, Portuguese, and French – each found the benefits sufficiently attractive as to apply for membership.
Tragically, however, the constructive potential of the Commonwealth is at risk of being squandered in a rancorous dispute over whether and how to reckon with past wrongs. With the King’s arrival in Antigua on Friday, the clamour for British reparations for historic slavery has reached its highest pitch. This is the climax of an international campaign that’s been gathering momentum since March, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama. This described transatlantic slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
On Tuesday, the King told leaders at the official opening of CHOGM that “we cannot change the actions of those who came before us ... We can, however, learn from the past.
“The transatlantic trade in enslaved persons still casts a shadow over these islands and other members of our Commonwealth,” he said.
Before he arrived, the King had visited Guyana to celebrate 60 years of independence. There his ear was no doubt bent by the president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, who has called for “a full and unconditional apology” for the slave trade and commented last week that “you [the British] … benefited tremendously from the darkest days in human history”.
A cartoonishly simplistic tale
Yet the claim that Britain should pay reparations for slave-trading and slavery, mostly from 1670 to 1833, is historically distorted, morally unfair and politically opportunistic. It depends on a cartoonishly simplistic – even racist – tale of whites exploiting blacks.
Transatlantic slavery was, while gravely unjust, not extraordinary. Difficult though it may be to appreciate, up until the early 19th century slavery was a universal institution practised on every continent by people of every skin colour. Even escaped black slaves in Jamaica in the 1700s and freed slaves in the American South up to the 1860s kept slaves of their own. So, it’s really no surprise that some British people were involved. But how many? According to recent research trumpeted by The Guardian under the headline “Enslaving Nation”, there were at least 13,000 investors. Which sounds impressive, until you notice that these were spread over 360 years from 1510. During that period perhaps as many as 150 million individuals lived in Britain – of whom British investors in slavery amounted to 0.0086 per cent. Enslaving nation? Really?
What’s more, British complicity needs to be put into context. Africans and Arabs were involved in African slave-trading and slavery for far longer and on a far larger scale. One estimate calculates that at least 35 million enslaved Africans were exported over the Atlantic to the Americas, through the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and across the Indian Ocean. Some black slaves ended up in Japan. Since Arabs and Europeans seldom did the slave-raiding themselves, Africans themselves were responsible for the primary enslavement of almost all the exports. And among those trafficking African slaves were the ancestors of many Ghanaians, including president Mahama himself.
As Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, the Nigerian novelist and journalist, wrote in The Times last week, “black people’s demands for reparations cannot realistically proceed without a sincere acknowledgment of the role played by Africans in capturing and selling other Africans. This … is an appeal for historical honesty”. Nwaubani speaks with authority: her great-grandfather was an Igbo slave-trader.
Whereas African responsibility for original enslavement was almost 100 per cent, the British share of the subsequent trade was about 9 per cent. In 1804, it’s reckoned there were 45 million chattel-slaves in the world – most of them in Asia – of which those in the British West Indies amounted to 1.7 per cent. In about 1850, the Fulani people deployed up to 4 million slaves in vast plantations in what’s now northern Nigeria. So, at that one time, there were more slaves in that one part of Africa than all the 3.26 million the British took across the Atlantic in two and a half centuries.
So, the involvement of a minority of Britons in slavery was not at all extraordinary in scale. But was it extraordinary in brutality? Was it really part of “the gravest crime in human history”? Not obviously. Slaves in West Africa were sometimes buried alive with their deceased masters. One report in 1797 has it that up to 1500 people were sacrificed at royal funerals in Asante.
What’s more, the treatment of European slaves by Arabs in North Africa in the early modern period was very brutal indeed. Take Miguel de Cervantes, the famous author of Don Quixote, who was captured and enslaved in Algiers in 1575. According to a first-hand witness, Cervantes “was on the verge of losing it [his life] on four different occasions when he was nearly impaled or hooked or burned alive”.
Three centuries later, in the 1860s, the Sudan was reckoned to furnish the Arab slave trade, annually, with 35,000 pre-pubescent African boys, to produce about 3800 eunuchs. That is, just under 90 per cent died in the process of being forcibly castrated with a razor.
Was the slave trade profitable for Britain?
What about the president of Guyana’s claim? Is it true that Britain “benefited tremendously” from the slave-trade and slavery? If you believe the Marxist historian Eric Williams, the answer is yes. In Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1940, Williams claimed that profits from slave-trading made “an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development”. But in 2010, David Brion Davis, the distinguished historian of slavery and its abolition in the Western world, pronounced the last rites on Williams’ thesis, declaring it “wholly discredited by other scholars”. More recently, the most eminent living historian of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, has reckoned slavery’s contribution to Britain’s industrial economy as “small”, and its contribution to the economy of Liverpool – Britain’s biggest slaving port in 1750 – as “trivial”. The winner of the 2025 Nobel prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, agrees. Without profits from slavery, he has written, Britain’s industrial prosperity would have grown “at a marginally slower pace”.
The argument in favour of British reparations distorts the truth about the past partly by ripping British involvement in slavery out of its historical context, and partly by exaggerating its contribution to Britain’s industrial prosperity. It also refuses to take into account the fact that Britain was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish both slave-trading and slavery, permanently. It then led the world in suppressing them both from Brazil, across Africa, to Australasia. In 1817 Britain paid Spain £50m ($96m) in today’s values to sign a treaty abolishing the slave-trade within its territories. And between 1806 and 1867 it’s estimated that British taxpayers spent the equivalent of £90bn ($173bn) trying to stamp out the transatlantic trade alone, when the government’s resources were but a fraction of their present amount. The American political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape have judged Britain’s efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade to be “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”. So, to finger the British – of all peoples – for slavery-reparations is outrageously unfair.
It’s also politically opportunistic and, according to some who are familiar with domestic politics in the Caribbean, not entirely sincere. Observing the susceptibility of Britain’s “progressive” elite to feeling guilt over a colonial past about which they know little, they’ve decided to exploit it. Yet, according to the Guyana-born Trevor Phillips, the reparations campaign “is theatre with a purpose”. “Do not be fooled into thinking the region’s leaders much care about what the British think about slavery”, he writes. “They need their own people to see them having a fight with the old colonial master. And it really doesn’t matter whether they win or not. What counts in the sight of the region united in a common cause”. That cause is really the independence of small island states in the face of superpower pressure from the US and China.
Reparations is a game played largely by the political class. “It is clear to me that ordinary people in the Caribbean realise that the campaign to wrest funds from Britain is driven by their own elite,” says Lord Tony Sewell, who lives between his urban residence in London and a farm in Jamaica. “Young people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana are not on the streets burning the British flag and demanding reparations … They all ask hard questions of their current leadership, not of a past colonial master. There are real problems in the Caribbean about education, levels of poverty, climate change and the building of civic society. Most of these have nothing to do with slavery and its legacy …. People in Kingston know this and refuse to join a war against a straw man”.
So, rather than play the game and yield to the cynical exploitation of misplaced white guilt, the King and his British government should publicly lament the inhumanity of worldwide slavery and the fact that some Britons ever played a part in it. But then they should point to Britain’s unequalled and sustained commitment to suppressing slavery all over the world from 1807 onward and invite Commonwealth members to collaborate in addressing contemporary slavery in states such as Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Libya. That would save the Commonwealth from collapsing into a divisive, performative dispute over the remote past, and free it to attend constructively to the real environmental and educational challenges of the present.
Reckoning with ‘colonial sins’
There is a lesson here for Australia, whose own politics have long suffered from a divisive controversy about how to reckon with colonial sins. The “progressive” left likes to tell a simple story of guilty white oppression and innocent black victimhood. But the truth is that Europeans didn’t introduce violence and displacement into an Aboriginal Eden. Aboriginal peoples were perfectly accustomed to killing and invading each other before Britons ever set foot in Sydney Cove. And, without downplaying the settler atrocities of the 19th century, the fact is that Aboriginal Australians now have the good fortune of being equal citizens in one of the most prosperous and liberal countries on earth. It could have been otherwise. When the Maori reached the Chatham Islands in 1835, they slaughtered 10 per cent of the Moriori people and enslaved the rest. Sooner or later, they would have landed in Australia.
In his 2009 book, The Politics of Suffering, the anthropologist Peter Sutton argues that disputes about the past often get in the way of sorting out the present. After spending several decades among the Aboriginal Wik peoples of northern Queensland, he became convinced that their social dysfunction was caused less by historic colonialism than by contemporary factors. Yet he found that the “progressive” elite was in thrall to an ideological “politics of compassion” that resisted the implications of expert or statistical evidence and obstructed the crafting of realistic remedies: “Simplistic causal accounts continue to grow like healthy weeds …. [For example,] [t]he kids don’t go to school because the teachers are racists”. “What enables the purveyors of such pap, and those who swallow it,”, he asked, “to so suspend their normal critical faculties?”. The answer he gives to his own question about the springs of such “uncaring kindness” is career-interests: “Victimhood becomes, for many, the family business, a business of status as well as of economics”.
Perhaps it’s time to stop playing the historic reparations game. Perhaps, it’s time to get serious about diagnosing present problems accurately, so as to address them effectively.
Nigel Biggar is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025) and, with historian Robert Tombs, Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story about Britain (Swift, 2026).
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