The distortion of historical facts about slavery.. to extort and profit!

'Reparations for slavery are just a cynical shakedown'

The Times, April 30, 2022

Article by Douglas Murray

Mr. Murray argues that every civilisation in history has engaged in this wicked trade and Britain should feel proud of the role it played in stamping it out.

This week it was the turn of the Wessexes, poor things. Edward and Sophie, the Earl and Countess of Wessex, arrived in St Lucia to a reception that was initially warm. But very soon they were met by protesters. The signs included one saying: “We want reparations now. The Queen of England needs to apologize for slavery.” Another said “Queen say sorry” while drums and chanting went on. There was a similar scene in St Vincent and the Grenadines, where protesters held signs saying “compensation now”and “Britain your debt is outstanding”. 

The Wessexes are just the latest royals to step into this particular mess. Last month it was the Cambridges. During their tour of the Caribbean Prince William and his wife, Kate, faced calls for the monarchy itself to pay reparations for the slave trade. So great was the pressure felt to be that William concluded the tour by giving a speech at a dinner in Jamaica where he expressed his “profound sorrow” for the slave trade, saying it “should never have happened” and that it “forever stains our history”.

Nothing could be more absurd. It is simply a shame that the royal family should have become enmeshed in one of the great shakedown attempts of our time. It is hardly surprising that officials and others in the Caribbean, as in parts of Africa, find the issue of reparations such a perennial interest. They know it to be one of the most cost-free exercises they can indulge in. In the best-case scenario their guests might actually pay up. The worst-case scenario is they just put every visitor from any western country on the back foot and pretend that any continuing problems in the country are not to do with misgovernance or corruption but to a trade that ceased more than 200 years ago.

They rely, of course, on western ignorance, which is indeed magnificent. In America as in Britain and the rest of the West, there was a time when the history of empire and slavery may have been taught only in one light. But those days are generations past. Today, slavery is taught as though the transatlantic slave trade was the only slave trade that existed. The far larger trading of Africans east to the Arabs during the same period is utterly unknown. Where are their descendants? They didn’t have any. Because the Arabs who transported perhaps as many as 18 million Africans to their lands castrated all the males to ensure there were no more black Africans. I would be surprised if one in a million schoolchildren knows anything about this. For there is very little scholarship on the subject outside the French-speaking world.

Map of both intercontinental and transatlantic slave trade in Africa

Also ignored is the trade in white Europeans which happened in the same period. In that process the Barbary pirates and others stole Europeans from the coastal towns of England and European countries and sold them into slavery. More than a million Europeans were stolen in this way. Like everything else that benefits the anti-western narrative of our day, slavery is presented as though it was a vice indulged in only by white westerners. Whereas it was of course a wickedness engaged in by every civilization in history. And, as Voltaire said, perhaps the only thing worse than what the Europeans did in buying Africans and sending them across the oceans was what the Africans did to their fellow Africans in stealing them and selling them, not just to the Europeans, Americans and Arabs but to other Africans.

The few memoirs of slaves that have come down to us, such as those of the remarkable Olaudah Equiano, bear testament to this. The people who did the people-stealing were African. None of this is whataboutery. Neither does it diminish the horror of the European and transatlantic slave trade. But it is context which is necessary, given that the re-eruption of a debate about reparations is so completely context-free. Those who call for apologies seem to think that no apologies have been forthcoming before. Never mind demanding action from the Cambridges or Wessexes, this country’s laws putting an end to the slave trade were signed by King George III.

Those who pretend that the Crown has never apologized for the slave trade or are overdue for an apology must simply be ignorant or mendacious. They cannot know, for instance, that Prince Albert spoke at a meeting in London dedicated to the extinction of the slave trade in 1840. During his remarks, the consort to Queen Victoria not only apologized for the slave trade but described it as having been “the blackest stain upon civilized Europe”. Why was Albert still speaking about the slave trade in 1840? Because although Britain had by then long abolished slavery, other countries in the world had not. What made Britain remarkable was not just that we were the first to stop taking part in the wicked trade ourselves, but that having stopped doing so we then went on to do everything we could to end it in the rest of the world as well.

After abolishing the trade in 1807, this country chose to send the Royal Navy around the world, establishing the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, and grew the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade. The cost to Britain of this highly unusual decision was significant. Scholars who have done the maths have produced some sobering conclusions. Abolition is estimated to have cost just under 2 per cent of national income. That was the case each year for 60 years (from 1808 to 1867). Factoring in the principal costs and the secondary costs, such as the higher prices of goods the British had to pay throughout this period, Britain’s abolition and suppression of the Atlantic slave trade may actually have equalled any financial benefits accrued to the nation during the period of the trade.

The West Africa Squadron, also known as the Preventative Squadron, was a squadron of the British Royal Navy whose goal was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa from 1808-1867

Britain’s actions have rightly been described by historians as “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history”. The costs were not only financial. In the years that the West Africa Squadron patrolled the seas, they captured as many as 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. This led to significant loss of British lives. During the decades after 1808, more than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action fighting ships from countries such as Brazil, whose trade in slaves continued until the 1880s. Do these lives not count for anything? Does the heroism of these seamen, chasing ships across the oceans, boarding vessels and fighting for the lives of slaves stowed away in the hold, count for nothing? Apparently so.

Activists are so desperate to pretend the Royal Navy did no such thing that they have even attempted to smear Britain’s greatest naval hero, Admiral Lord Nelson, by claiming he was a supporter of the trade. In 2020 activists called for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square to be removed. Searching for evidence after they had already reached their conclusion, they cited the existence of a “letter” showing Nelson’s ardent support for the trade. What they did not realise (it was proved to much less fanfare shortly afterwards by Nelson scholars) was that these activists had cited a letter which was a forgery. Specifically, it was a forgery created by the anti-abolitionist movement when the slavery debate in England was still current to posthumously pretend he would have been on their side. So much for truth.

The reparations debate involving Britain is in some ways just a spin-off of a much more brutal debate going on in America, on steroids and with megaphones. In the US almost everything in the country’s history has been put up for grabs and then spun through the same remorselessly hostile spin-cycle of racism, slavery and original sin.

Three years ago The New York Times, once the country’s paper of record, began a project which set out with the purpose of resetting the founding date of America. The date they chose was 1619, the first year slaves were brought into America. Of course the republic itself wasn’t even founded yet, but the NYT’s project sets out to make slavery the original, founding sin of America. A sin that is seen in America as unique, unprecedented and ineradicable.

Of course, nobody would deny that the legacy of slavery in America has been long. But it is hardly as though the country has failed to address the issue. The US fought a long and bloody civil war over it two centuries ago that almost tore the country apart. But today, just as the Founding Fathers are condemned, and are currently being removed from their plinths by activists and authorities alike, so both sides of the civil war are treated in the same manner. It is understandable that people might not lament the removal of remaining statues to commanders of the southern forces. But in recent years the heroes of the north have come under equal attack. Even Abraham Lincoln, the man who saved the Union and freed the slaves, is now attacked as though he himself were a slaver. His statues have been torn down by activists and also pre-emptively removed by local governments. All of this has coincided with renewed calls for reparations.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates kicked off the latest round of this debate in 2014 with a piece in The Atlantic magazine making “the case for reparations”. In it, Coates argued that African-Americans might look for a precedent to the money paid to Israel by postwar Germany. This argument caught on in record time. By the 2020 Democratic primaries, all candidates for the presidency professed some support for the idea of reparations, and several were ardent advocates. One of the first things the Biden administration did was to look at setting up a commission to investigate the possibility of paying reparations. What any such commissions will some day have to confront are the deep problems that everybody in America as in Britain would like to avoid. First is the fact that this demand is not as new as it sounds. The case for reparations has been made for 200 years and with every year that passes it becomes ever less justifiable. Who today has actually suffered for the crimes of slavery? Who today has actually perpetrated the crime?

As it happens there are estimated to be about 40 million slaves in the world today. I have met some on my travels. Indeed there are estimated to be more slaves today than there were in the 19th century. But nobody is very interested in that. They are interested in past wrongs, not present ones. So the demand for cash continues.

But here is the problem. Today we are not even talking about a wealth transfer from perpetrators to victims. We are not even talking about a wealth transfer from the descendants of perpetrators to the descendants of victims. We are talking about a wealth transfer from people who may look like people who did a wrong in the past to people who may look like people to whom a wrong was done. How on earth is restitution to be made on such terms? In America there is a fierce debate over whether it is “racist” to expect voters to show ID when they exercise their franchise at the polls. Democrats insist that black Americans will be put off voting if they are expected to prove their identity.

So how easy does anybody think it will be to persuade black Americans to do the necessary DNA tests to work out who comes from slaves and who does not? After all, black people in the US who have arrived in the past 150 years can hardly be expected to be beneficiaries of this largesse. And what are we to do about people who are descended from slaves and slavers, slaves and slave-stealers? Should African countries, residents of the Caribbean and other places where people benefited from the selling of slaves be asked to chip in to the great reparations pot? It would be an unpopular suggestion to make.

Whenever the UN discusses such issues African leaders and others have a disagreement between those who would like the money to be paid directly into their own bank accounts and those who think some other system might work. In reality, the whole system will not just be a way of encouraging mass fraud and corruption, but will also detonate race relations in America in the name of healing them. A more fractious and divisive idea could hardly be invented. Worse is that there would be no guarantee any such payment would be a one-off. How do we know? Because, deliberately or otherwise, memories are short. How many people demanding the latest bouts of apologies from the royals know that the family dealt with this matter 200 years ago? How many people who think America never addressed the issue of slavery understand that the country almost fell to pieces fighting about that very issue 200 years ago? Any payments would open a demand for cheques that will never end.

So long as American blacks underperform, more reparations will be demanded. The fact that other ethnic minorities, such as Asian-Americans, outperform whites will always be ignored as just another of those too-difficult facts in a mono-explanational world. As in America, so it will be here. Just as no apology will be enough, no payments will ever be enough. For there will always be a country that needs more money. There will always be those who see people prepared to prostrate themselves for wrongs they did not do. And there will always be a smiling politician eager to explain an easy way to absolve yourself of your sin.

I feel sorry for the royals but the answer is easy. No one alive did the sin. No one alive suffered the consequences. History has moved on. Some former colonies did well. Others did not. Only those who don’t know anything about history are inclined to think otherwise or think slavery is still a root issue. They are a familiar type, these people. They are people who tear at wounds long since healed and then cry about their pain. It is an insult to our history, as well as a demonstration of ignorance and cowardice, to pretend that such people should get what they demand. 

We owe them nothing. The debt is paid.■