This article is based on two earlier pieces that originally appeared 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”, and in his opening speech to Commonwealth leaders in Antigua this week he said that the transatlantic slave trade “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow”. But he did 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.
More than two centuries after Pitt, Prime Minister Andy Burnham – who offered Commonwealth leaders talks on a formal apology, though not on reparations – has blithely walked into the obvious trap laid by those Commonwealth governments who are hoping for large payouts as reparations for slavery.
His waffly statements, rather than “drawing a line” under the issue, have announced open season on the British taxpayer. To talk about being “open” to an apology, and to link development aid to the issue of reparations implicitly concedes what successive Prime Ministers have consistently refused. Can Burnham really think that rebadging a few millions in aid payments will satisfy the reparations lobby?
The demand for a “formal apology” is not really about giving satisfaction for supposed psychological trauma dating back two centuries. Soothing words – whether pronounced by monarch or prime minister – are only phase one. The real demand for massive amounts of money is based on economic theories that claim the slave trade and slavery were essential to Britain’s own development.
The godfather of these arguments was Eric Williams, an Oxford PhD student in the late 1930s. His thesis was published in 1944 titled Capitalism and Slavery. He came from a middle-class Trinidadian family, went into politics, was influenced by the Black Power movement, and became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
Williams’s arguments, much elaborated by later writers, were twofold. First, he aimed to demolish the idea that Britain had abolished slavery for moral reasons, and therefore deserved some credit, even gratitude. No, he said, the British only abolished the slave trade and slavery because they were no longer profitable. Second, he claimed that the slave economy was central in British economic history. The Industrial Revolution, and hence Britain’s later wealth, was founded on the inhuman exploitation of enslaved Africans.
These two ideas remain the basis of the reparations lobby: British abolitionism was mere opportunism, and Britain owes trillions of pounds to the descendants of slaves. There are some academic historians who try to support these arguments. One recently claimed, against all the evidence, that a technological breakthrough vital to the industrial revolution was invented by slaves in Jamaica and stolen by the British.
Despite such ingenuity, both of Williams’s arguments defy basic common sense.
First, slavery was not unprofitable. Slave uprisings could not stop it: the price of slaves kept rising. It took a bloody civil war to end it in the United States. Sustained efforts by the Royal Navy and the Foreign Office – financial payments, diplomatic pressure, and gunboats – were required to throttle it in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Not only did slavery last until the 1880s in parts of the Americas, it continues today. Britain could have monopolised this booming traffic. It chose to do the opposite.
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.
Turning to the second of Williams’s arguments, ascribing Britain’s wealth today to 18th-century slavery ignores everything since: the internal combustion engine, electricity, the atom, computers and so on. Even more crucially, it ignores what went before. England was a wealthy country long before the age of slavery and the Industrial Revolution. England was three times as rich as Africa in 1500, and richer then than China and India would be until the 1990s. It was the high level of wages and consumption in Britain that sparked industrialisation, not the labour of enslaved Africans. Moreover – and this ought to clinch the argument – several countries were more involved with slave economies than Britain: France, Portugal, Spain, the Ottoman Empire. But none industrialised.
These are the common-sense arguments against the Williams thesis. In addition, generations of economic historians have disproved it in painstaking detail. They have calculated the relative importance of the slave trade and the slave economy within the broader story of British economic growth. The verdict has been the same over and over again. At the height of slavery, the Caribbean took only about 5 per cent of British exports. One estimate of total profits from the slave trade in 1770 is at most £342,000 out of total British GNP in that year of £166m.
Strikingly, even historians who try to talk up the importance of the slave economy seem to end up doing the opposite. The most recent example is an expensive inter-university project to track every British slave owner and trader. Press reports suggest it has found that only a fraction of 1 per cent of the population was involved. Yet we are being told that all of us owe reparations.
Campaigners, including Commonwealth politicians who intend to be on the receiving end, demand “discussions”. Well, one could discuss this issue forever. In theory, there are circumstances in which reparations might be due. There is an American academic study that suggests that the indigenous people of England are still suffering from the effects of the Norman Conquest. Perhaps that is one explanation for the crowds queuing to see the Bayeux Tapestry. Perhaps President Macron could give it back as a belated reparation.
Reparations are simple when the perpetrators and the victims, or their immediate descendants, are still around. The many churches built by the Normans, including an altar on the very spot where King Harold was killed, may show that the conquerors realised they had sinned. But today? Perhaps my ancestors were enserfed by William of Normandy as were those of the homeless man on the street corner. Would we both be equally deserving of cash from the French treasury? Or equally undeserving?
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. Its President, John Mahama, is the African Union’s Champion on Reparations, and was at the 2026 Commonwealth summit in Antigua pressing Britain for an apology. 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.
Britain transported existing slaves from sellers to buyers – a nasty, cruel business. But Britain was far from being the leading slave owner. A recent estimate is that British people owned 1.7 per cent of the global enslaved population. The number of people in Britain identified as directly involved in the ownership or trafficking of slaves was – so a recent study claims – around 13,000 (including babies). This was out of a total number who lived and died in Britain during the slaving period of 20-30 million. In short, Britain was not the most guilty of involvement in slavery. Yet it seems to be the most targeted for reparations.
The slave trade bequeathed many kinds of evil, tangible today in the United States, Africa and the Arab world. In the Caribbean, the trade created whole new societies of enslaved people and their descendants. That those societies today are in many ways successful and attractive testifies to their resilience and creativity over many generations. It also owes something to the efforts of British colonial rulers to repair the damage done by slavery and set up working democracies. Compare Barbados with Haiti.
Do Commonwealth countries now deserve apology and reparations? As I noted at the start of this article, William Pitt as Prime Minister made a very strong apology in 1792, and his successors worked hard to “atone” (his word) by combatting slavery. To repeat expressions of regret may be desirable and conciliatory, but not if they imply that Britain accepts the case for reparations. The idea that the Caribbean and Africa were somehow the creators of Britain’s present wealth, and that they therefore have a practically unlimited claim on it with no strings attached, is absurd.
Caribbean countries today can prosper by their own efforts, and many do. Most outstrip the African countries that enslaved their ancestors. The idea that they are still suffering from slavery nearly two centuries after emancipation is implausible. Where there are concrete problems – in health, or education – they would be candidates for aid based on friendship and goodwill, not on obligation.
A sensible prime minister would keep questions of aid and investment entirely separate from discussion of reparations, to which our response should be a polite but unambiguous no. A much wiser King maintained that separation in his opening speech in Antigua on 3 November. He also praised the anti-slavery efforts of the Royal Navy – a reminder that history (in his words) can “inspire” as well as “appal”.
Robert Tombs is emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge.
