The president of Guyana Mohamed Irfaan Ali recently
argued that Britain owed his country reparations for slavery. So too an
international judge from Jamaica claimed that Britain owed nearly £19 trillion
for its involvement in the slave trade. We are constantly reprimanded for the
British Empire and urged to decolonise. Yet nobody in Britain living today took
part in the Atlantic slave trade. Britain
did more than anyone else to abolish it by Acts of Parliament in 1807 and 1833 and
by enforcing those laws with the Royal Navy. This involved enormous costs at
the time. But it seems we must pay twice.
I would have preferred that there had been no British
Empire. If you compare the standard of living in modern day Britain with European
countries which had minimal involvement in colonisation, then you will find
people who have a similar standard of living to us or higher. The people of
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Luxembourg are not obviously worse off
because they didn’t have an empire.
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It is true that the English language spread around the
world because of the British Empire, and this can be advantageous to us, but Finns
manage fine with a language no one else speaks. We could have managed too.
For the same reason British people do not continue to
benefit from slavery or colonisation. If we did continue to benefit you would
expect us to be in some obvious way better off than Swedes, but we are not.
It would be very hard indeed to prove much of a connection
between economic activity two or three hundred years ago and now. If the UK
benefited from having an empire with slaves hundreds of years ago our present
economic condition owes far more to economic choices made in recent decades. The
Greeks after all don’t benefit today from Alexander having no more worlds to conquer.
The logical problem for the president of Guyana
seeking reparations for slavery is that if it had not been for the slave trade
and the British Empire his country would not exist at all. If Europeans had not
colonised North and South America and the Caribbean, if we had all stayed in
Europe and if there had been no slave trade then African people would not have
been forced to move from Africa to the New World. Under those circumstances Mohamed
Irfaan Ali either would not exist or else would be living somewhere else. He
certainly would not be president of Guyana because there would be no Guyana.
Let’s say there had been no European colonisation and
no European involvement in the slave trade. Would that have meant that no Africans
were enslaved? No. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs also were involved
in enslaving Africans. But oddly no one asks for reparations from the
descendants of Africans who enslaved other Africans or indeed from present day
Arabs.
Slavery has existed since time began. Europeans were
enslaved by other Europeans and by North Africans. Russians were able to own
other Russians until 1861, but no Russian ever asks for reparations from a
descendent of a former owner.
If you go back enough generations then everyone in the
world has an ancestor who was a slave and also an ancestor who was a slave
owner. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings are descendants
of a slave owner just as much as the descendants of Gladstone. The same situation
will apply to much of the population of Guyana.
But more importantly the concept of demanding
reparations for empire and slavery ignores the historical alternative. If there
had been no colonisation, then none of the countries in North and South America
would exist. There would be no black people in the Caribbean nor in the USA or
anywhere else. Would they prefer not to be living where they are? But if you
are happy being president of Guyana, how can you demand reparations for what put
you there?
If Europeans had remained in Europe and had not
explored beyond our continent there would have been no sharing with other people,
any of the discoveries or inventions that have been developed over the centuries.
We have then the president of Guyana wearing a suit
and tie, wearing glasses, and speaking over the Internet using a computer and
speaking English. But if British people had remained in our island and had
never gone anywhere else, he would be doing none of these things.
Colonisation, empire and slavery are part of what gave
us the modern world. Europeans travelled the world for profit. They went to
places like Guyana and imported slaves. The descendants of slaves can wish that
slavery never happened, but it is to wish for a world unimaginably different to
the one in which we live.
The historical circumstances of empire and slavery were
part of the development of the modern world. You cannot logically blame Britain
and demand reparations for slavery while accepting the benefits of modern knowledge,
medicine, science and everything else that was shared only because of European
involvement in Africa.
Who knows what the world today would be like no European
country had ever explored, there had been no colonisation and no slavery. It
would be vastly different, nowhere near as developed and much of what we all
rely on would never have been discovered.
If we have to pay 19 trillion for the slave trade, how
much do you have to pay for your existence in Jamaica and all of the knowledge
you would not have if Europeans had never seen Africa?
Everyone has benefited from the discoveries that took
place when European powers were involved in colonisation and slavery. Who knows
the interconnections between the profits made from empire and the scientific discoveries
of early modern science. But all humans benefit including the descendants of
slaves.
It would have been better if Europeans had never
colonised anywhere. It would have been better if we enslaved no one. But that is
to imagine a world where every descendant of a slave is somehow miraculously
back in Africa.
The modern world is a consequence of human history
both good and bad. Trying to obtain reparations for wrongs done centuries ago
is senseless because it goes against the moral principle that I am responsible
for my own actions, not the actions of my ancestors. We don’t blame modern day
Mongols for the invasion of Europe any more than we blame the Goths Huns and
Vandals.
Reparations of nearly £19 trillion is five times the
UK’s national debt, but the UK population is multiracial. Some are descendants
of slave owners, others the descendants of slaves, but others have ancestors
from places that were never involved in the slave trade. Should they all pay
the descendants of slaves in Guyana or is it only white people who are guilty?
If I am to pay reparations because my ancestor owned slaves,
then I should pay reparations because my ancestor murdered someone. Murdering
must be worse than enslaving. This rapidly becomes morally senseless.
The truth is that it is hard to imagine anything worse
we could do to a country than give it free money for something that happened centuries
ago. Would this free money make Guyanese people work harder? Would it encourage
them to be more innovative in business and trade? Would it make them more
self-reliant? Would it make Guyana less corrupt or more democratic?
It would be far better for Guyana to try to become
prosperous by its own efforts. It is blaming someone else for its poverty that
keeps it poor. It’s not blaming anyone else that makes other countries rich.
