Demands that nations, or their political representatives, make public apology for the sins of their fathers are now frequently heard. The British have apologised, however indirectly, to some of the native peoples of New Zealand about land seizures. Second world war allies and conquered nations continue to demand apologies and damages from the Japanese. Last year, Germans and Czechs exchanged apologies for recent wrongdoings. This year, the 50th anniversary of Indian independence will stimulate critical scrutiny of British rule. Indian voices will seek more than the comforting British nostalgia for the Raj. The list goes on.
Few countries with a bellicose or imperial past can hope to escape a contemporary censure which often results from the moral confusions of political correctness. The idea of Britain's good-natured evenhandedness-bringing civility to great swathes of the world-may be semi-fictional; yet it is easy to slip into an equally misleading view of Britain's imperial past which sees only aggression and self-interest.
One way of avoiding the dilemmas of imperial history is to regard it as part of the inconsequential dust of past times. The trouble is that not everyone views British history as an inert, distant past. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the history of British slave trading. Is it time to ask whether the British should atone for their role in this rebarbative experience? Is there, indeed, a case for reparations for black slavery?
It may be invisible to most educated whites, but the question of reparations exerts a powerful charge among many black intellectuals in Africa (where it surfaces periodically in the Organisation of African Unity), Europe and the Americas. The issue is given occasional impetus by apologies or reparations elsewhere; in Britain it has been forcefully promoted by Bernie Grant MP; and in February this year it will be discussed at an international conference in Jamaica. Is this anything more than political posturing?
The inspiration is obvious enough: the damages paid to Israel for the Holocaust by Germany and Austria. Even the terminology of the Final Solution has recently been borrowed by commentators on slavery, some of whom speak of the African Holocaust. The number of casualties of slavery was enormous, the regions damaged by slaving were huge (reaching from the African coast deep into the interior), and it is easy to see how the language of the Final Solution can be readily transferred to Atlantic slavery itself. But it is a false analogy. For all the innocent casualties of slave trading, the Atlantic slave system was not genocidal. Its aim was to secure cheap labour for the development of the Americas. The havoc, death and dislocation created in its wake was incidental to the main economic drive to transport cheap labour. Yet the case for reparations cannot be brushed aside so easily.
First, let us consider what happened. In the course of their invasion and development of the Americas in the three and a half centuries up to the 1860s, Europeans transported about 11m Africans across the Atlantic. Many Africans died within three years of arrival in the new world. It is hard to assess how many died during the crossing, although the numbers were considerable. It is even more difficult to judge the numbers who died en route from the African interior.
Africans were also transported to regions other than the Americas, with the result that, between 1500 and 1900, about 18m Africans were forcibly removed from west and east Africa. It was a staggering and complex enforced movement of peoples. But it is the movement across the Atlantic which is best known-because of its size and because it laid the basis for the contemporary African-American populations throughout the Americas and, indirectly, in Europe since 1945.
We can arrange the statistics of Atlantic slavery in different ways, but perhaps the most impressive fact is that, by 1820, of the 12m people who had migrated to the Americas (rather than been born there), some 2m were Europeans-the rest were Africans. (Whites still outnumbered blacks thanks to much higher reproduction rates.) Of course, the Africans were not migrants in any commonly accepted fashion; they were enslaved-items of trade with a value on their miserable heads, deracinated from their homelands and transported in conditions of scarcely speakable horror. Africans were the sinews of Atlantic empire.
The broad outline of this story has been known for a long time. It is however the context of that knowledge which has shifted fundamentally over the past 40 years. Since the 1960s we have seen the rise of black political rights on both sides of the Atlantic. British history begins to look different when viewed from Kingston, Brixton, Toxteth or Moss Side. Among black Britons there is a cynicism and anger about many historical issues which do not trouble whites. For example, should Plymouth f?te the memory of Drake and ignore his early slave trading? Should Manchester's history continue to stress the misery of its factory workers, but ignore the slaves who produced the cotton?
The risk in seeking to remedy the omissions of written history is that we slide into accepting an unsatisfactory polarity of historical victim and victimiser. The reduction of historical complexity into teams of goodies and baddies can also reinforce a victim mentality among blacks. That is, nevertheless, no reason to ignore the grimmer side of the British past. And in the history of Atlantic slavery, the British were the key players. They did not initiate the slave trade, but they perfected it to a high degree of commercial significance. The British shipped more Africans across the Atlantic than any other nation. Some 11,000 British ships (about half from Liverpool) sailed for the slave coast of Africa. Who today would think of Lancaster, Poole or Lyme Regis as centres of the slave trade? But they were. The slave communities of colonial North America and islands of the Anglophone Caribbean filled with African slaves courtesy of British traders, manufacturers and consumers who devoured slave-grown produce.
Large chunks of tropical and subtropical America were converted to profitable agriculture by Africans and their new world descendants. The fruits of slave labour helped to transform the nature of British life; sugar sweetened British drinks and slave-grown tobacco was chewed and smoked. Even the misery of life below deck in the Royal Navy was eased by slave-produced rum. Whether in the form of starch (derived from slave-grown rice) or Lancastrian cotton goods (look at Manchester's coat of arms), the black slave of the Americas was, until the mid-19th century, never far away from some basic feature of British life. Yet because slave life unfolded on the far side of the Atlantic, and because the British have looked back to their slaving past through the distorting lens of the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century, the British involvement with Atlantic slavery has drifted from view.
The reparations argument has tried to change that. It has stressed, rightly, that among forced migrations of peoples, at least until the 20th century, the Atlantic slave trade was unique. But the argument has also stimulated some very dubious claims-about the numbers of slaves involved and the link to African economic underdevelopment-and runs into all sorts of practical difficulties.
There is the question of African involvement. The slave trade spread its tentacles deep into the African interior, ensnaring whole societies and communities, as slavers as well as slaves. The voracious European appetite may have driven the system, but there were crucial layers of African slave traders and middlemen. It seems likely that from the 17th to the 19th century there were as many slaves in Africa owned by other Africans, as in the Americas. Those African slavers bought and bartered a huge range of material goods from Europe and the wider world: knives and textiles from Britain and India, wines from France and guns in remarkable numbers. During the peak years of the 18th century slave trade, west Africa was importing a third of a million guns every year.
If reparations involve financial compensation rather than simple diplomatic apologies, who should be compensated? The victims, Jamaicans, say, or African Americans, or the African regions whence the slaves originated, which might not correspond to present-day nation states? On a recent radio programme, a West Indian teenager from Hackney put the matter succinctly: "How much will I get?" The answer-which no one dared say-is nothing. The complexities of apportioning blame, and cost, seem insuperable. Moreover, those demanding compensation have, unlike Israel, little of the political leverage required to extract money from the perpetrators. However, they do have moral authority on their side.
In fact, when the British finally abolished slavery in 1833 (they had ended maritime slave trading in 1807), they did pay out compensation-a massive ?20m. It went not to the slaves, but to their owners. It was the final and cruel act of British slave trading; slave freedom was effectively bought by a British parliament ever alert to the need to compensate owners for the loss of property. Thereafter British slave poachers turned abolitionist gamekeepers, insisting that the rest of the world should follow the British anti-slavery lead and forgo their reliance on labour drawn from Africa. It was no accident that, by then, the British had come to believe in the economic efficiency of free labour. Not for the last time, British economic utility found a compliant bed fellow in outraged morality.
What happened in the Atlantic slave economy was not simply a remote descant on the main tune of British history. It can, indeed, be reduced to a simple, familiar image: what could be more British than a cup of sweet tea? Yet what made that naturally bitter drink palatable to British taste was the sugar cultivated by Africans imported into the Caribbean as slaves. Wherever we look, the realities of that painful relationship abide: in the stately homes built on the backs of colonial fortunes, in British social habits shaped from the fruits of slave labour (tobacco, sugar, rum and cotton). Before we can discuss compensation, before we can even begin to think about the material cost, paid unwillingly by other peoples to the development of British well-being, we need to come to terms with some brutal historical facts. That must be the starting point in any debate about reparations for slavery.
