How Britain walked straight into the slavery trap

How did it come to this? Are we doomed to bring out the worst in each other? As the King tours the Caribbean and Andy Burnham prepares to join Commonwealth leaders at this week’s summit in Antigua and Barbuda, one cry will drown everything else: Britain must pay reparations for slavery . Nothing reflects more poorly on our relationship with the Commonwealth than the fact that all 34 African and Caribbean members have joined hands to endorse this demand.

As for how much Britain owes for its part in the Atlantic slave trade, one answer is $26.2tn (£19.7tn), according to a report compiled for the University of the West Indies by the Brattle Group, a US consultancy. That sum amounts to six times Britain’s entire GDP, 14 times the UK’s total national budget, or £281,000 from every man, woman and child in the country. You might be reassured to learn that Burnham is not going to agree to the economic equivalent of dynamiting the British Isles and sinking them beneath the waves for eternity.

Instead, the Prime Minister set out his approach in The Guardian on Friday . In brief, Burnham is willing to abase himself and “face up to the past” – he is even “open to” a formal apology, apparently regardless of the legal obligations that it might create – but when it comes to reparations, his response is: “I do not believe that is the right answer.” The danger is that Burnham will trap Britain in the worst position of all: agreeing that it deserves to be in the dock, conceding the principle of the case for the prosecution but opposing the suggested remedy.

Thanks to a strange case of ideological groupthink that unites British diplomats and politicians with Caribbean leaders, Burnham will give the latter everything except what they most want, which means this destructive issue will probably run and run. So what should be done? I spent five years at the Foreign Office and three in Downing Street, writing speeches and advising three foreign secretaries and one prime minister. I saw for myself how the British state, stifled by intellectual uniformity, shudders and recoils from almost any argument about British history.

What I am about to suggest would probably not have made the list of options that our diplomats will have presented to Burnham and Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, neither of whom is likely to disagree with British and Caribbean groupthink on this question. But it might nonetheless break the cycle of recrimination and place our relations with Commonwealth states on a new and more modern footing. It would involve three steps: be privately realistic about why Caribbean and African leaders are raising this issue, respect their interpretation of history by subjecting it to critical scrutiny, and examine the morality of the case for reparations.

To begin with “why” – it was as recently as 2013 that the 15 states of the Caribbean Community finally united behind the demand for slavery reparations. It was only in 2023 that the African Union, which brings together 55 countries, formally endorsed this position. Some observers in the Caribbean are not sure that Britain fully understands why the issue has suddenly been given such prominence. “The Caribbean leaders are trying to scapegoat the British Government – and therefore the British people – for problems that they themselves have caused,” says Rasheed Griffith, the director of the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute.

“Essentially, the UK foreign minister should, politely perhaps, point this out. You cannot scapegoat people for your own problems.” He adds: “If you think about this more clearly, this is only a recent push. Years ago, this was not a particularly strong political topic in the Caribbean, nor was it in many other places, either. So it’s only a recent generation of younger political leaders in the Caribbean who have been pushing this topic.

“You would think, if this was really such a deep Caribbean ideological position, they would have held it from the 1960s or 1970s, right after the decolonial period. But no. It’s very delayed because the actual generation of political leaders [at independence] did not share this view. They thought they actually had to build their societies.” As for why a new generation thinks differently, Griffith says they are deeply influenced by the intellectual milieu of universities in the US, Britain and the Caribbean, where a “post-colonial” view of history and economics has come to dominate.

This approach blames inequalities of wealth and power on the enduring legacy of colonial rule. Behind it lies the implicit notion that all humanity is divided between oppressors and the oppressed, with Britain, Europe and the US leading the former camp, and Africa and the Caribbean in the latter. The natural conclusion is that justice requires transferring wealth from oppressor states to the oppressed, while largely absolving the latter of any responsibility for their own condition, even when they have been independent for generations.

The irony is that the Foreign Office is profoundly influenced by this school of thought, not least because British diplomats have often attended the same British universities as Caribbean heads of government. Rather than challenge or question, our representatives often prefer to accept the assumptions of Commonwealth leaders, reinforce their opinions and run along the same intellectual tramlines. After all, they share a similar world-view, taught in many British lecture theatres.

Griffith notes that Mia Mottley, the prime minister of his home country of Barbados, lived in Britain in her early life and studied at the London School of Economics. “When I hear her talk, I think she’s a British woman from the Caribbean,” he says. “Her world-view is that way. It has always been that way.” The same, in his opinion, applies to Sir Hilary Beckles, the vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies and an intellectual architect of the Reparations Campaign, who has a doctorate from Hull University.

“They want to talk about breaking from England, but their entire world-view is mainly British,” says Griffith. “When you hear what they talk about – healing or reparatory justice – all of it is things that require the UK, the only intellectual base they can think about, to give Caribbean people money or access. It’s still a dependence mentality on the UK as a source of salvation.” Griffith adds: “On the UK side, the historical education is so poor that they actually accept this blame and self-reflection.

So on both sides, there’s quite a lot of blame to pass around.” But there is another way of thinking – more confident and more respectful for both sides. It would require British politicians and diplomats to be willing to escape post-colonial dogma and subject the interpretation of history behind the reparations campaign to critical examination. That interpretation proceeds from a powerful and searing truth. The Atlantic slave trade was an abomination whereby millions of African men, women and children were kidnapped and then trafficked across the Atlantic in atrocious conditions.

Those who survived the passage were the property of others, forced to endure backbreaking labour and terrible punishment on the plantations of the Caribbean or the Americas. The Brattle Report, which calculated the bill for reparations, says that 9.3 million people were embarked on Atlantic slave ships between 1510 and 1870, of which more than 1.2 million did not survive the passage. Other figures for the number of people enslaved in this way range as high as 12.5 million.

Millions were carried on English or British ships (from 1707) to colonies in the Caribbean. As for how many suffered British slavery, the figure in the Brattle Report is 3,478,044. Since we are talking about individual men, women and children, it is best to give the full and precise number. So far, there is no argument. One can only echo the words of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 80/250, passed in March, that the Atlantic slave trade amounted to “one of the longest-running systems of organised mass human exploitation in recorded history”, with millions dying “during capture, detention and trafficking across oceans”.

The mistake is when campaigners apply post-colonial ideology to this atrocity, which forces them into a selective view of slavery’s horror. The UN Resolution, for example, bluntly asserts that the 15th century “marked the critical beginning of the exceptional and dark history of the capture, forced transportation and racialised chattel enslavement of the people of Africa”. Plenty of academics now declare that Atlantic slavery was a new and uniquely terrible phenomenon.

But their case does not convince. In Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World , Justin Marozzi writes: “The slave trade practised within the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, dates back to the 7th century, endured openly until the 20th and, more covertly and in much smaller numbers, continues.” He adds: “The number of people captured and enslaved during these 14 centuries, forcibly removed from their families to do service in foreign households, harems, armies and other occupations, approximates to the total captured and sold into slavery in the Atlantic slave trade – something in the order of 12 million to 15 million.”

Marozzi notes this may be an “underestimate” and cites another figure of 17 million for the period 650 to 1905. We will never know exactly how many people were marched northwards across the Sahara to the slave markets of Algiers, Tripoli, Cairo or elsewhere; unlike the Atlantic slave trade, there are no shipping records. We do know that not all of the captives came from Africa: the Ottoman Empire plundered large areas of Europe for slaves.

We also know that plantation labour was not unique to the Caribbean. Marozzi writes that African slaves in the Islamic world were forced to work on cotton plantations in Egypt, sugarcane fields in Oman, and date farms and clove plantations in Yemen and Zanzibar. As for the human cost, one illustration comes from 1820 when Mohammed Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, launched an invasion of Sudan that Marozzi describes as a “mass slave raid”.

“You are aware that the end of all our effort and this expense is to procure negroes,” Ali told Mohammed Bey, his military commander. “Please show zeal in carrying out our wishes.” Those wishes were zealously fulfilled. By 1824, 20,000 people had been enslaved and sent on the 800-mile march from central Sudan to Aswan in Egypt. Fewer than 3,000 survived the journey. Marozzi writes that between 80,000 and 100,000 slaves “died from malnutrition, disease and savage treatment at the hands of the traders running caravans” in three areas of Sudan in just four years – from 1875 until 1879.

That is but one indication of how Africa was ravaged by slavery emanating from the Islamic world, including the area encompassed by today’s Saudi Arabia, where slavery was only abolished in 1962. But you will not find African leaders beating a path to Arab countries or Turkey to demand compensation, nor would Caribbean states necessarily support them if they did. No American consultancy has been commissioned to add up a bill for Oman, ruled by the same royal family that moved its capital to Zanzibar in 1840, all the better to raid East Africa for slaves.

There is no Brattle Report for Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, there is near silence on all sides. “Arab society and civilisation benefited tremendously over the centuries from the blood, sweat and tears of African labour,” writes Zeinab Badawi in An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence , “and there has not been a public debate about slavery reparations to mirror the one in Europe and North America.” There has been no public debate because there has been no outside pressure.

There has been no outside pressure because slavery in the Muslim world is hard to reconcile with post-colonial ideology, and its simple division of humanity into European and American oppressors