Should Scotland Pay Reparations for Slavery?

Nae wey!

Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion—fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government—according to the 2023 Brattle Report. And if the ‘Glasgow—City of Empire’ display at the Kelvingrove Museum is anything to go by, Scotland owns a large share of that, since Glasgow was “one of the major port cities” involved in the slave-trade, whose profits played “a crucial role” in its economic development and prosperity.

The Tall Ship in Glasgow Harbour

The debt-collectors are already knocking at the door. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, MP and shadow Foreign Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, called for the UK government to start “meaningful negotiations” over reparations with Caribbean countries. The following autumn, Lewis’s parliamentary office became the centre of a reparations-campaign, funded by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien. And in April this year, Sir Keir Starmer received the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, into No. 10. “We’ve known each other many years as good colleagues and now as leaders who think alike”, said Starmer. Mottley has stated that Britain owes Barbados £3.9 trillion and it was she who pushed for reparations onto the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit last year.

But the case for reparations doesn’t add up. Yes, some Britons were involved in inhumane slave-trading and slavery, mainly from about 1650 to the early 1800s, when they transported over 3.2 million slaves from Africa to the Americas. Yet, while campaigners portray British involvement as uniquely dreadful. It wasn’t.

Up until the end of the 18^th century AD slavery and slave-trading were universal institutions, practised since the dawn of time on every continent by peoples of every skin colour. In North America, indigenous societies in the Pacific North-West were built on slave-labour, since subsistence required the rapid processing of salmon, and the quantity of work outstripped the supply of female labour. So, raiding for slaves was endemic. Thousands of miles to the south, the Comanche ran “the largest slave economy” in the 1700s—according to Oxford’s Pekka Hämäläinen. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Arabs had been busy slave-raiding and -trading since at least the 7^th century AD. According to one authority, the Muslim trade transported 17 million slaves mainly from Africa, but also from Europe, to the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. This is one context out of which reparations-advocates like to abstract British slavery.

Another is African complicity. British slave-ships off the coast of West Africa didn’t have to raid inland to obtain their slaves. They just waited on the coast for them to be brought. Africans had been busy enslaving and trading other Africans for centuries, first to the Romans, then to the Arabs, and finally to the Europeans. As early as 1550 the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting up to 8,000 African slaves annually to the Portuguese.

The final context that campaigners studiously ignore is the fact that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading (in 1807) and slavery (in 1833) throughout its territories. It then used its dominant power to suppress both slave-trading and slavery from Brazil, across Africa and India, to New Zealand for the second half of the British Empire’s life. In the 1820s and ‘30s, the Slave Trade Department was the Foreign Office’s largest unit. By mid-century the Royal Navy was devoting over 13 per cent of its total manpower to stopping transatlantic slave-trading. The cost of this alone to British taxpayers was at least the equivalent of up to £1.74 billion today or 12.7 per cent of the UK’s current expenditure on development aid—for half a century. According to the eminent historian, David Eltis, the nineteenth-century costs of slavery-suppression exceeded the eighteenth-century benefits.

The West Africa Squadron, which freed 150,000 African slaves.

In addition to an exaggerated picture of British involvement in slavery, the case for reparations depends on two further claims. The first, that Britain’s prosperity was built on the profits from slavery. Yet, while neo-Marxists repeat Eric Williams’ 1940 assertion that slavery made an “enormous” contribution to Britain’s industrial wealth, most economic historians reckon it somewhere between small and modest. Other factors played a larger part. After all, Portugal was much more heavily involved in slave-trading than Britain, and for a longer period, and yet the Portuguese didn’t start the industrial revolution.

The second claim is that Britain’s former Caribbean colonies continue to languish because of slavery. But over time, other factors change, perhaps soften, the effects of historic wrongs. In the 1600s, the Biggars were Scottish Covenanters, who were compelled to worship in secret, lost battles, and were hunted in the hills by government troops. Do I suffer ‘intergenerational trauma’? Not obviously.

If present conditions in Caribbean countries are determined by historic enslavement, we’d expect them to suffer equally. But they don’t. In 2019 GDP per capita in Jamaica was only $5,500, while in Barbados it equaled the world average at $18,000. Indeed, in 2019 life expectancy at birth in post-slavery Barbados was fourteen years higher than in post-slave-trading Nigeria, literacy (in Barbados in 2014) was over 60 per cent higher (than in Nigeria in 2018), and Gross National Income per capita in US$ in 2023 twelve times higher. The different fates of Barbados and Jamaica owe more to the quality of post-colonial government than to slavery two centuries ago.

So, if evidence and reason prevail over activist prejudice, Scottish taxpayers can relax. Against the Kelvingrove’s display, Stephen Mullen, historian at Glasgow University, argues that there was “a general lack of direct Scottish involvement” in the slave-trade. Not only did Scots play an important part in the abolition campaign--“the first human rights crusade in British history”—but their commitment to the later abolitionist movement, especially in Glasgow, was “a hugely significant factor in promoting an international conscience”.

I pointed all this out in an eight-page open letter to Philippa Macinnes, the Kelvingrove’s manager, over a year ago. Answer has come there none. And yet the display still stands, wilfully disinforming.