Landing in the Bahamas, the King brought the goodwill of the British people. What he didn’t take was money. The Commonwealth summit opening in Antigua today will also be light on payments because Britain has already paid.
The history of slavery is a vile exercise of submission and compulsion. Families torn apart, bodies broken and constant fear and pain. It is also, sadly, a story that spans the world.
For centuries, Roman armies took Gauls to power their economy. Arab princes crossed the African deserts to chain men in caravans heading north. Ottoman slave armies conquered the eastern Mediterranean. In India and China, servitude was not foreign, or imposed, or imported.
To the shame of us all, it emerged in every society that needed labour and needed power.
Until something changed, here, in England.
In the churches across our country, the abolitionist movement was born from the Christian ideals of the people. William Wilberforce wasn’t the first. Some 700 years before him, William the Conqueror had already rocked the Saxon slave-built economy, pressed by Wulfstan of Worcester and his Archbishop, Lanfranc, to end the sale of Englishmen abroad. In 1102, Archbishop Anselm’s council at Westminster banned the trade outright, condemning the business of selling men like animals.
In 1574 Elizabeth I freed the Crown’s remaining serfs. When the runaway slave James Somerset brought his case before the Court of King’s Bench in 1772, establishing his own liberty, the court was building on centuries of precedent that no man can be a slave in England.
By 1800, preaching and judging were not enough. The trade was outlawed in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. As our King’s great-great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert, said in his first public speech in Britain, in 1840: “This great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity, and the best feelings of our nature.”
He was supported by the government and the people. Hundreds of thousands abstained from slave-grown sugar, and Lancashire’s cotton workers would later go hungry rather than side with America’s slave states. The Royal Navy itself was engaged in what may rank as the world’s first military humanitarian operation.
The West Africa Squadron, costing some 2 per cent of GDP, roughly what we spend on defence today, was intercepting slave vessels off the Bight of Benin, and other ships were doing the same from the Gulf of Mexico to the Indian Ocean.
They were not alone.
Around the world, British forces were taking on those who refused to end what Prince Albert so rightly called the “atrocious traffic in human beings”.
In Madagascar, Sir Robert Farquhar, the governor of Mauritius, sent a Cork-born sergeant called James Hastie into the highlands to talk King Radama out of the slave trade. From 1817 Britain paid an annual subsidy to buy his support in ending the practice on the island and within seven years slavers abandoned the Malagasy coast.
In 1850 Commander Frederick Forbes went to Abomey to tell King Gezo of Dahomey that the trade must end. Gezo refused, the Navy blockaded his coast, and in 1852 he signed, then cheated, and the squadron stayed. In 1861 Lagos became a British colony to end slavery.
No great power had taken such action before. A sixth of the Royal Navy was engaged in battles not for profit but for principle. They captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. The Navy’s own count is that 17,000 of its men died doing it, one sailor for every nine freed, most of them of fever on the African coast. The courage of our ancestors had a real cost in their own lives.
That’s why this talk of reparations is so disingenuous. It’s true that we could ask the heirs of the Asante and Dahomey kingdoms to pay for their predecessors’ violence. It was Gezo who said: “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.” But that would be to engage in a new form of colonialism.
We could remember the power of Mansa Musa, by some claims the wealthiest man ever to have lived, and the many thousands of slaves he brought with him to Cairo and on to Mecca. But that would be looking to the past not the future.
What matters today is not to seek grievance, even in the slave markets of Yemen that only closed in 1962, or Mauritania that only outlawed the practice in 1981, but to fight the real curse of modern slavery that exists today.
That’s the example Britain, again, sets. Whether it is the abuse of bonded workers from the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent, or even those here on our own islands, we know we must do more. It would be absurd for us to demand that Algiers pay because the villagers seized from the Cornish coast in 1645 were sold in its slave market.
It is as absurd to claim that those who were first to fight slavery are the ones who owe, while those who profited from the criminal trade are treated as bystanders or, worse, victims.
When a British prime minister is asked for reparations we should be clear: we were the first to condemn the evil of slavery, and we paid in lives and treasure to destroy the hateful trade. This week’s Commonwealth summit should build on this shared history of fighting for freedom and condemn the work camps of Xinjiang where repugnant slavery is alive and well.
An excellent piece. Thank you Tom, once again. Going into the rabbit hole, take a few more moments to look at the Barbary Slave Trade and what it meant to people in my Cornish home. As a former RN officer there is a lot to be reckoned with when someone (and look who it is...) starts pointing a finger at The British for reparations. Additional challenges arise when one considers that half my family only turned up in the UK in 1905-1911.