‘Decolonisation’ threatens to become expensive. Earlier this month the African Union joined the Caribbean Community (‘Caricom’) in demanding reparations from Britain for its ‘colonial crimes’, especially slavery. Caricom has already submitted its bill of £18 trillion. The African continent’s claim is bound to be higher.
Indeed, ‘decolonisation’ has already become expensive for members of the Church of England. In November 2023 the Church Commissioners of England, responsible for the church’s property assets, committed itself to deploy an initial £100 million to establish an investment fund to support communities ‘affected by historic slavery’. As they explained, ‘The immense wealth accrued by the Church Commissioners has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement… [which] was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter’. The commissioners confessed a ‘strand of complicity in an abominable trade that still scars the lives of billions… [T]he cruelty of a multinational white establishment that deprived tens of millions of Africans of life and liberty… has continuing toxic consequences…’. Hence, the need for the Church to make reparations.
The ‘strand of complicity’ concerns the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th-century forerunner of the Commissioners’ endowment devoted to supporting poorer clergy, which, through its investment in the South Sea Company, acquired ‘links’ with African enslavement.
Except that it didn’t. As Richard Dale, retired professor of international banking and author of The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (2004), has written:
First, no investor in the South Sea Company benefited financially from the slave trade, since it was consistently loss-making. Second, the Church Bounty did not even stand to benefit from the trade, because it declined to buy shares in the Company. Third, the investments that it did make, in South Sea annuities, represented, at one remove, claims on the Government which had no connection with the trade in slaves. Finally, it is grossly misleading to suggest, as the [Commissioners do], that all South Sea investors were consciously investing in slave-trading voyages.
What’s more, the cartoonish – even racist – tale of a ‘white establishment’ exploiting innocent African victims is a caricature of the truth. The ‘black establishment’ was even more to blame. Africans had been enslaving other Africans for centuries. Those they didn’t consume in human sacrifices, they sold first to the Romans and then to the Arabs. A few years before the first British slave-ship arrived on the West African coast in 1563, a Portuguese witness had reported that the African kingdom of Kongo was exporting overseas between four and eight thousand ‘pieces’ (slaves) annually.
Three hundred years later, Omani Arabs were running slave plantations on the East African coast, and Fulani Africans were running them in the Sokoto Caliphate in what’s now northern Nigeria. Indeed, according to the historian Mohammed Bashir Salau, the Caliphate became ‘one of the largest slave societies in modern history’, equaling the United States in the number of slaves (four million).
Meanwhile, unlike Africans, the British had repented of their involvement in slave-trading and slavery, and in the early 1800s were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish them. They then used their imperial dominance to suppress them from the Pacific North-West, across India, to Africa. In mid-century, the Royal Navy devoted over 13% of its total manpower to stopping slave-traffic between West Africa and Brazil.
At the same time, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s idea that the key to ending the slave trade and slavery in Africa was to promote alternative, ‘legitimate’ commerce, was gaining traction. This led to the setting up of trading posts in West Africa, and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land. In 1851, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves, the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities.
Contrary to the groundless claim of Caricom reparations champion, Sir Hilary Beckles, the Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, has written that ‘[w]hen the slave trade was abolished [by the British], Africans were against abolition’.
The sustained British commitment to stamp out slavery was expensive in both blood and treasure. Seventeen hundred sailors died in the service of the Royal Navy’s campaign to stop maritime slave-trading. Meanwhile, on land, Christian missionaries risked – and often spent – their lives striving to shut down slave-markets in Africa. Among them was the Anglican bishop, John Mackenzie, who died horribly of blackwater fever in what is now Mozambique in 1862 at the age of 37.
What did all this cost in pounds and pence? David Eltis, described by the African American historian, Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, as ‘the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade’, has estimated that the campaign to suppress transatlantic slavery alone cost British taxpayers more than the total of eighteenth-century profits. The political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have described that campaign as ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.
As for slavery’s ‘centrality’ to British industrial growth and prosperity, most economic historians reckon its contribution somewhere between marginal and modest. Eltis has described it as ‘trivial’.
The Church Commissioners have made a well-intentioned, ‘progressive’ mistake. For eighteen months now a recent holder of the Anglican Communion’s premier professorship in Christian Ethics, two Oxbridge historians, a retired Old Bailey judge and a descendant of African slaves have been trying to persuade them to rethink. Yet, apart from one flimsy online response, the commissioners have offered no ethical justification at all for their policy. Instead, they have dismissed their critics (without ever naming them) as acting in bad faith through deliberate disinformation, and they have declared that they will not respond to arguments that African descendants find ‘offensive’. But suppose it’s the truth that offends?
This issue is not going away. Questions are being asked in Parliament. If the Church Commissioners keep on digging, they risk a major national scandal. Reputations may not survive it.
‘Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt’ by Nigel Biggar is published by Forum.
