The abolition of slavery by Britain is one of the most significant moral and political acts in modern history. It does not cancel what came before it, but it is an essential part of the complete picture that the reparations campaign consistently refuses to present.
The costs Britain took on to abolish slavery were huge. To defuse opposition and bring slavery to a quick end, Britain paid £20 million in compensation to slave owners in 1835–1843, following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. That was an enormous sum, equivalent to around 40% of the government's annual expenditure. The debt taken on to finance those payments was finally cleared only in 2015, 180 years after the original loan was raised.
After abolition, Britain did not simply stop trading in enslaved people and move on. It invested heavily in actively stopping others from continuing the trade. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron patrolled the Atlantic for sixty years, at significant cost in money and lives, intercepting slave ships and freeing over 150,000 people. This alone was estimated at roughly £40 million by the mid-1840s. No other nation made anything remotely comparable to this commitment. But the West Africa Squadron is almost entirely absent from the reparations debate.
(By contrast, France demanded 150 million gold francs from Haiti in 1825 as the price of recognising its independence, which Haiti had won through a revolution against slavery in 1791–1804. That was about ten times Haiti’s annual revenue: to pay France, it took on debt was not finally cleared until 1947, over 120 years later. In effect, formerly enslaved Haitians were made to compensate their former masters.)
While the West Africa Squadron patrolled the Atlantic to suppress the transatlantic slave trade, Britain simultaneously ran a separate naval campaign on the other side of the continent. The East Africa Squadron operated in the Indian Ocean and off the East African coast with the specific mission of intercepting Arab dhows carrying enslaved people and suppressing the trans-Sahara slave trade.
That trade was no small operation. It had been running for over 1000 years, and estimates put the total at between 10 and 17 million enslaved people, compared with under 12 million for the transatlantic trade. Zanzibar was the central hub for a trade that moved tens of thousands of enslaved Africans a year to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and the wider Middle East. The operation to halt it also used significant diplomatic force, pressuring the Sultan of Zanzibar into abolishing the trade entirely and, when the fort at Mombasa resisted, it was reduced to rubble.
None of this fits the required story, which is one of Britain as perpetrator, not as the nation that spent nearly a century fighting slavery on two oceans simultaneously.
The omission is not a minor oversight. It is a structural feature of an argument that depends on presenting an incomplete version of history. The complete version is considerably more complicated, and considerably less useful to those seeking to extract financial commitments from the British government.
Britain accepted slavery was a moral wrong, and spent vast sums of money ending it. So how come we are portrayed as the bad guys by the reparations campaigners?
Find out more at: https://noreparations.uk/
Mark Griffin