No idea why the country that boldly put an end to slavery should pay reparations to anyone. If anything, the rest of the world should pay reparations to Britain for the IR, and ending slavery.
"If anything, the rest of the world should pay reparations to Britain for the IR, and ending slavery."
The British did not end slavery...it still exists in parts of the world today. Nor did Britain end slavery in the United States; the United States ended slavery in the United States.
"Of course not, they ended slavery where they could and set the example for the rest of the world."
A little overstated. Britain is to be honored for its stand against slavery. But while the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was a landmark, it did not end slavery throughout the entire British sphere of influence. The Act explicitly excluded territories like British India, where slavery was addressed separately by the Indian Slavery Act, 1843. In regions colonized later, such as Nigeria, the abolition of pre-existing local systems of slavery was a gradual process that extended into the early 20th century. Furthermore, in British protectorates, which retained their own local laws, the institution persisted for much longer. For example, slavery in Bahrain was not legally abolished until 1937.
The Nigerian tribal chiefs resisted Britain's attempts to abolish slavery within the colony as they were accumulating great wealth from enslaving and selling their rival tribes. Some managed to negotiate special dispensation where the local British colonial official would look the other way.
The tremendous advancements of the British, as well as the rest of Western Civilization, in wealth, health, living conditions, and science and technology are the result of intelligence, inquisitiveness, industriousness, insight, inspiration, imagination, and inventiveness.
The empirical point is solid. Britain’s wealth was not primarily built on slavery, and the historical picture is far more complex than the reparations narrative suggests.
But why does this dry historical question feel so loaded? Because it is made to carry the weight of a different conflict entirely: guilt and power.
Both sides make the same mistake — and often the same dishonest move — of hinging the moral and political question on a particular reading of the historical one. If Britain’s economy had depended more heavily on slavery, would the British then be obliged to pay reparations? And if not, at what threshold do they escape them? The entire framing outsources Britain's moral self-understanding to an econometric reconstruction of the eighteenth century.
The legitimacy of a civilisation, and the obligations it owes to others, cannot be allowed to rise or fall on contingent empirical claims. To tie guilt to a contested version of history is to surrender sovereignty to whoever controls the narrative. What kind of culture would voluntarily impoverish itself to benefit groups openly hostile to it? Only one that has lost its internal sources of legitimacy and seeks absolution from outsiders.
My own view is simpler: even if slavery had contributed far more to Britain’s wealth than it did, reparations should still be dismissed out of hand. History is not a court of justice; it is a theatre of tragedy and power. Other civilisations understand this implicitly, as the West once did. They rely on inherited loyalties and organic attachments as a form of civilisational immunology — anchoring duty and belonging in prejudice without needing to litigate the past. That makes moral blackmail impossible.
Acknowledge the facts of history honestly, and reject guilt and reparations categorically — not because slavery was insignificant, but because legitimacy comes from within, and because on the stage of history, guilt is suicidal.
I am not offering to write it. Someone should do that with more abilities and knowledge than I. However, I would be very interested in reading a well-written article and seeing the reader's response.
Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher who champions this.
Well stated. Sowell's discussions on slavery come to mind.
That the very institutions that increased human prosperity & liberated most of humanity from thralldom are under siege speaks volumes about the corrosive nature of modern delusions. Enshrined irrationality is the bloody goddess of strife & she seems to beckon with allure to her strident partisans.
I watch the rampaging crowds with indifference; but then again, I'm in Texas with an armory, surrounded by neighbors that all agree: "molon labe." Because though not a trained biologist, I can define the term "woman" ; & because, though not an effete intellectual, I abide in "Common Sense." (T Paine)
This piece reads like selective economic history packaged to dismiss an entire reparations debate without engaging with the evidence.
You argue that Britain’s wealth was “endogenous” and largely unrelated to slavery, yet you ignore the huge body of research showing how deeply the Atlantic slave economy and the wider empire were entangled with British finance, insurance, shipping, banking and state revenue. The fact that some growth occurred before 1700 doesn’t erase the documented role of slave-derived capital, the massive 1830s bailout of slave-owners, or the reinvestment of those funds into railways, infrastructure and financial institutions that shaped modern Britain.
Calling slavery a “byproduct” of British institutions is a rhetorical manoeuvre, not serious analysis. The marine insurance sector, London credit markets, and West Indian commerce were structurally tied to slavery for centuries. Pretending this was a marginal sideline is just bad history.
The section on Africa is far worse: sweeping generalisations about “superstitious beliefs” and “low test scores” are not institutional analysis; they’re racialised caricatures. You reduce complex histories of African states, pre-colonial commercial systems, the destructive impact of both the Atlantic and colonial trades, and the long-term effects of imperial partition into a simplistic claim that Africa’s underdevelopment is mostly cultural. That’s ideology, not scholarship.
Finally, the argument that Black Britons and Caribbean nations have already received “reparations” simply by living in the West is morally unserious. Relative living standards don’t answer questions about historical harm, compensation (which Britain gave to slave-owners, not the enslaved), or the continuing legacies of empire. Aid programmes and a handful of scholarships are not reparations.
In short: the article cherry-picks data that flatters a predetermined conclusion, downplays well-established historical facts, and ends by implying that Black people should consider Western prosperity their compensation. It’s a seductive narrative for people who want the past to be simple — but it’s neither accurate nor intellectually honest.
England had a financial advantage before acquiring colonies. Finance in England helped to propel slavery and financial institutions implemented innovative strategies to fund the slavery business. Nobel prizing winning economists have also shown that the contribution of the slave trade was indirect. The transatlantic trade stimulated investments in property rights. However institutional exposure does not always stimulate innovation in property rights. Africans have preserved communal property rights and anti-business inheritance protocols despite exposure to the West. Compensating slaveowners expedited the abolition of slavery. Africans wanted compensation too but they did not have a lobby to sponsor them in the UK. England does not owe blacks anything. Being in the UK is reparation for blacks. They benefit from scholarships and other luxuries because they are black. Africa is Indeed superstitious and test scores are low. Africa has the lowest level of human capital.
They don’t need to pay reparations. It’s not going to happen in America anyway. But the Europeans cannot simply deny any involvement or benefit gained from the primitive accumulation taking place in North America that fueled the industrial revolution in Europe.
Eh, I’m not a reparations guys, but this articles is leaving out a couple of pretty huge pieces of the story.
First, it sets up a weird either/or that doesn’t really exist: either Britain’s rise was driven by internal institutions and “useful knowledge” or it was driven by slavery and empire. In reality, those two things are entangled. The same financial sophistication, legal innovation and empirical mindset the author celebrates are precisely what allowed Britain to plug itself into a global system of extraction and make it insanely profitable. You don’t get bonus moral points because you exploited enslaved labour efficiently.
Take cotton. You can talk all you like about productivity statistics from 1270–1700, but the decisive phase of British industrialization is the late 18th and 19th centuries, when cotton textiles are front and center. Britain wasn’t growing its own cotton. The raw material that fed the mills in Lancashire and made Manchester “Cottonopolis” was overwhelmingly grown by enslaved people in the Americas. That doesn’t mean “100% of British wealth = slavery,” but it does mean that a key industrial sector, and all the downstream finance, shipping, insurance and infrastructure, were heavily downstream of slave labour. The essay treats slavery almost as an accidental side hustle that clever institutions happened to touch, instead of something that became deeply baked into those institutions’ business models.
The same goes for the institutions themselves. Joint-stock companies, marine insurance, bills of exchange, sophisticated bookkeeping ; all of that is real, and it did matter. But in practice, those tools were co-developed with imperial and slave economies, not separately and then applied later as an afterthought. The state backed chartered companies that conquered, monopolized and extracted; insurers wrote policies on ships, cargo and enslaved people; banks and merchants recycled profits from colonial trade into domestic investment. The article describes the slave trade as though you could just surgically remove it and the institutional landscape would look basically the same. That’s not obvious at all; a lot of capital formation and risk-management know-how was learned by doing, and what they were doing was empire.
Then there’s the moral sleight of hand in how “rationality” is used. The fact that slavery can be modelled with actuarial tables and made “insurable” is presented as a testament to British reason, not as a damning indictment of what that reason was deployed to justify. Saying “business was governed by law and mathematics, not sentiment” is not the defense the author seems to think it is. It’s precisely the problem: people built a legal and financial architecture that turned mass violence and dispossession into a series of tidy balance sheets and contracts. That’s not some neutral background condition; it’s the institutionalization of racialized exploitation.
The bit on Africa is even more lopsided. Africa “remains the poorest continent” because of weak institutions, low test scores and “superstitious beliefs”? That’s an extraordinarily glib way to wave away centuries of external interference : including the very same European powers whose institutional genius the author praises. Enslavement and forced migration of millions of people, repeated military interventions, the carving up of polities at the conference table, extractive colonialism and debt ; these are not footnotes. You can’t just mention the trans-Saharan slave trade, call it “unscientific,” and leave it there, as if that somehow absolves the Atlantic system or magically explains contemporary underdevelopment.
And even if you buy the “institutions did most of the work” story, that doesn’t actually kill the reparations question. You can concede that Britain generated some endogenous growth before and beyond slavery and still ask: who was violently excluded from those gains, and who bore disproportionate costs? Reparations arguments are about harms and transfers, not about pretending that no one in Britain ever worked hard or innovated. The article never really engages that; it just tries to show slavery wasn’t all of Britain’s story and then jumps to “therefore, reparations are incoherent.”
Finally, the way it talks about Black Britons and Caribbean nations is pretty gross. Scholarships, universal credit and the NHS are not “forms of reparation”; they’re part of the basic social contract in a rich country, available (in theory) to everyone. Black people also pay taxes, work, invent and create ; they’re not passive recipients of white institutional generosity. And the idea that “to live in a Western country that is stable and reasonably prosperous is itself a form of reparation” is upside-down: many Black Britons are there because of the very imperial entanglements the piece is trying to sanitize, and they still face legacies of discrimination that those vaunted institutions helped encode. And outside of refugees, they're allowed in because Britain wants labor that speaks their language, not because it's feeling particularly generous
"Africa “remains the poorest continent” because of weak institutions, low test scores and “superstitious beliefs”?
Black Africa was certainly one of the least developed parts of the world before 1500 and it's logical it's still underdeveloped now. Development is a thing nations and cultures learn to do for centuries, if not millennia. As for the colonialism, there were few colonies in Africa before late 19th century, mostly there were nothing but trade posts.
By the way I'm not sure how black Africans (not African descendants in the colonies) can be eligible for any reparations, it was their ancestors (in a lot of cases, direct ancestors, the chances for that are probably much better than in case of white Europeans) who were the primary beneficiaries of the slave trade. Logically, they should be among the ones who pay reparations.
Africans in Africa wouldn't benefit in reparations from slavery, maybe for some of the stuff that happened during the colonial era, but that's separate.
>Black Africa was certainly one of the least developed parts of the world before 1500 and it's logical it's still underdeveloped now.
Some of parts of it were, some weren't. I don't see how it's logical it's still underdeveloped now. South Korea used to be underdeveloped. Northern Europe used to be underdeveloped. Things change.
No idea why the country that boldly put an end to slavery should pay reparations to anyone. If anything, the rest of the world should pay reparations to Britain for the IR, and ending slavery.
"If anything, the rest of the world should pay reparations to Britain for the IR, and ending slavery."
The British did not end slavery...it still exists in parts of the world today. Nor did Britain end slavery in the United States; the United States ended slavery in the United States.
Of course not, they ended slavery where they could and set the example for the rest of the world. The IR hasn’t made it everywhere either. Sheesh!
"Of course not, they ended slavery where they could and set the example for the rest of the world."
A little overstated. Britain is to be honored for its stand against slavery. But while the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was a landmark, it did not end slavery throughout the entire British sphere of influence. The Act explicitly excluded territories like British India, where slavery was addressed separately by the Indian Slavery Act, 1843. In regions colonized later, such as Nigeria, the abolition of pre-existing local systems of slavery was a gradual process that extended into the early 20th century. Furthermore, in British protectorates, which retained their own local laws, the institution persisted for much longer. For example, slavery in Bahrain was not legally abolished until 1937.
The Nigerian tribal chiefs resisted Britain's attempts to abolish slavery within the colony as they were accumulating great wealth from enslaving and selling their rival tribes. Some managed to negotiate special dispensation where the local British colonial official would look the other way.
The tremendous advancements of the British, as well as the rest of Western Civilization, in wealth, health, living conditions, and science and technology are the result of intelligence, inquisitiveness, industriousness, insight, inspiration, imagination, and inventiveness.
The empirical point is solid. Britain’s wealth was not primarily built on slavery, and the historical picture is far more complex than the reparations narrative suggests.
But why does this dry historical question feel so loaded? Because it is made to carry the weight of a different conflict entirely: guilt and power.
Both sides make the same mistake — and often the same dishonest move — of hinging the moral and political question on a particular reading of the historical one. If Britain’s economy had depended more heavily on slavery, would the British then be obliged to pay reparations? And if not, at what threshold do they escape them? The entire framing outsources Britain's moral self-understanding to an econometric reconstruction of the eighteenth century.
The legitimacy of a civilisation, and the obligations it owes to others, cannot be allowed to rise or fall on contingent empirical claims. To tie guilt to a contested version of history is to surrender sovereignty to whoever controls the narrative. What kind of culture would voluntarily impoverish itself to benefit groups openly hostile to it? Only one that has lost its internal sources of legitimacy and seeks absolution from outsiders.
My own view is simpler: even if slavery had contributed far more to Britain’s wealth than it did, reparations should still be dismissed out of hand. History is not a court of justice; it is a theatre of tragedy and power. Other civilisations understand this implicitly, as the West once did. They rely on inherited loyalties and organic attachments as a form of civilisational immunology — anchoring duty and belonging in prejudice without needing to litigate the past. That makes moral blackmail impossible.
Acknowledge the facts of history honestly, and reject guilt and reparations categorically — not because slavery was insignificant, but because legitimacy comes from within, and because on the stage of history, guilt is suicidal.
In any event, the privilege of living in an economically developed Western society is reparation.
Solid piece, thanks.
Great analysis with data.
Compelling essay, Lipton. Excellent as always.
Aporia, how about a piece on Limitarianism?
We'd be open to that.
—NC
I am not offering to write it. Someone should do that with more abilities and knowledge than I. However, I would be very interested in reading a well-written article and seeing the reader's response.
Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher who champions this.
To clarify, my primary interest lies in the field of Economic Limitarianism.
Well, some of it was. What is capital after all if not the accumulated crime and sacrifice of centuries, plus interest?
Lenny never was very funny. This is his worst joke ever.
Well stated. Sowell's discussions on slavery come to mind.
That the very institutions that increased human prosperity & liberated most of humanity from thralldom are under siege speaks volumes about the corrosive nature of modern delusions. Enshrined irrationality is the bloody goddess of strife & she seems to beckon with allure to her strident partisans.
I watch the rampaging crowds with indifference; but then again, I'm in Texas with an armory, surrounded by neighbors that all agree: "molon labe." Because though not a trained biologist, I can define the term "woman" ; & because, though not an effete intellectual, I abide in "Common Sense." (T Paine)
This piece reads like selective economic history packaged to dismiss an entire reparations debate without engaging with the evidence.
You argue that Britain’s wealth was “endogenous” and largely unrelated to slavery, yet you ignore the huge body of research showing how deeply the Atlantic slave economy and the wider empire were entangled with British finance, insurance, shipping, banking and state revenue. The fact that some growth occurred before 1700 doesn’t erase the documented role of slave-derived capital, the massive 1830s bailout of slave-owners, or the reinvestment of those funds into railways, infrastructure and financial institutions that shaped modern Britain.
Calling slavery a “byproduct” of British institutions is a rhetorical manoeuvre, not serious analysis. The marine insurance sector, London credit markets, and West Indian commerce were structurally tied to slavery for centuries. Pretending this was a marginal sideline is just bad history.
The section on Africa is far worse: sweeping generalisations about “superstitious beliefs” and “low test scores” are not institutional analysis; they’re racialised caricatures. You reduce complex histories of African states, pre-colonial commercial systems, the destructive impact of both the Atlantic and colonial trades, and the long-term effects of imperial partition into a simplistic claim that Africa’s underdevelopment is mostly cultural. That’s ideology, not scholarship.
Finally, the argument that Black Britons and Caribbean nations have already received “reparations” simply by living in the West is morally unserious. Relative living standards don’t answer questions about historical harm, compensation (which Britain gave to slave-owners, not the enslaved), or the continuing legacies of empire. Aid programmes and a handful of scholarships are not reparations.
In short: the article cherry-picks data that flatters a predetermined conclusion, downplays well-established historical facts, and ends by implying that Black people should consider Western prosperity their compensation. It’s a seductive narrative for people who want the past to be simple — but it’s neither accurate nor intellectually honest.
England had a financial advantage before acquiring colonies. Finance in England helped to propel slavery and financial institutions implemented innovative strategies to fund the slavery business. Nobel prizing winning economists have also shown that the contribution of the slave trade was indirect. The transatlantic trade stimulated investments in property rights. However institutional exposure does not always stimulate innovation in property rights. Africans have preserved communal property rights and anti-business inheritance protocols despite exposure to the West. Compensating slaveowners expedited the abolition of slavery. Africans wanted compensation too but they did not have a lobby to sponsor them in the UK. England does not owe blacks anything. Being in the UK is reparation for blacks. They benefit from scholarships and other luxuries because they are black. Africa is Indeed superstitious and test scores are low. Africa has the lowest level of human capital.
Urging all to read Thomas Sowell's and Douglas Murray's thoughts on this matter (The War On The West)
https://www.lotuseaters.com/the-war-on-the-west-how-to-prevail-in-the-age-of-unreason-20-04-2022
They don’t need to pay reparations. It’s not going to happen in America anyway. But the Europeans cannot simply deny any involvement or benefit gained from the primitive accumulation taking place in North America that fueled the industrial revolution in Europe.
The head figure in the Brattle Report is a man named Colemon Bazelon. If you are interested look at the history of that surname.
Eh, I’m not a reparations guys, but this articles is leaving out a couple of pretty huge pieces of the story.
First, it sets up a weird either/or that doesn’t really exist: either Britain’s rise was driven by internal institutions and “useful knowledge” or it was driven by slavery and empire. In reality, those two things are entangled. The same financial sophistication, legal innovation and empirical mindset the author celebrates are precisely what allowed Britain to plug itself into a global system of extraction and make it insanely profitable. You don’t get bonus moral points because you exploited enslaved labour efficiently.
Take cotton. You can talk all you like about productivity statistics from 1270–1700, but the decisive phase of British industrialization is the late 18th and 19th centuries, when cotton textiles are front and center. Britain wasn’t growing its own cotton. The raw material that fed the mills in Lancashire and made Manchester “Cottonopolis” was overwhelmingly grown by enslaved people in the Americas. That doesn’t mean “100% of British wealth = slavery,” but it does mean that a key industrial sector, and all the downstream finance, shipping, insurance and infrastructure, were heavily downstream of slave labour. The essay treats slavery almost as an accidental side hustle that clever institutions happened to touch, instead of something that became deeply baked into those institutions’ business models.
The same goes for the institutions themselves. Joint-stock companies, marine insurance, bills of exchange, sophisticated bookkeeping ; all of that is real, and it did matter. But in practice, those tools were co-developed with imperial and slave economies, not separately and then applied later as an afterthought. The state backed chartered companies that conquered, monopolized and extracted; insurers wrote policies on ships, cargo and enslaved people; banks and merchants recycled profits from colonial trade into domestic investment. The article describes the slave trade as though you could just surgically remove it and the institutional landscape would look basically the same. That’s not obvious at all; a lot of capital formation and risk-management know-how was learned by doing, and what they were doing was empire.
Then there’s the moral sleight of hand in how “rationality” is used. The fact that slavery can be modelled with actuarial tables and made “insurable” is presented as a testament to British reason, not as a damning indictment of what that reason was deployed to justify. Saying “business was governed by law and mathematics, not sentiment” is not the defense the author seems to think it is. It’s precisely the problem: people built a legal and financial architecture that turned mass violence and dispossession into a series of tidy balance sheets and contracts. That’s not some neutral background condition; it’s the institutionalization of racialized exploitation.
The bit on Africa is even more lopsided. Africa “remains the poorest continent” because of weak institutions, low test scores and “superstitious beliefs”? That’s an extraordinarily glib way to wave away centuries of external interference : including the very same European powers whose institutional genius the author praises. Enslavement and forced migration of millions of people, repeated military interventions, the carving up of polities at the conference table, extractive colonialism and debt ; these are not footnotes. You can’t just mention the trans-Saharan slave trade, call it “unscientific,” and leave it there, as if that somehow absolves the Atlantic system or magically explains contemporary underdevelopment.
And even if you buy the “institutions did most of the work” story, that doesn’t actually kill the reparations question. You can concede that Britain generated some endogenous growth before and beyond slavery and still ask: who was violently excluded from those gains, and who bore disproportionate costs? Reparations arguments are about harms and transfers, not about pretending that no one in Britain ever worked hard or innovated. The article never really engages that; it just tries to show slavery wasn’t all of Britain’s story and then jumps to “therefore, reparations are incoherent.”
Finally, the way it talks about Black Britons and Caribbean nations is pretty gross. Scholarships, universal credit and the NHS are not “forms of reparation”; they’re part of the basic social contract in a rich country, available (in theory) to everyone. Black people also pay taxes, work, invent and create ; they’re not passive recipients of white institutional generosity. And the idea that “to live in a Western country that is stable and reasonably prosperous is itself a form of reparation” is upside-down: many Black Britons are there because of the very imperial entanglements the piece is trying to sanitize, and they still face legacies of discrimination that those vaunted institutions helped encode. And outside of refugees, they're allowed in because Britain wants labor that speaks their language, not because it's feeling particularly generous
"Africa “remains the poorest continent” because of weak institutions, low test scores and “superstitious beliefs”?
Black Africa was certainly one of the least developed parts of the world before 1500 and it's logical it's still underdeveloped now. Development is a thing nations and cultures learn to do for centuries, if not millennia. As for the colonialism, there were few colonies in Africa before late 19th century, mostly there were nothing but trade posts.
By the way I'm not sure how black Africans (not African descendants in the colonies) can be eligible for any reparations, it was their ancestors (in a lot of cases, direct ancestors, the chances for that are probably much better than in case of white Europeans) who were the primary beneficiaries of the slave trade. Logically, they should be among the ones who pay reparations.
Africans in Africa wouldn't benefit in reparations from slavery, maybe for some of the stuff that happened during the colonial era, but that's separate.
>Black Africa was certainly one of the least developed parts of the world before 1500 and it's logical it's still underdeveloped now.
Some of parts of it were, some weren't. I don't see how it's logical it's still underdeveloped now. South Korea used to be underdeveloped. Northern Europe used to be underdeveloped. Things change.