Review of 'Reparations' by Nigel Biggar

Reparations are not about justice but about delegitimising Western civilisation.

Written by Lipton Matthews.

Nigel Biggar’s Reparations: The Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt is a courageous intervention in the increasingly fraught debate over the West’s historical involvement in slavery and colonialism. It offers an incisive critique of contemporary calls for reparations—which are less about justice than about power, symbolism and false guilt. As its title suggests, the book’s central thesis is that Westerners, especially Britons, are being manipulated into assuming moral responsibility for historical wrongs that happened in numerous civilizations (not just the West) or that weren’t even “wrongs” in the first place.

Biggar begins by discussing the political climate in which the reparations movement has re-emerged over the last few years. The key event, he argues, was the death of George Floyd in 2020, which triggered a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that quickly spread to Britain. Anti-colonial activists seized upon these protests as an opportunity to reframe British society as inherently racist and to paint white Britons as morally culpable for slavery and colonialism.

This movement, Biggar notes, has been actively cultivated by institutions such as the CARICOM Reparations Commission, founded in 2013 by Sir Hilary Beckles. The Commission sees the British Empire as one long project of economic exploitation—encompassing slavery, colonialism and indentured labor. Its reparations campaign, bolstered by documents like the Brattle Report (which claims that Britain owes over $26 trillion to its former colonies), has managed to secure political sympathizers within Britain’s Labour Party.

A key strength of Reparations is its rigorous contextualisation of slavery. Biggar devotes several chapters to showing that slavery was a universal human practice, not a European or British invention. For example, the African kingdoms of Dahomey, Kongo and Asante played an active role in enslaving their neighbors and selling them to Europeans, often getting rich in the process. The narrative of a predatory Europe exploiting a passive Africa is deeply misleading.

Biggar reminds us that the trans-Saharan slave trade, overseen by Muslim traders, lasted longer than the trans-Atlantic one and transported far more people—roughly 17 million Africans (as opposed to 11 million in the trans-Atlantic trade). And the Islamic world’s treatment of slaves was equally, if not more, brutal. The castration of African boys to produce eunuchs for the Ottoman court was a cruelty that rivals any from the West Indies. It involved severing genitalia with razors and sealing the wounds with boiling oil—a procedure that killed many and permanently emasculated the survivors.

What’s more, white Europeans were victims as well as perpetrators of slavery. The Vikings sold white slaves to Muslim traders, and Barbary pirates snatched over a million people from coastal towns in Ireland, Spain and Italy. These facts completely undermine the simplistic anti-white narrative that dominates the reparations discourse.

Biggar does not try to whitewash the horrors of British slavery. He acknowledges the brutality of the Middle Passage and the harsh conditions on West Indian sugar plantations. Yet he also notes that some planters treated their slaves with a degree of humanity, sometimes even arranging for their manumission in their wills. And not all systems of bondage in British territories were rooted in chattel slavery: indentured servitude of both Europeans and Asians was widespread and occasionally more fatal than slavery itself.

Biggar underscores that plantations were not unique to the Americas. The Fulani people of West Africa established massive plantation economies in the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria, and the Omani Arabs operated similar economies on the East African coast. In fact, the Sokoto Caliphate rivaled America in terms of the total number of slaves. Large-scale, plantation-based slavery was a global institution, not some colonial aberration.

Biggar is particularly critical of the popular claim, put forward by Eric Williams, that the industrial revolution was built on the profits of slavery. Drawing on recent research, he argues that slavery’s contribution to Britain’s industrialisation was modest at best. The historian David Richardson estimated that, by 1790, profits from the slave trade were responsible for less than 1% of domestic investment. Likewise, David Eltis and Stanley Engerman have shown that the economic gains from slavery were small relative to the economy as a whole. They also point out that Portugal transported about two-thirds as many slaves as Britain. So if slavery fuelled Britain’s industrialisation, Portugal should have been richer per head of population—yet its economic performance was far less impressive.

As Biggar explains, the broader industrial economy—driven by coal, iron and textile manufacturing—would have developed regardless of the Atlantic economy. Even Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson’s revisionist work, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, which attempts to revive Williams’s thesis, ultimately concedes that slavery was not essential for the emergence of industrial capitalism.

A sizeable part of the book is dedicated to the myth of African innocence. Biggar notes that African kingdoms such as the Asante Empire not only sold slaves to Europeans but also practiced human sacrifice. These societies even resisted attempts to abolish slavery, viewing it as essential to their political survival. Remarkably, the Jamaican Maroons—hailed today as symbols of black resistance—owned slaves themselves.

This complicity undermines the moral absolutism of reparations activists. If historic involvement in slavery is the basis for reparations, then African and Muslim states should be held accountable too. Yet this perfectly reasonable claim is typically dismissed or ignored, exposing the selective outrage (and anti-white agenda) of reparations activists.

Arguably the most compelling rebuttal to the case for reparations is Britain’s role in ending slavery. After abolishing the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, Britain spent vast sums of money and diplomatic capital suppressing slavery across the world. The Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic for over five decades, intercepting slave ships and liberating their human cargo. So far from profiting from the slave trade, Britain incurred significant costs to end it. Eltis concluded that those costs amounted to about £250,000 year—equivalent to around £1.7 billion in today’s money.

Biggar argues that this legacy calls for pride, rather than shame. Britain's self-imposed abolitionist campaign was unique in history, and forms part of a broader moral revolution in the West that led to international norms and human rights law.

Biggar devotes an entire chapter to dissecting the Brattle Report—which attempted to quantify Britain’s alleged debt to its former colonies. He exposes the report’s flawed assumptions and glaring omissions. Crucially, it treats black descendants of slaves as uniquely entitled to redress, while ignoring all the other groups whose ancestors suffered. It also ignores all the groups whose ancestors were made better off by British policy, such as those who would have been enslaved but not for the actions of the Royal Navy.

The report presents a distorted picture of reality in which colonialism is entirely to blame for the backwardness of former colonies. Biggar points to Barbados as a powerful counterexample. Once a British colony, the Caribbean archipelago has outperformed its peers in terms of economic development. According to World Bank data, its scores on indicators of policy effectiveness and institutional quality place it within the range of OECD countries—in some cases near the top of that range.

By way of contrast, Jamaica’s post-independence experience was marked by exceptionally poor governance, particularly between 1972 and 1984, when living standards crashed. Few nations not embroiled in civil war have done so poorly. Although there has been some recovery since then, the country’s real per capita income today is similar to what it was in 1975.

Such disparate outcomes undermine the narrative that colonialism itself explains persistent underdevelopment. By ignoring this inconvenient fact and attempting to monetise centuries-old wrongs, the Brattle report descends into political theatre. As Biggar points out, turning history into a moral ledger where guilt can be paid off in cash is intellectually unserious.

A civilisation that internalises false guilt becomes susceptible to manipulation and self-destruction. Reparations, in Biggar’s view, are not about justice but about delegitimising Western civilisation. He concludes with a call for honesty and courage in resisting this agenda. Britain abolished slavery nearly two centuries ago and then led the world in stamping it out. That legacy is one of moral progress, not wickedness.

‘Reparations: The Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt’ is available for preorder in both the UK and the US.

Lipton Matthews is a research professional and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute, The Epoch Times and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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