Calls for Britain to pay reparations for slavery are gathering pace. The Church of England has committed £100 million to Project Spire. Jamaica’s petition has been referred to the Privy Council, and Caribbean leaders are pressing the case through the Commonwealth. The Brattle Group puts Britain’s bill at £18.8 trillion, more than the UK’s entire net wealth.
In a new IEA paper, The Atonement Complex, Professor Doug Stokes argues that this case does not hold up. Slavery enriched a small group of Britons, not the nation. The best evidence suggests a gain of at most a decade’s worth of per capita income growth. Ending it came at a huge cost: suppressing the trade took 1.8% of national income a year for sixty years, and emancipation cost £20 million and five thousand British lives. Britain was one participant among many, alongside African states such as Dahomey and the Ottoman Empire. What set Britain apart was its role in abolition.
Professor Stokes warns that this one-sided “atonement complex” has become a tool for hostile regimes such as Russia, China and Iran. Rather than accept liability for a trade it spent sixty years suppressing, the Government should press the Commonwealth to tackle the fifty million people enslaved today, a third of them in four of its member states.
