Flick on Nostr: > Let’s do what reparations advocates don’t do: be fair and put British ...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/08/britain-should-not-pay-a-penny-in-slavery-reparations/

> Let’s do what reparations advocates don’t do: be fair and put British involvement in proportion. In 1804, there were an estimated 45million chattel slaves around the world, of which the British share in the West Indies was just over one per cent. Of a total of at least 41million African slaves bought and transported across the Atlantic, the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, British merchants bought just under eight per cent, whereas Arabs were responsible for 37 per cent. But the original enslavers and traders of almost 100 per cent were other Africans. In the 1850s, the Fulani people of what is now northern Nigeria ran vast plantations employing four million slaves at any one time – more than the total transported to the Americas by the British in over 140 years.

> What’s more, unlike any African nation, the British 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 the slave trade, not least in Africa itself. The Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, has written that, ‘When the slave trade was abolished [by the British], Africans were against abolition’. Indeed, according to Plaut, many of them are still against it. Today, the trade and the institution are alive and well in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Libya.