Reparations for Slavery

Does someone deserve reparations for living here?

A coalition of 14 Caribbean states, including Jamaica, is now asking for reparations for slavery from Britain, France, and Holland.

I suppose I should support the campaign. For, after all, if these folks deserve money from modern Britons now for a policy that ended in 1833, I should surely score something nice for the longstanding occupation and mass starvation of my ancestors in Ireland, right up to the 1920s. And then there is the matter of the Irish slave trade.

If only it weren’t for the obvious injustice of the claims.

After all, not a single Briton living today has owned a slave, and not a single Jamaican can claim to have been enslaved. So why should either accuse the other of guilt or responsibility? If this is just, should modern Jews then bear responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?

The advocates of reparations say, ““You can’t have it both ways,” … “Your [British] society was developed. You are enjoying a lifestyle because of the blood, sweat and tears of people in the past.”

Yet this was a past that ended almost two hundred years ago. If it is really responsible for Britain’s current relative wealth, and Jamaica’s poverty, then how to explain the current wealth of Germany, for example, who was never involved in the slave trade, and has risen from utter desolation as recently as 1945? The same could be said for most of Europe, and Japan; or for any number of immigrant families who arrived destitute on America’s or Canada’s shores, and in two or three generations were quite well-off.

The demand overlooks the fact that, in world terms, Britain, France and Holland were actually among the first countries to abolish slavery. It persisted much longer in Africa: in Niger and Mauretania, into the 21st century. Had their ancestors not been transported to the new world, it would probably have taken several generations longer for African-Caribbeaners to have achieved freedom from the practice.

The demand for reparations also overlooks the fact that Britain left the ex-slaves and their modern descendants in possession of several new democratic nations. And that the citizens of these countries, on the whole, are better off financially as well as in terms of personal freedom than African-Caribbeaners would be if they were now living in Africa. Jamaica’s GDP per capita is higher than almost all black African countries, and a full ten times greater than the ethnically comparable nation of Liberia. And Jamaica is one of the poorest of the former British possessions in the Caribbean. The GDP per capita of the Bahamas, for example, is three to four times larger again.

Obviously, such variations in the economic welfare of otherwise similar states have nothing to do with slavery two or three hundred years ago. They have to do with good and bad governments today.

Unfortunately, it is entirely in the interests of bad governments and corrupt elites to demand reparations for slavery. Not just for the free cash, but to distract attention from the real problem, and their own culpability.