Nobody Has Clean Hands

Let's start with the blunt bit. Slavery was evil. Not "complicated", not "a product of its time". Evil. People were owned, beaten, bred, bought and sold, and their children were taken from them. Nothing in this article softens that.

But if we only tell half of the story, we are not honouring the victims. We are using them. And I am not writing this from a safe distance, because my own family has a part in this history, and I will come to that.

First, the history itself. Slavery is as old as civilisation. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, the Americas before Columbus and right across Africa all had it. If you go looking for a society with clean hands, you will be looking a long time. Inside Africa, kingdoms and trading states enslaved war captives for centuries, and some grew rich doing it. That is not a comfortable fact, but it is still a fact.

From the seventh century, Arab and wider Islamic trading networks moved enslaved people out of East Africa, the Sahel and beyond. They went across the Sahara and through Indian Ocean ports like Zanzibar, into households, armies, mines and plantations across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Historians disagree on the numbers because the records are thinner, but many estimates land between ten and seventeen million people or more over about twelve centuries. Treat those figures as rough. The scale is still enormous. And it lasted. Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962, Oman followed in 1970, and Mauritania did not abolish it until 1981. Campaigners say slavery still exists there today.

Then came the part everyone knows. From the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and others built an industrial machine. Around twelve and a half million Africans were forced onto ships, and roughly ten and a half million survived the Middle Passage. Britain alone carried over three million. I will say this clearly: Europe built it, ran it and profited from it. Fortunes in Bristol, Liverpool, London and Glasgow were soaked in it, and some of the grand houses and institutions we still admire were paid for with it. Pretending otherwise would be a lie.

So why does Europe get most of the attention? There are fair answers. The Atlantic trade moved millions of people in a compressed window to build plantation economies. In the Americas, slavery became tied to skin colour and passed from mother to child, and that ideology outlived slavery itself and still echoes today. Ports, insurers and governments kept meticulous records, so we know the Atlantic story in detail. Millions of descendants live in Britain, America and the Caribbean, so for them the history is not abstract. It is family. And Western universities, media and museums are examining their own past, which is healthy, even if it can look one sided from outside. It is also true that Britain produced one of history's great abolition movements, passed the 1833 Act and sent the Royal Navy to hunt slave ships. That does not wipe the slate clean, but it does show that the story is not simple.

Even so, the imbalance is real. The Arab and Islamic slave trades get a fraction of the attention, partly because of thinner records, partly because there are fewer visible descendant communities in the West, and frankly because it is a harder conversation for many people to have openly. Pointing that out is not an attack on anyone, and it is not whataboutery. It is asking for the whole picture, because truth that has been trimmed to fit a narrative stops being truth.

I will not ask others to face the past while hiding from mine. When I researched my own family history, I found that one branch of my family, on my father's mother's side, were colonial officials and sugar plantation owners in the Caribbean from the 1670s into the 1800s. Their names appear in the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database, and their wealth rested on the labour of enslaved people. I do not dress that up. I am not going to say they were products of their time, because plenty of people of their time knew slavery was wrong and said so. I did nothing, and I will not claim guilt that is not mine. But I am sorry for what was done, and I would rather say so than stay quiet. I found no involvement in any of my other family lines, and I mention that only because accuracy cuts both ways. What I do not know is the names of the people who were enslaved, and that is where I am looking next.

Should countries apologise? Yes. An apology is not a performance. It is an honest acknowledgement of a wrong, and for many descendants it matters deeply. The same goes for families. I have said plainly what mine did, and I am sorry for it. But the principle has to be consistent. If acknowledgement is the standard, it applies to European states, to African rulers who sold their own neighbours, and to Arab and Islamic states and institutions. One rule for everyone, or it is not a principle, it is politics. What should follow an apology is another matter. Reparations, education, investment or simply remembrance? Decent, intelligent people disagree, and I am not going to pretend there is one tidy answer.

I also get why people are tired of the argument. Nobody alive today owned slaves, and nobody should carry guilt for what their ancestors did. A society that only defines itself by its worst chapters gets stuck. But the past does shape the present, in wealth, in attitudes and in who inherited what, and ignoring it does not make it disappear. So here is where I land. Learn it all. Tell it evenly. Acknowledge what needs acknowledging, starting at home. Then stop living there and start building.

Because slavery is not history. The International Labour Organization and Walk Free estimated in 2021 that around fifty million people live in modern slavery today, in forced labour, forced marriage and trafficking. That is more than at any point in the Atlantic trade. If we are serious about honouring those who suffered, the real test is what we do for the people enslaved right now.

No single group owns the guilt, and no single group owns the pain. Europeans, Africans and Arabs all took part, and all of them have something to face. So do I. Facing it honestly does not mean wallowing, and moving forward does not mean forgetting. It means telling the truth, with compassion, and then getting on with ending it for good.

A note on figures: historical estimates vary between scholars, especially for the Arab and Islamic trades, and should be read as approximate. The family research can be checked in the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database.