28 May 2024. Nigel for The Times.

Scotland owes over £20 billion in reparations for slavery, claims the Cambridge don, Michael Banner. And if the Kelvingrove Museum is to be believed, the Scots should pay it. “Glasgow was one of the major port cities in Britain which benefited from the [slave] trade”, declares its display, ‘Glasgow—City of Empire’. And many merchants who traded cargo produced by slaves “invested a lot of their wealth into the city”. “In what ways”, then, “could we make reparations for this?”.

This ‘decolonising’ narrative is a travesty of the truth. According to the University of Glasgow’s Stephen Mullen, there was “a general lack of direct Scottish involvement” in the slave-trade. In total, only twenty-seven slave voyages left Scottish ports, with a further four being funded from Scotland, over half-a-century. And while it’s true that profits from slave-trading and slavery made a greater contribution to Scotland’s economic transformation than Britain’s as a whole, the consensus among economic historians is that their contribution to the latter was very modest—maybe 12 per cent, reckons David Richardson. 

But the museum’s greatest distortion arises from what it fails to say. It is largely silent on the campaign to abolish slavery–“the first human rights crusade in British history,” according to Mullen, “with an unprecedented mobilisation of public opinion and support”. In the initial campaign Scotland played an important part, sending 185 of the 519 petitions to Parliament in 1792 and the later Scottish abolitionist movement, especially in Glasgow, was “a hugely significant factor in promoting an international conscience”.

The display is absolutely silent on the fact that, after abolishing slave-trading throughout her empire in 1807, Britain took the lead in suppressing both the trade and slavery itself at sea and on land, worldwide, over the course of the following century-and-a-half. The American political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, estimate the cost at roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over sixty years from 1808 to 1867. By rough comparison, in 2021 the UK spent 0.5 per cent of GDP on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.

As part of the British nation the Scots were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish the hitherto universal practices of slave-trading and slavery. Thereafter they used their imperial power to suppress the trade and the institution from Brazil, across Africa and India, to Australasia—at considerable cost in money, diplomatic effort, naval resources, and lives.

Before calling for reparations, the Kelvingrove needs to tell the whole truth, displaying the credit column, too.