By Mike Coté
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Since its establishment in the 1750s, the British Museum
has been the cultural institution at the heart of the United Kingdom. Intended
to cover all aspects of study, from history to science, it was always meant to
be open to visitors from all across the world. It has evolved with the times,
shifting based on developments in human knowledge and collecting a smorgasbord
of cultural and historical artifacts from civilizations throughout mankind’s
past. It is simply astounding in the breadth and depth of its collections and
exhibits. But now, progressive activists wish to add one more permanent display
to this cornucopia of culture: a dedicated section lambasting Britain for its
role in the African slave trade.
The museum is currently undergoing a major
renovation, expanding its galleries and reorienting many of its exhibits.
The plan is to bring the institution into the 21st century as a place where
visitors can experience the sum total of world knowledge in the novel ways in
which we can explore it today. Technological integration, changes in how
artifacts are displayed, and physical expansion will help accomplish that
mission and allow the museum to fulfill its original purpose long into the
future. This much-needed renovation, however, is being targeted by left-wing
political activists who see it as an opportunity to weave their favored
ideology into the fabric of the organization.
The Good Law Project, a progressive group linked with
social-justice causes and anti-Brexit activism, is the driving force behind the
“No Room for Slavery” project, which seeks to commit the
British Museum to create a permanent exhibit about the country’s role in the
transatlantic slave trade. It argues that Britain played a uniquely pernicious
part in the trade in humans that characterized the early modern era and that
this reading of history should be ensconced in the nation’s preeminent museum.
The project is also backed by the racial justice organization The World
Reimagined. Both of these groups gained significant resources — including
government funding — in the wake of the 2020 “racial reckoning,” and they are
using them to push this ideology into all facets of British life. The British
Museum is a ripe target, especially during this restructuring.
The activists claim that it is necessary to properly educate British citizens about
the “awkward truths” of their past to help avoid “racist violence.” They say
that cultural institutions must ensure that the progressive conception of
British history, one focused on the purported evils of the imperial past, is
the dominant vision of the “national story.” The campaign’s frontman, a former Labour
MP candidate, said that:
What is currently on display at the
British Museum is an inadequate representation of the history of British
involvement in the trade of enslaved Africans. . . . This is not about
moralising, being right or wrong, or introducing something that is contested;
our calls are for a clear, comprehensive and permanent exhibit to present this
defining period of our national story.
The campaign paid for a survey which found,
unsurprisingly based on its phrasing, that 53 percent of respondents thought a permanent exhibit on Britain’s role in slavery was
appropriate and 66 percent saw the British Museum as having a role in
educating the public about the topic.
The British Museum should listen to public sentiment by
creating a permanent exhibit about Britain’s unique part in the slave trade.
But it should do so in a way that is historically accurate. If they focused on
the most important British contributions to global slavery, the result would be
extremely useful in educating a public that lacks such an understanding:
Britain was not special in participating in slavery, but it was in ending it.
Nearly every human civilization engaged in some form of
human bondage. European empires and Western Hemisphere states during the early
modern period were no exception. The Arab slave trade, bringing in captives
from sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Europe, lasted for over 1,000 years
and was profoundly brutal. Ancient Roman slavery involved horrendous conditions
where slaves would be worked to death within a matter of months. Slaves built
the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of India and China, and the cities of
Mesoamerica. Slaves were used as field labor, conscripted soldiers, sexual
playthings, and human sacrifices. People held slaves of the same race, as well
as different ones. They sold and bought their own just as much as they did
outsiders. Humanity was defined by this horrific institution for thousands of
years. The British Museum holds artifacts from many of these societies; should
each be contextualized by explaining their relation to the universal
institution of slavery?
If one wishes to examine the truly unique aspect of
Britain’s involvement with slavery, the outcome is the exact opposite of that
which the “No Room for Slavery” advocates promote. Instead of showing Britain
as just another force for evil that requires modern-day recompense, it would
prove that the British Empire did far more than any other society or power in
world history to end the scourge of human bondage for good.
Abolitionism — the idea that slavery is a moral stain on
mankind and that it should be legally forbidden and physically excised — was a
creation of Britain itself. Both reason-loving philosophers and
morality-focused religious nonconformists argued against slavery in the 1700s,
when such sentiments were anything but widespread in Europe and practically
nonexistent in the rest of the world. By the turn of the 19th century,
abolitionism was a popular cause, with upwards of 30 percent of British men
signing antislavery petitions. Led by men like William Wilberforce and groups
like the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, their efforts
succeeded, with parliament outlawing the trade in 1807. Britain was the first
nation to do this in a durable fashion, and given its immense maritime strength
and trading interests, it was the most important one to make that choice.
Over the next decades, British abolitionist sentiment
grew even more popular and muscular, especially as the institution lingered on
in the colonies. The planters living in these colonies had significant legal
autonomy within the Empire and did everything they could to slow the
dissolution of slavery, refusing attempts by parliament to phase it out. After
decades of intransigence, the metropole became fed up and passed the Slavery
Abolition Act, which, on August 1, 1834, freed every slave within the British
Empire. This piece of legislation emancipated millions of men, women, and
children from the chains of bondage; it was perhaps the greatest immediate boon
to human freedom in world history.
This was not economically beneficial for the Empire. The
trade was still quite profitable upon its destruction in 1807, and enslavement
itself was a lucrative proposition through emancipation in 1834. Unfree labor
allowed for cheaper commodities, more accessible foodstuffs, and a higher
standard of living for the nascent middle classes of Europe. Yet these benefits
were discarded because Britons thought slavery a moral evil. British trade with
its prosperous Caribbean colonies declined significantly after the prohibition
of human importation, which itself took place during the height of the
Napoleonic Wars. Instead of waiting until after the defeat of their greatest
foe, London pulled the trigger on abolition at the peak of a highly taxing
global conflict. Such was the moral importance of the abolition movement that
it even superseded the imperatives of national security and economic
prosperity.
Britons were dissatisfied with merely ending their
participation in the slave trade and their citizens’ ability to hold men in
bondage. They wanted to destroy this evil institution everywhere and forever.
Such a moral crusade had never before been attempted, and the British threw
their entire military, economic, and diplomatic might behind the effort. The
world’s largest navy used a full 13 percent of its total manpower pursuing this
objective. It bombarded forts (e.g., Lomboko), seized ships (e.g., HMS Pickle‘s
victory over the Voladora), and forced various governments to abolish
the trade. Britain used military force against Brazil and several African
polities, including Lagos and Zanzibar, as well as areas deeper inside the
continent. It ended slavery in Sudan and Egypt, forbade it in India, and
eliminated the practice in Malaysia and Indonesia. When it made treaties with
neutral parties in places like Central Asia, it cajoled the leaders to
emancipate slaves and cease trading in humans.
Indulging local customs around human bondage would have
been far easier to extend British governance and arrange more favorable
economic deals, but the moral imperative was more important. Britain rarely
sought to reach into the heart of Africa, preferring to ply its trade along the
more lucrative and established coasts, yet expended a great deal of men and
materiel penetrating deep inland to cut off the source of slaves for export and
punish their captors. Britain would have been much better off with the key
statelets along the approaches to India had they ignored their involvement in
enslavement. But they insisted on radical reform and often lost these Great
Game competitions to the Russians as a result. Not only did they incur military
and geopolitical costs in support of this tenacious anti-slavery stance, they
spent incredible sums of money in the process.
The historian David Eltis tried to account for the costs
of the naval suppression of the transatlantic trade and found that the British
spent the equivalent of more than £1.25 billion per year for over 50 years on
quashing worldwide slavery. According to his calculations, “by any more
reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs
of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.”
Broader calculations made by the historians Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape —
including not only naval costs but lost business opportunities and increased
tariffs against slave-labor-produced commodities — found that the suppression
of the transatlantic trade over the period from 1808–1867 cost the British
“roughly 1.8 percent of national income.” That is nearly equivalent to the
percent of GDP most European nations spend on their defense today. Kaufmann and
Pape wrote that this British effort against slavery was “the most expensive
example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history.”
Unfortunately for the activists, history is not on their
side. The British Empire indeed participated in slavery, as did nearly every
organized society across all of human existence. However, the unique aspect of
Britain’s role in this despicable human institution was not the fact that it
engaged in trade during the 17th and 18th centuries; it was the truth that it
led the world in suppressing and destroying this historic and universal evil.
Britain was the font of abolitionism and the first major nation to end
enslavement in any durable and systematic way. It sought to end the scourge of
human bondage worldwide, spending enormous sums of economic and human capital
to do so. In the meantime, it undermined its own pecuniary and geopolitical
interests, alienating important constituencies at home and abroad to do the
right thing. It was largely alone in this quest, yet it made abolition a
primary goal of what was then the greatest and most powerful empire on the
planet.
The British Museum should absolutely take this incredible
opportunity to create a permanent exhibit on the unique part that Britain
played in the universal stain of human enslavement. If done properly and in
accordance with historical fact, the exhibit would be a triumphant telling of
the Empire’s immense sacrifices to end this evil once and for all. That may not
appease the activists, but it would do justice to the truth of the past. And
what else is a museum for?
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