By Wilfred Reilly
Sunday, July 12, 2026
One hundred and fifty years or so after the Western
abolition of slavery, we have seen a busy few months for those who enjoy
declaring their opposition to it.
A group representing most of the world’s African and
Caribbean nations recently called for “a formal apology for transatlantic slavery” from every
country to benefit from it. This demand hardly stands alone. As I noted back in
November 2025, the African Union also launched “a new push for slavery and colonial reparations,”
demanding tens of billions of dollars to compensate for “transatlantic slavery
and the slave trade.” The General Assembly of the United Nations, meanwhile — a
body generally sympathetic to Third Worldist demands — voted in
March 2026 to recognize the white-run Atlantic portion of the historical
slave trade as the “gravest crime” in all of human history.
To point out the politically incorrect obvious, there is
an almost amusingly large logical problem with all of this. The list of every
country “to benefit from slavery, colonialism, and conquest” at some point
includes virtually every state in Africa — if not the world. As I noted in an earlier piece, most of modern Ghana — the
nation that brought forward the apology resolution to the UNGA — is the
territory of the “still-legendary Ashanti Empire . . . whose national economy
was based almost entirely on trade in precious metals and in slaves.” Per a note in one scholarly resource, the sizable Ashanti army
functioned primarily as “an instrument for capturing [slaves] in war.”
Modern-day Benin, for her part, is composed of the former
kingdoms of Dahomey and Benin, which were some of the most legendary
slave-trading states in history. Dahomey was long ruled over by the ruthless
King Ghezo (1818–1858), who was responsible for perhaps the most widely cited quote about African slaving: “The
slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and glory of
their wealth. The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an
enemy reduced to slavery!” Ghezo also, negotiating with European trading
partners, once stated his market position as this: “We want three
things — gunpowder, [musket] ball, and rum. We have three things to sell: men,
women, and children.”
For her part, today’s rising regional power of Nigeria
was home to the well-armed Aro Confederacy — which operated as “one of the
leading exporters of slaves to Europe and the Americas from 1690 to 1902 [!],”
selling almost 900,000 battle captives and other enslaved persons — and the
even more formidable Sokoto Caliphate. Following its 1804 establishment by the
Muslim general and scholar Usman dan Fodio, the caliphate grew by conquest to
incorporate huge chunks of modern-day Niger, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. More
notably for our purposes, Sokoto is generally considered to have been the
second-largest slave society in modern world history. At its peak, the massive
overall population included between 1.1 and 2.5 million slaves.
Paler North Africans, whose countries are also part of
the African Union, were as bad or worse historically. Algeria, “in particular, was the home base of the legendary
Barbary Pirates, who were huge players in the [global] slave trade, enslaving
both Africans and Europeans.” The pirates were so global a problem, for such a
long time, that they directly inspired the “Shores of Tripoli” line in the United States Marine Corps Hymn.
Egypt, too, has been described as “[moving] human chattel
overseas at least as far back as 641 AD, following the conquest of that ancient
state by the Rashidun Caliphate.” That strikes me as a conservative estimate: I
note in my own previous writing that “they didn’t build those
pyramids with backhoes.” Morocco, similarly, was known for capturing and selling not
only black Africans and other Caucasian Muslims but also “Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, the Irish, Scandinavians, Russians, Georgians,
and any other nationalities sailing in inadequately armed sea-faring vessels.”
As all of this indicates, the global slave trade was a
good deal more multicolored than it has recently been conventional to think in
middle-class America. Ohio State professor Robert C. Davis famously estimates
that perhaps 2 million white Europeans, in total, were sold to Muslim and/or
black African masters during the course of the Barbary slave trade.
An even more fascinating and awkward point regarding
historical slavery is that the West’s truly unique contribution to the global
bondage trade was ending it. As a wise man once said, “While white European countries were
no better than any others for most of history . . . the scope of their unique
and solitary commitment to cleaning up this ancient vice during the past two
centuries should never be under-estimated.” By 1808, the United States had banned the slave trade,
while Britain established an entire West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy to “do battle with
slavers and freeing slave captives.” Over five decades, the Squadron set
150,000 to 180,000 slaves free — while losing more than 2,000 men.
In contrast, where the Wicked Colonizers™ never landed,
or stayed only briefly, slavery — and similar practices such as serfdom, debt
peonage, and actual caste systems — persisted far longer. Far away from the (straight, two-edged) sword and the Cross,
Bhutan banned slavery in 1957, Niger in 1959, and Saudi Arabia and North Yemen
in 1961. Oman did so in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1982, Niger in 2003, and
Mauritania (in practice) in 2007. Chad did not fully criminalize the Peculiar
Institution until 2017 — and Afghanistan just brought a “mild” version of it back following
America’s withdrawal under President Joe Biden.
Tragic, to be sure. But, given the fact that fairly major
nations practice slavery today, and that roughly 50
million human beings are slaves now, it also seems obvious that the
white-led portion of the historical slave trade alone was not definitively The
Worst Thing in History. It would, in fact, be impossible to actually define any
such thing. As legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko once said, in a joking column about whether
“toughest man of all time” Cassius Clay could actually take down Saladin — or
“Ung the Rock Eater” — all time is a very long time.
The Atlantic slave trade, which involved the
transshipment of at least 12 million enslaved Africans to the New World
(400,000 to the young USA) was obviously a horrific crime by modern moral
standards, or any standard. But, speaking frankly, it does not stand out hard
against the red record of human history. The Mongol conquests — which defeated
China, Russia, Iran/Persia, Iraq, Korea, and every “Stan” — killed so many
people that they cooled the planet by 2–3 degrees. World War II, in our own
time, took 60 million to 85 million lives and included the
Holocaust. The conquest of the New World, led by ambitious knights
such as Cortés and Pizarro, wiped out 95 percent of a sizable indigenous
population.
While it feels more than a bit tacky to “rank” in this
fashion, the Atlantic slave trade was not even the largest or worst human slave
trade. The Arabic/trans-Saharan trade lasted far longer, and included at least 17 million Africans along with millions
of other human beings. The ancient Romans owned tens of millions of slaves
across the lifespan of their empire and treated them far more harshly than even
the coldest Confederate or Moorish master — often making half-naked prisoners of
war fight literal lions and hippos in Rome’s famous arenas.
Real-life gladiators
could not, one recalls, leave or change jobs at will.
Although we wish to avoid total relativism, an obvious
point underlying all of this is that laws and moral standards genuinely do vary
across eras — heavily influenced by the incentives in play and the level of
technology then available. Applying contemporary dorm-room morality to the deep
past would not work out very well for anyone’s ancestors, and this does
not mean that everyone’s ancestors were wicked orcs. Prior to the
development of modern farm machinery and functional detention facilities for
large numbers of tough prisoners, slavery was a universal human practice, and
one considered marginally more humane than . . . the only other effective way
of dealing with boatloads of war captives.
As the United States ambassador to the U.N. noted in response to the latest reparations demand: Few
major nations “recognize a legal right to historical wrongs that were not
illegal under . . . law at the time they occurred,” and a full review of the
past using modern metrics would not paint the West in a worse light than any
other civilization.
This is especially the case as it is, empirically and
practically, very difficult to balance the total set of benefits versus harms
associated with race wars that occurred 500 years ago. The previously discussed
European conquest of the New World’s civilized Indians also introduced the Old
World to tobacco, cocaine, and STDs such as syphilis — which have reaped a
Western and Asian death toll reaching into the billions by now. The descendants
of abused Africans in the Americas, particularly in the U.S. but also in such
states as Bahamas and Barbados, are by far the richest and most culturally
influential black people on Earth.
Perhaps the fairest and most obvious answer to the
question of who owes what to whom is that no one owes anyone, at least at the
group level. We can — and almost certainly should, for comity’s sake — simply
choose to keep the deep past in the past.
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