Britain was Not Built Upon Slavery, By Richard Miller (Londonistan)

Sir Lenny Henry's £18 trillion reparations demand is a moral ransom note written in the language of bad maths and worse history. The comedian-turned-activist, waving the Brattle Report like a papal bull, insists Britain's empire was erected on the bent backs of enslaved Africans and that Black Britons and Caribbean nations are still owed a cosmic debt. The truth is simpler and far less flattering to the grievance industry: Britain's wealth was forged centuries before the first slave ship weighed anchor, and it was sustained not by colonial plunder but by the quiet, cumulative miracles of institutions, innovation, and intellect. Reparations are not merely impractical, they are incoherent. No slaves are alive to collect. No slaveholders are alive to pay. And the supposed beneficiaries already inhabit the most prosperous, stable societies their ancestors could have imagined. The bill is a fantasy. The facts are not.

England's economic ascent began in the 13th century, long before the trans-Atlantic trade became a grim footnote in maritime ledgers. Between 1270 and 1700 per capita income grew at a steady 0.2 percent annually, slow by modern standards, but enough to double living standards over four centuries in a world still crawling out of subsistence. This was not trickle-down from Caribbean sugar. It was homegrown. The Black Death slashed population, drove wages skyward, and turned English tables heavy with meat and dairy. Labour scarcity forced farmers to invest in ploughs and windmills; land abundance shifted agriculture from grain to livestock. Towns multiplied, crafts specialised, and domestic trade thickened into arteries of commerce. Total factor productivity, flat until 1600, then leapt three percent per decade, before the slave trade scaled in the mid-1600s. The engine was internal transformation: better capital, smarter organisation, and a gradual pivot from field to factory and shop. The ruling class did not stifle invention; it built the legal scaffolding that let it flourish.

Financial institutions were the skeleton on which modern capitalism grew muscle. Double-entry bookkeeping, imported from Italy, turned merchants into mathematicians who could track credit and debit with surgical precision. By the 17th century joint-stock companies and limited liability let strangers pool capital without fear of personal ruin, funding canals, factories, and — yes — eventually slave voyages. But the same instruments financed Baltic timber and East India cotton. China and the Ottoman world relied on kin networks that capped scale at family size; England built impersonal trust governed by contract, not cousinage. This was the administrative revolution that made large ventures possible and risk insurable. Slavery did not create these tools. It borrowed them.

Intellectually, Britain was rewiring the relationship between thought and thing. The Enlightenment did not begin in ivory towers; it began in Bacon's call for "useful knowledge." The Royal Society was less salon than start-up incubator, linking scientists, engineers, and craftsmen in a feedback loop where theory fed practice and practice refined theory. Apprentices did not memorise Latin; they modified machines. One loom tweak in Manchester became ten thousand by 1800. Knowledge was no longer an ornament, it was capital. France trained theoreticians in state academies; England trained tinkerers who turned insight into income. This culture of empiricism and quantification did not invent the slave trade, but it did organise it with chilling efficiency. Early voyages were financial chaos, captains paid in rum IOUs and planters' promissory notes. London bankers responded with "bills in the bottom," marine insurance 1.0, integrating slavery into the same risk-management system that priced canal bonds and cotton mills. By the 1790s slave voyages accounted for seven percent of British marine contracts; the broader West Indies trade, forty-one percent. That is all. Less than half of shipping insurance tied to slavery, comparable to any other maritime staple. The trade was a line item, not the balance sheet.

Africa's deeper tragedy was institutional, not extractive. The trans-Saharan slave trade ran a millennium before the Atlantic system yet built no universities, no banks, no steam engines. Even within Africa stronger institutions won: Bonny eclipsed Old Calabar in the 18th century because its kings enforced contracts, not because its soil was richer. The West did not steal Africa's future; Africa never built the scaffolding to launch it.

Now to the £18 trillion hallucination. The Brattle Report compounds sugar profits, interest, "pain and suffering" multipliers, and four centuries of inflation into a number that exceeds Britain's entire GDP. Actual slave-trade profits in 18th-century pounds were £20–40 million, less than one percent of 1800 GDP. The Industrial Revolution's annual productivity gains dwarfed that in a decade. No living slave will pocket a penny. No living slaveholder will write the cheque. And the supposed beneficiaries? Black Britons already enjoy free NHS care, subsidised degrees, and Bristol University scholarships earmarked by race. Caribbean nations receive UK aid, EU trade preferences, and technical assistance. The average Jamaican immigrant in London earns three times Jamaica's GDP per capita. To live in a stable, prosperous West is the reparation, participation in the civilisation whose knowledge systems created modern wealth.

Reparations fail on every count: no victims, no villains, no maths, no justice. Britain does not owe the Caribbean £18 trillion. The Caribbean owes Britain a thank-you note, and a history lesson. The empire's gift was not shackles; it was the rule of law, the steam engine, and the scientific method. Demanding cosmic restitution for a crime no one alive committed, payable to people already living in the world's richest societies, is not restitution. It is ransom. Burn the bill. Build the future, resist the bs.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/britains-wealth-was-not-built-on