The Jamaican Government is about to present a petition to the King concerning slavery reparations. His Majesty is to be asked to refer the matter to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which will then be invited to consider whether the transportation of Africans to Jamaica was lawful and whether it constituted a crime against humanity. Behind these questions stands the demand that Britain should pay for the alleged continuing consequences of slavery.

There is something faintly ridiculous in asking a modern court whether slavery was wicked. Everyone agrees that it was a great evil. No British Government proposes to restore the slave trade, no respectable British institution defends plantation slavery, and no serious person denies the cruelty inflicted on those transported across the Atlantic. The petition therefore seeks an answer to a question that has already been settled in the moral consciousness of the British people.

What remains unsettled is money. Once the pieties have been cleared from the table, this is a demand that present British taxpayers should transfer wealth to Caribbean governments on account of acts committed before any living person was born. The injured are dead. The offenders are dead. The proposed creditors and debtors are political abstractions assembled by race and nationality.

This campaign has very little to do with condemning slavery. That condemnation requires no campaign because it is universal in Britain. The real purpose is to establish that British civilisation is uniquely stained, that its achievements are morally counterfeit and that people living in Britain today inherit a debt merely by belonging to the nation that once possessed an empire. The language is humanitarian. The underlying business is the organised degradation of British history, followed by the presentation of an invoice.

I will have none of it. Slavery was not a British invention. It was not a European invention, and it was certainly not an invention of white people. It was one of the most persistent institutions in human history. It existed in Africa and Asia, throughout the Middle East and across the pre-Columbian Americas. It was practised by kingdoms and republics, by settled civilisations and by peoples living beyond any central state. Human beings enslaved other human beings whenever custom permitted it and power made it profitable.

Before British power was turned against slavery, the institution was lawful, customary or tolerated in nearly every part of the world. It was accepted as an ordinary consequence of conquest, debt or birth. Even those who dreaded enslavement for themselves commonly saw no contradiction in enslaving others. Liberated slaves could become slave owners. Slaves themselves sometimes traded in human beings. This was not because any particular people possessed a unique depravity. It was because the moral revolution that now makes slavery universally detested had not yet occurred.

The reparations campaign reverses this history. It takes the moral standard established by the abolitionists and applies it retrospectively to the country that did most to make the standard effective. Britain is condemned in the name of a moral principle that British power helped impose on a reluctant world.

More than 12.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as many as one million may have been taken to Jamaica. These people were captured and delivered to European buyers through African systems of enslavement. African rulers made war to obtain captives, punished subjects with enslavement and sold human beings acquired through debt. They maintained markets, negotiated prices and resisted foreign demands that the trade should cease.

Without African sellers there could have been no Atlantic trade on anything approaching its historical scale. European responsibility is real, but it is not exclusive. The slave ships required cargoes, and those cargoes were supplied by Africans who knew perfectly well that the people they sold were human beings. It was not necessary to possess a modern degree in human rights law to understand that being chained, transported and worked as property was an appalling fate. The sellers understood this whenever the chains were intended for them.

Yet these African participants are granted an exemption. Their modern successors are not expected to apologise or pay compensation. Their dynasties may be treated as innocent victims of colonialism, even where their wealth and power rested on the sale of human beings. The descendants of the buyers inherit guilt, while the descendants of the sellers inherit victimhood. Responsibility passes down one racial line and is extinguished along the other.

The treatment of the Obas of Benin is an especially ripe example. Their kingdom profited from slavery, and their rituals included the killing of human possessions. One of the Obas has nevertheless been commemorated in St Paul’s Cathedral as a victim of colonialism. His present-day successor benefits from the return of immensely valuable Benin Bronzes, made with metal obtained through the commerce of his slave-trading ancestors.

I do not suggest that a present Oba should be punished for what an ancestor did. That would be as absurd as taxing a shopkeeper in Croydon for the conduct of an eighteenth-century Bristol merchant. I merely observe that the reparations lobby is capable of understanding this principle when the ancestral offender was African. When the alleged inheritance of guilt is British, the principle vanishes.

This is not an accidental omission from an otherwise honest account. It is the account. The campaign depends on dividing the history of slavery into white perpetrators and black victims. African agency must therefore be minimised, while the much larger history of slavery outside the Atlantic world must be pushed beyond the edge of the picture. British abolition must be reduced to a footnote or treated as a cunning continuation of imperial oppression. Without these falsifications, the demand for racial reparations collapses into the far less profitable observation that nearly every civilisation has committed wrongs and that no living population can sensibly sue all the others.

The United Nations report calling for monuments and revisions to school curricula speaks of “accurate, unbiased accounts”. One recognises the dialect of official mendacity. An accurate account would teach that most eighteenth-century slaves were in Asia. It would examine the African and Arab systems of enslavement, including their markets in women and eunuchs. It would explain that the Atlantic trade depended on African rulers who regarded selling neighbouring peoples as an ordinary source of revenue.

An unbiased account would also explain what Britain did after abolition. It would teach that Britain became the first great power to break decisively with the established human pattern and to make the suppression of slavery an object of sustained foreign policy. It would commemorate those who transformed an eccentric moral objection into a worldwide assault on an institution accepted for millennia. Above all, it would acknowledge that British civilisation produced both the political will and the practical power required to act on that objection.

Other people opposed slavery, and honour is due to them. Yet it was Britain that possessed the combination of parliamentary government, Christian moral agitation, commercial power and command of the seas that made worldwide suppression possible. The abolitionists appealed to the British conscience. Parliament changed the law, and British power carried that decision far beyond British territory. What began as moral persuasion became an undertaking pursued through diplomacy and naval force.

This was goodness made effective. It is easy to possess virtuous opinions when they cost nothing. Britain diverted ships and exposed its sailors to disease in order to suppress a trade from which other states and foreign rulers continued to profit. British diplomats exerted pressure on governments that had no wish to abolish slavery. British officials investigated foreign markets, used public money to liberate captives and sheltered fugitives in their own houses. Lord Palmerston ordered the destruction of the Brazilian slaving fleet in 1850, thereby bringing the greatest remaining Atlantic traffic to an end. The Royal Navy intercepted slave ships and released those found aboard. Where African rulers resisted suppression, Britain sometimes compensated them because buying out an entrenched interest was quicker than allowing the trade to continue. Where payment and persuasion failed, force was used.

The modern campaigner sneers at British power when it was used for conquest, then averts his eyes when the same power was used against enslavers. He dwells on compensation paid to British owners but seldom mentions compensation paid to African traders. He has much to say about the wealth Britain supposedly extracted from slavery and remarkably little about the cost Britain incurred in suppressing it. This is not history. It is a prosecution brief from which every fact useful to the defence has been removed.

Britain did not merely free slaves held under its own authority. It interfered with the slave trade of other nations. It coerced rulers who saw no reason to abandon an ancient and profitable institution. British abolition therefore marked something greater than a domestic change of policy. It was a civilisational rebellion against the normal practice of mankind.

That achievement belongs to the goodness of British civilisation. I use the word “goodness” without apology. A civilisation should be judged not by whether it ever shared the common wickedness of mankind, since none could survive that test, but by whether it generated the principles and institutions by which wickedness could be recognised and overcome. Britain produced a movement capable of looking on an institution sanctioned by antiquity and declaring that custom was no defence. It then accepted the burden of enforcing that judgment.

The campaign for reparations must obscure this because the truth reverses its preferred moral hierarchy. Britain was not uniquely responsible for slavery. It was uniquely important in destroying the international system that sustained it. The British Empire contained men who profited from human bondage, as every large political order of the time contained them. It also generated the power that hunted slave traders across the seas and compelled unwilling societies to surrender an institution they had practised without shame.

One might expect this achievement to be commemorated throughout the world. There should be monuments in Africa and Brazil to the British sailors who suppressed the traffic. There should be memorials to the diplomats and officials who forced open slave markets and protected fugitives. Lord Palmerston deserves a statue in Rio de Janeiro rather more than Britain deserves another lecture from a United Nations committee.

No such commemorations are likely. They would concede too much. A statue to British abolition would remind the public that the present moral consensus did not descend from the clouds. It was created by identifiable people within a particular civilisation and spread by the use of British power. That fact is intolerable to those whose political business depends on presenting Britain as the hereditary criminal of world history.

The campaign is therefore not anti-slavery in any meaningful sense. It is anti-British. Its racial character is revealed by the distribution of guilt it demands. White populations are expected to inherit the sins of people who resembled them, while Africans inherit only the sufferings of people who resembled them. Individual conduct is swallowed by pigmentation. The language of racial justice becomes the means by which racial responsibility is imposed.

Such reasoning would be denounced as poisonous if its direction were reversed. One cannot blame present Africans for the conduct of African slave traders, and I have no desire to do so. Nor can one blame present Britons for British slave traders. The decent principle is individual responsibility. The indecent principle is collective guilt allocated according to the political convenience of those demanding payment.

Jamaica’s ministers claim that present problems in education, public health and economic resilience are inherited consequences of slavery. This is a wonderfully elastic theory of causation. Jamaica has governed itself since 1962, yet the failures of its modern state are to be carried backwards across nearly two centuries and laid before the British taxpayer. Decisions made by Jamaican governments disappear, while an institution abolished in the 1830s acquires permanent explanatory power. History undoubtedly shapes the present. It does not follow that every disappointment of a former colony is a legally recoverable loss against the former imperial power. If this principle were admitted, no claim could ever become too remote. Every failed policy could be described as an inherited structure, and every demand for money could be dressed as historical repair.

The destination of the money presents another difficulty. Reparations would not be paid by eighteenth-century merchants to liberated slaves. They would be taken from living people in Britain, including families whose ancestors arrived long after abolition, and delivered to governments whose present citizens have never been enslaved. The transaction would not repair the past. It would create a political reward in the present for maintaining racial grievance.

Nor is there reason to believe that payment would conclude the matter. A movement founded on inherited grievance has no interest in issuing a final receipt. Any sum would be described as symbolic and therefore insufficient. An apology would become evidence that liability had been admitted. The demand would grow because the continuation of the grievance is the source of the campaign’s money, influence and moral authority.

Britain should refuse. It should do so without the customary mumbling about regret followed by promises to “engage”. There is nothing to negotiate. Modern Britons do not own Jamaicans, have not sold Jamaicans and have not inherited a personal debt to the Jamaican Government. The British state abolished slavery throughout its territories and thereafter used national power to suppress it elsewhere. That record requires honest remembrance, not reparations.

The Jamaican delegation does, however, offer one prospect of practical benefit. It proposes to visit the British Museum and seek the return of Jamaican artefacts. Questions of legal title should be considered properly, and objects shown to have been unlawfully taken should be restored. But, if Jamaica really wishes to remove a quantity of the fashionable clutter with which the Museum has lately obscured its original purpose, I hope the trustees will display an uncharacteristic spirit of accommodation. The British Museum once existed to place the great civilisations of the ancient world before the public. Its recent custodians have too often preferred topical gestures and approved sermons, as though Assyria and Egypt were merely the supporting scenery for a diversity seminar. Jamaica may therefore perform a small service to British culture by carrying some of this clutter away. We should wish the delegation every success in that limited enterprise.

On the larger demand, the answer must be contemptuous refusal. Britain will remember the slaves because their suffering was real. It should also remember the African rulers who sold them and the British abolitionists who fought to end the trade. It should reject the racial bookkeeping by which everyone descended from a victim becomes a creditor and everyone living in the country of an offender becomes a debtor.

British civilisation was not innocent. No civilisation has been. It was something more remarkable: a civilisation capable of condemning an evil sanctified by almost universal custom and using its strength to break that custom across the world. Those who now demonise Britain employ the moral vocabulary that this achievement helped make universal. They may keep the vocabulary. They are not entitled to falsify the history, and they are certainly not entitled to payment.