[Courtesy: The Times]
Cambridge’s proposal to devote resources neither to teaching nor to research, but to virtue signalling over slavery is not only questionable for a charity, but also an endorsement of notions of hereditary guilt.
Leaving aside the prevalence of coercive labour systems across much of the world, including Africa, throughout much of history, and the major role of African polities in the enslavement and sale of people, there is a preference for beating up on the past rather than addressing slavery in the world today.
Public slavery in the shape of those oppressed under totalitarian rule, for example in North Korea, is particularly serious.
With the Left unable to use the Holocaust as a key signifier in historical consciousness, it has focused on the slave trade as an alternative and equivalent – inaccurately so, as the purpose of slavery was not to kill slaves.
Reparation for a distant and very widespread practice is absurd, both practically and philosophically. That the idea is gaining traction is an instance of the strange politics of these times.
Jeremy Black,
Professor of History,
Exeter University
