Jamaica wants £10 billion from Britain for slavery reparations. Ezra Levant has a response on Tuesday’s Ezra Levant Show. It’s not £10 billion. It’s one coin.
“Two men, a European and an African, standing face to face, shaking hands,” Ezra described, holding up the medal. Around the edge: “We are all brethren.” Underneath: “Slave Trade Abolished by Great Britain, 1807.”
Flip it over and the other side isn’t English. It’s Arabic. “Sale of slaves prohibited in 1807 Christian era, in the reign of George III. Verily we are all brothers.” Why Arabic? Because of who was selling the slaves.
“The way this is taught now, you’d think slavery was invented by Englishmen in the 1600s. It wasn’t,” Ezra said. “Slavery is as old as civilization. It’s in the Torah, the laws of Moses regulated. It’s in the New Testament. It’s in the Quran. Every one of those books treats slavery the way we treat the weather, a permanent fixture of the world, to be managed, not abolished.”
What had never happened before in human history, he argued, was a group of people deciding it was wrong and acting on it. “Overwhelmingly, evangelical Christians. Wilberforce, Clarkson, the Clapham sect.”
“The moral code of the entire world changed, and it changed because of them,” he said.
“Here’s the part they don’t teach you in school,” Ezra said. “The Atlantic slave trade ran for about 350 years. The Arab slave trade ran for about 1,300 years. It started in the 7th century and it didn’t stop until the 20th. In fact, in some parts it still lives.” He cited Ronald Segal’s book Islam’s Black Slaves, which puts the total at “somewhere between 11 and 14 million souls.”
“There’s a reason there is no large black population in Arabia today, the way there is in Brazil or Jamaica or Alabama,” he continued. “Most of the men were castrated. Most of those died. The ones who lived were sold as eunuchs at seven times the price of a man who hadn’t been cut.”
The medal, Ezra explained, was written in Arabic precisely because of who it was directed at.
“When the Royal Navy showed up on the coast of West Africa in 1808 to enforce the new law,” he said, “the men marching slaves down to the beach to sell them to the ships were very often Muslim slave traders from the interior, men who read Arabic. That is who this medal was for.”
The museum says plainly it was intended to deter Arab-speaking African traders from sending slave caravans to the coast. “It’s not a souvenir. It’s not actually money. It’s a warning.”
Britain backed that warning with a navy. The West Africa Squadron patrolled for 60 years, capturing roughly 1,600 slave ships and freeing about 150,000 Africans at a cost of approximately 1,600 British lives.
Two University of Chicago academics calculated the bill. “They found the campaign against these slave ships cost Britain about 1.8% of its national income, of its GDP, every year for 60 years,” Ezra said.
“You know, NATO’s target for a country’s entire military is 2% of GDP. Canada’s not even at 2%. Britain spent nearly that amount for two generations just on other people’s freedom and got nothing back except a lot of dead British sailors.”
Then in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery itself across the British Empire. Eight hundred thousand people freed. And Britain did something no other country has done: it paid for it. “The slave owners got 20 million pounds. That was about 40% of the entire national budget that year.”
The loan, arranged by Nathan Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, wasn’t paid off until February 1, 2015. “If you paid tax in Britain before 2015, you were still paying for the end of slavery, literally paying for it.” Measured as a share of the economy, the economic historians at Measuring Worth put that at roughly £133 billion in today’s money — “about $250 billion Canadian dollars. A quarter of a trillion dollars was borrowed by the UK to buy the freedom of other people.”
Against all of that, Ezra turned to the reparations push now underway. The Caribbean reparations commission hired the Brattle Group, which produced a number: $24 trillion US. “Trillion with a T. That’s roughly seven times the size of the entire British economy.”
In March, the UN General Assembly voted 123 to 3 declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and urging reparations — “the transatlantic trade, mind you, not the Arab one, which ran four times as long.”
Nobody, Ezra noted, is asking Saudi Arabia, which kept slaves until 1962, or Oman, until 1970, or the descendants of the African kings who sold the captives. “They’re just asking Britain — the one country that spent 60 years and 2% of its economy stopping it.”
“No force in human history has done more to free the slaves, to stop the slave trade, and to enforce that ban around the world than the United Kingdom,” Ezra said, reiterating it took “60 years of its Royal Navy” and “a loan that took 180 years to pay off.”
He held up the coin one more time. “This little piece of bronze is what it looked like on the ground. A handshake, three words, and a sentence in Arabic. And so the men who’d been doing it for a thousand years would understand, it’s over. We are all brethren. They meant it.”
“Do you think anyone would strike a medal like this today?”
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