Activists want a permanent exhibit at the British Museum to commemorate the country’s role in the slave trade. They should get it, but not in the way they think.
S ince its establishment in the 1750s, the British Museum has been the cultural institution at the heart of the United Kingdom. Intended to cover all aspects of study, from history to science, it was always meant to be open to visitors from all across the world. It has evolved with the times, shifting based on developments in human knowledge and collecting a smorgasbord of cultural and historical artifacts from civilizations throughout mankind’s past. It is simply astounding in the breadth and depth of its collections and exhibits. But now, progressive activists wish to add one more permanent display to this cornucopia of culture: a dedicated section lambasting Britain for its role in the African slave trade.
The museum is currently undergoing a major renovation, expanding its galleries and reorienting many of its exhibits. The plan is to bring the institution into the 21st century as a place where visitors can experience the sum total of world knowledge in the novel ways in which we can explore it today. Technological integration, changes in how artifacts are displayed, and physical expansion will help accomplish that mission and allow the museum to fulfill its original purpose long into the future. This much-needed renovation, however, is being targeted by left-wing political activists who see it as an opportunity to weave their favored ideology into the fabric of the organization.
The Good Law Project, a progressive group linked with social-justice causes and anti-Brexit activism, is the driving force behind the “No Room for Slavery” project, which seeks to commit the British Museum to create a permanent exhibit about the country’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. It argues that Britain played a uniquely pernicious part in the trade in humans that characterized the early modern era and that this reading of history should be ensconced in the nation’s preeminent museum. The project is also backed by the racial justice organization The World Reimagined. Both of these groups gained significant resources — including government funding — in the wake of the 2020 “racial reckoning,” and they are using them to push this ideology into all facets of British life. The British Museum is a ripe target, especially during this restructuring.
The activists claim that it is necessary to properly educate British citizens about the “awkward truths” of their past to help avoid “racist violence.” They say that cultural institutions must ensure that the progressive conception of British history, one focused on the purported evils of the imperial past, is the dominant vision of the “national story.” The campaign’s frontman, a former Labour MP candidate, said that:
What is currently on display at the British Museum is an inadequate representation of the history of British involvement in the trade of enslaved Africans. . . . This is not about moralising, being right or wrong, or introducing something that is contested; our calls are for a clear, comprehensive and permanent exhibit to present this defining period of our national story.
The campaign paid for a survey which found, unsurprisingly based on its phrasing, that 53 percent of respondents thought a permanent exhibit on Britain’s role in slavery was appropriate and 66 percent saw the British Museum as having a role in educating the public about the topic.
The British Museum should listen to public sentiment by creating a permanent exhibit about Britain’s unique part in the slave trade. But it should do so in a way that is historically accurate. If they focused on the most important British contributions to global slavery, the result would be extremely useful in educating a public that lacks such an understanding: Britain was not special in participating in slavery, but it was in ending it.
Nearly every human civilization engaged in some form of human bondage. European empires and Western Hemisphere states during the early modern period were no exception. The Arab slave trade, bringing in captives from sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Europe, lasted for over 1,000 years and was profoundly brutal. Ancient Roman slavery involved horrendous conditions where slaves would be worked to death within a matter of months. Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of India and China, and the cities of Mesoamerica. Slaves were used as field labor, conscripted soldiers, sexual playthings, and human sacrifices. People held slaves of the same race, as well as different ones. They sold and bought their own just as much as they did outsiders. Humanity was defined by this horrific institution for thousands of years. The British Museum holds artifacts from many of these societies; should each be contextualized by explaining their relation to the universal institution of slavery?
If one wishes to examine the truly unique aspect of Britain’s involvement with slavery, the outcome is the exact opposite of that which the “No Room for Slavery” advocates promote. Instead of showing Britain as just another force for evil that requires modern-day recompense, it would prove that the British Empire did far more than any other society or power in world history to end the scourge of human bondage for good.
Abolitionism — the idea that slavery is a moral stain on mankind and that it should be legally forbidden and physically excised — was a creation of Britain itself. Both reason-loving philosophers and morality-focused religious nonconformists argued against slavery in the 1700s, when such sentiments were anything but widespread in Europe and practically nonexistent in the rest of the world. By the turn of the 19th century, abolitionism was a popular cause, with upwards of 30 percent of British men signing antislavery petitions. Led by men like William Wilberforce and groups like the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, their efforts succeeded, with parliament outlawing the trade in 1807. Britain was the first nation to do this in a durable fashion, and given its immense maritime strength and trading interests, it was the most important one to make that choice.
Over the next decades, British abolitionist sentiment grew even more popular and muscular, especially as the institution lingered on in the colonies. The planters living in these colonies had significant legal autonomy within the Empire and did everything they could to slow the dissolution of slavery, refusing attempts by parliament to phase it out. After decades of intransigence, the metropole became fed up and passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which, on August 1, 1834, freed every slave within the British Empire. This piece of legislation emancipated millions of men, women, and children from the chains of bondage; it was perhaps the greatest immediate boon to human freedom in world history.
This was not economically beneficial for the Empire. The trade was still quite profitable upon its destruction in 1807, and enslavement itself was a lucrative proposition through emancipation in 1834. Unfree labor allowed for cheaper commodities, more accessible foodstuffs, and a higher standard of living for the nascent middle classes of Europe. Yet these benefits were discarded because Britons thought slavery a moral evil. British trade with its prosperous Caribbean colonies declined significantly after the prohibition of human importation, which itself took place during the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Instead of waiting until after the defeat of their greatest foe, London pulled the trigger on abolition at the peak of a highly taxing global conflict. Such was the moral importance of the abolition movement that it even superseded the imperatives of national security and economic prosperity.
Britons were dissatisfied with merely ending their participation in the slave trade and their citizens’ ability to hold men in bondage. They wanted to destroy this evil institution everywhere and forever. Such a moral crusade had never before been attempted, and the British threw their entire military, economic, and diplomatic might behind the effort. The world’s largest navy used a full 13 percent of its total manpower pursuing this objective. It bombarded forts (e.g., Lomboko), seized ships (e.g., HMS Pickle‘s victory over the Voladora), and forced various governments to abolish the trade. Britain used military force against Brazil and several African polities, including Lagos and Zanzibar, as well as areas deeper inside the continent. It ended slavery in Sudan and Egypt, forbade it in India, and eliminated the practice in Malaysia and Indonesia. When it made treaties with neutral parties in places like Central Asia, it cajoled the leaders to emancipate slaves and cease trading in humans.
Indulging local customs around human bondage would have been far easier to extend British governance and arrange more favorable economic deals, but the moral imperative was more important. Britain rarely sought to reach into the heart of Africa, preferring to ply its trade along the more lucrative and established coasts, yet expended a great deal of men and materiel penetrating deep inland to cut off the source of slaves for export and punish their captors. Britain would have been much better off with the key statelets along the approaches to India had they ignored their involvement in enslavement. But they insisted on radical reform and often lost these Great Game competitions to the Russians as a result. Not only did they incur military and geopolitical costs in support of this tenacious anti-slavery stance, they spent incredible sums of money in the process.
The historian David Eltis tried to account for the costs of the naval suppression of the transatlantic trade and found that the British spent the equivalent of more than £1.25 billion per year for over 50 years on quashing worldwide slavery. According to his calculations, “by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.” Broader calculations made by the historians Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape — including not only naval costs but lost business opportunities and increased tariffs against slave-labor-produced commodities — found that the suppression of the transatlantic trade over the period from 1808–1867 cost the British “roughly 1.8 percent of national income.” That is nearly equivalent to the percent of GDP most European nations spend on their defense today. Kaufmann and Pape wrote that this British effort against slavery was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history.”
Unfortunately for the activists, history is not on their side. The British Empire indeed participated in slavery, as did nearly every organized society across all of human existence. However, the unique aspect of Britain’s role in this despicable human institution was not the fact that it engaged in trade during the 17th and 18th centuries; it was the truth that it led the world in suppressing and destroying this historic and universal evil. Britain was the font of abolitionism and the first major nation to end enslavement in any durable and systematic way. It sought to end the scourge of human bondage worldwide, spending enormous sums of economic and human capital to do so. In the meantime, it undermined its own pecuniary and geopolitical interests, alienating important constituencies at home and abroad to do the right thing. It was largely alone in this quest, yet it made abolition a primary goal of what was then the greatest and most powerful empire on the planet.
The British Museum should absolutely take this incredible opportunity to create a permanent exhibit on the unique part that Britain played in the universal stain of human enslavement. If done properly and in accordance with historical fact, the exhibit would be a triumphant telling of the Empire’s immense sacrifices to end this evil once and for all. That may not appease the activists, but it would do justice to the truth of the past. And what else is a museum for?