Exchange of the week The legacy of the slave trade

To The Guardian

Kris Manjapra’s excellent article on the slave trade reminds us of some uncomfortable contemporary truths. One is that many political and business “leaders” are where they are in part because their families benefited from the slave trade; millionaire and ex-pm David Cameron is only one such beneficiary. Another truth is that business has always been able to exert pressure to ensure its interests are put before those of slaves. Professor Gary Craig, York

To The Guardian

It would be no exaggeration to say that the entire Atlantic economy of former times, from which Britain profited more than most, was based on slave labour. Far from representing the new birth of freedom, what the discovery of the Americas brought about was a new birth of slavery. In the settlement of the New World prior to 1820, Africans outnumbered Europeans by roughly five to one. So the typical American settler was neither a swaggering entrepreneur nor a Biblewielding puritan, but a terrified African captive.

Where Manjapra errs is in applying today’s moral assumptions to the past. What was truly extraordinary about abolition was not that Parliament paid £20m to slave owners, but that it put paid to a system that had served Britain well in the past, and would doubtless have continued doing so. Parliament’s ex gratia payment was the least of the sacrifices involved. By withdrawing, first from the slave trade and then by freeing its slaves, Britain was effectively handing over lucrative markets to its continental rivals.

The result, clearly seen at the time, was the economic ruin of the British West Indies, the rise of Cuba as the world’s principal slave importer and sugar producer, and higher costs to British consumers. Howard Temperley, Norwich

must go back to asking: has the criminal’s punishment matched and outlasted their victim’s pain? If not, why not? Victor Launert, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire