Biggar condemns the Church of England’s folly in paying reparations for slavery

Reparations: Slavery and the tyranny of imaginary guilt by Nigel Biggar

Nigel Biggar ended his last book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, reviewed here on ConHome, by quoting part of a resonant observation by Elie Kedourie:

“No doubt, great Powers do commit great crimes, but a great Power is not always and necessarily in the wrong; and the canker of imaginary guilt even the greatest Power can ill withstand.”

In this new and shorter work, Kedourie’s insight is quoted in full in the preface, but in the book’s title the word “canker” is replaced with “tyranny”.

This substitution was perhaps proposed by the publishers, and tolerated by the author, in the feeble belief that too few readers would understand the word “canker”.

But the original term suggests far more powerfully how an imaginary guilt can eat away, contaminate and at length cripple the self-belief on which a great Power depends.

Biggar has written a textbook, or primer, in which he summarises recent studies of the Atlantic slave trade, and the moral conclusions which can reasonably be drawn from them.

He is particularly exercised by the “gross imprudence” of the Church Commissioners, who authorised the spending of £100 million by the Church of England in reparation for the supposedly huge profits it made three centuries ago from slavery, by investments around the time of the South Sea Bubble, 1720, in the South Sea Company.

Scholars have demonstrated that the Church actually invested, as Professor Richard Dale of Southampton University puts it, “in what were essentially government-backed debt instruments”, and made no profit from the slave trade.

Biggar does not rush to the opposite extreme, and claim for the Church an implausible state of innocence. “Since all accumulation is achieved by sinners,” he suggests, “there is no such thing as a pure inheritance.”

But the C of E is far less guilty than the Commissioners supposed it to be, and as Biggar points out, to the extent that it can be held guilty, how can one possibly decide who 300 years later should receive reparations?

The book is dedicated

To the sailors of the Royal Navy – of all skin colours – who gave their lives in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade.

Advocates of reparations generally ignore the contribution of British campaigners, including John Wesley, Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, to the abolition in 1807 within the British Empire of the monstrosity that was the transatlantic slave trade, and then in 1834 of slavery itself.

Abolition was prompted by the growing recognition of abominable wrongs. Wesley prefaced his Thoughts Upon Slavery, published in 1774, with a quotation from the Book of Genesis:

“And the Lord said – What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

I happen recently to have been reading about Thomas Clarkson, who at great risk to himself went to Bristol and Liverpool to gather the evidence about the horrors of the slave trade which William Wilberforce needed, so as to confound the slave traders who assured a Commons inquiry that they were rescuing Africans and taking them to a better life on American plantations.

Clarkson’s interest in the subject had been aroused in 1785 when he competed as an undergraduate for the Latin essay prize at Cambridge, the title of which had been set by the Vice-Chancellor, and Master of Magdalene College, Peter Peckard:

“Is it ever right to make slaves of others against their will?”

A later Master of Magdalene, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has in recent years sought to bring Peckard back to public notice. One may note that the slave trade was by 1789 opposed by the greatest parliamentarians of the day, including William Pitt, who was Prime Minister, Wilberforce, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox.

In the early stages of the French Revolution in 1789-90, Clarkson spent five months in Paris trying and failing to persuade the National Assembly to abolish the slave trade.

Biggar has written a brief book, only 161 pages of text, so gives a scanty account of this history (more detailed argument can be found on his Substack, the Biggar Picture).

But the more one reads about the campaign in the later 18th century and 19th century against the slave trade, the more one realises the indispensable role played by Christian abolitionists, including many Quakers.

Missionaries such as David Livingstone gave their lives in part so that Africans might be free. Livingstone’s account of a massacre at Nyangwe by Arab slave traders, which Henry Stanley saw into print, led the British Government to close the slave market in Zanzibar, through which 20,000 Africans a year were sold.

In May 2024, Biggar points out, Dr Williams’ successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, in which he acknowledged the missionaries’ fight against slavery, but went on to criticise them for treating the Africans as inferior.

Alexander Chula, who spent three years teaching in Malawi, responded to this criticism in a piece for The Critic in which he described visiting the grave of Bishop Charles Mackenzie (mistakenly referred to by Biggar as John Mackenzie), leader of the Universities Mission to Africa, who in 1862, at the age of 37, died of blackwater fever in what is now Mozambique:

“I am curious to know who exactly the former Archbishop had in mind. Mackenzie’s successors gave everything they had to the region, and their graves litter Malawi, still venerated today. They committed to sharing the lives of local peoples and — as I argue in my recent book (Goodbye, Dr Banda) — approached their cultures with a curiosity and respect seldom matched by Western visitors today. The imputation that they treated Africans as inferior dishonours men who died precisely because they considered Africans as worthy of that sacrifice as anyone else.”

After demonstrating that the case for reparations does not add up, Biggar in his final chapter asks why “the lust for self-condemnation” is felt so widely in “English-speaking countries that are former members of the British Empire”, especially among the university-educated.

He observes that such people, among whom he has spent most of his life, consider patriotism “to be vulgar at best”, and quotes George Orwell’s observation in 1941 that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”.

This feeling can be traced much further back. In the 1790s George Canning set up a paper, The Anti-Jacobin, in which he poured scorn on the kind of person who supported the French Revolution:

“A steady patriot of the world alone,

The friend of every country but his own.”

Biggar interprets “the anti-patriotism of the English intellectual as the expression of a degenerate Christian sensibility”. For Christians, an awareness of one’s own unrighteousness is “the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person”.

But this can “degenerate into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness”, by declaring one’s sins – or at least one’s country’s sins – to be worse than anyone else’s, and broadcasting one’s repentance for those sins.

The book ends at this point, which is where Biggar should perhaps in his next work begin an exposition of Christian behaviour.

Social media are disfigured by childish squabbles, both sides proclaiming their own righteousness by casting their opponents into outer darkness.

No past error is treated as pardonable, no mercy granted to the unenlightened figures who came before us, no allowance made for the likelihood that we too will seem unenlightened to our descendants.

With preposterous self-righteousness, we assume the right to condemn our forbears, and to do so without studying the history of former times in all its contradictory richness.

With abject stupidity, we pretend to ourselves that there are short cuts to wisdom.

Biggar remarks on his last page that “more religious faith would help, since a great advantage of believing in a God is that the believer is less likely to mistake himself for one.”

This claim will bring down on him the anathemas of secular thinkers, unable to see how lost they are, and ready with knock-down examples of Christians who have claimed divine sanction for unChristian acts.

For a recent corrective to unthinking secularism one should turn to God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England by Bijan Omrani.