So it has come to this. A coalition of African and Caribbean nations, led by the indefatigable CARICOM, has issued a formal demand: a full, unqualified apology for the transatlantic slave trade. And not just an apology, mind you, but reparations.
One can almost hear the ghost of Edmund Burke sighing from the afterlife. The question is not whether the slave trade was an abomination, it was. The question is whether the modern state can bear the moral and financial burden of sins committed centuries before its birth.
The answer, as any student of history would tell you, is complicated. But the demand itself reveals something far more unsettling about our current epoch: the pathological need to assign collective guilt and extract moral penance. We live in an age of performative contrition, where governments trip over themselves to apologise for things they never did.
Yet what does this achieve? It does not undo the suffering. It does not heal the wounds.
It merely feeds a narrative of eternal victimhood and eternal guilt, a cycle that benefits no one save those who profit from grievance. The nations making these demands are not the same as the kingdoms that sold their neighbours into bondage. The Britain of today is not the Britain of the 18th century.
To insist otherwise is to commit the very sin of historicism that we condemn in others. Let us instead focus on the real work: economic development, education, and the dismantling of actual modern oppression. Apologies are cheap.
Results are not.
