The Islamic Trade in European Slaves

To an outsider many of the causal chains of our time would not be obvious, were they discernible at all. It is three months since a Minnesotan policeman — currently awaiting trial for murder — put his knee on the neck of George Floyd, engulfing America in protest and violence. Yet almost 100 days later the consequences of his actions keep rolling out like ripples in a pond, one of the latest being the BBC’s announcement that the words of “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory” will not be sung at this year’s Last Night of the Proms. Why?

It appears that for many people at the BBC, as at various other cultural, media and governmental institutions, the death of George Floyd is not only symptomatic of the actions of one Minnesotan policeman — or indeed of some wider problem that may exist in segments of US policing. For these people the events in the American Midwest are only explicable if they come from a deep well-spring of unaddressed prejudice, and in particular unaddressed historical injustice.

Over recent years it has been striking how easily this assumption has settled in and how glibly many people appear to address it. In the United States there most certainly is a dark and difficult history involving the country’s two and a half-century involvement in slavery, yet it is inaccurate to claim that America has never addressed or “faced up to” its slave-owning past. The US fought a civil war over the issue more than a century and a half ago, at the cost of a million lives, and for the past six decades has very publically agonised over the legacy and historical injustice of slavery and racism.

Of course the follow-on claim is that America cannot be said to have fully addressed its past until it has made reparations of some kind for the sin of slavery, an argument most famously recently advanced by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a cover piece for the Atlantic magazine in 2014.