Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt

by Nigel Biggar

'Compelling and timely' Tirthankar Roy

'Essential reading' David Eltis

Many now claim that Western countries should pay reparations to former colonies for the lasting damage they caused, especially through slavery. Why is this claim being made now? How far does it make sense? And, more generally, how can historic wrongs be righted?

Reparations removes the sloganeering from a newly-fashionable cause, sets the issue in its proper historical context, and mounts an ethical counter-argument. The natural sequel to Nigel Biggar's bestselling and widely acclaimed  A Moral Reckoning, it makes a powerful contribution to an increasingly prominent public debate.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Race

203 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2025

About the author

Nigel Biggar CBE is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He holds a B.A. in Modern History from Oxford and a Ph.D. in Christian Theology & Ethics from the University of Chicago. He was appointed C.B.E. “for services to Higher Education” in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours list. His most recent books are Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), What’s Wrong with Rights? (2020), In Defence of War (2013), and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (2014). In the press he has written articles for the Financial Times, the (London) Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the (Glasgow} Herald, the Irish Times, Standpoint, The Critic, The Article, Unherd and Quillette. He served on the Committee on Ethical Issues in Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians (London) from 2000 to 2014, the Royal Society’s Working Group on People and the Planet from 2010 to 2012, and the Pontifical Academy for Life from 2017 to 2022. He now chairs the board of trustees of the Free Speech Union.

He has lectured at the Royal College of Defence Studies, London; the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham; the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Hamburg; the US Military Academy, West Point; and the National Defense University, Washington, DC. His hobbies include visiting battlefields. In 1973 he drove from Scotland via Iran and Afghanistan to India. And in 2015 and 2017 he trekked across the mountains of central Crete in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his comrades, when they abducted General Kreipe in April-May 1944.

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many people in the modern West, especially those on the left, have zealously condemned the West’s past. They exhibit what the late Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia” - the hatred of one’s own culture, civilization, or country. When they cast their gaze upon history, they see more darkness than light, more oppression than emancipation, a long, long litany of injustice. They extol the social reforms that have garnered more freedom for ethnic minorities, women, and the queer community (many of these reforms, such as universal suffrage and the campaign for equal pay for equal work genuinely being laudatory accomplishments). But while there has been renewed and vigorous contemporary debate around some of these issues in the West (should immigration be more restrictive? has feminism been beneficial and what of the flailing status of men? now that same-sex marriage is largely legal throughout the West, has the gay rights movement achieved enough and should the transgender movement be subject to more scrutiny?), virtually everyone, whether left, right, or centrist, believes that slavery is deeply immoral. Conservatives in the West may want illegal aliens sent back home, more restrictions on abortion, and may still seek the repeal of same-sex marriage, but beyond the radical, deplorable fringe, those on the right obviously don’t want slavery reinstituted. But does our moral condemnation of slavery require us to make amends to the descendants of slaves today? That is quandary Nigel Biggar addresses in Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt.

Biggar is one of the world’s leading Christian ethicists but his recent work on colonialism has provoked an uproar. In many respects, Reparations reads like a more focused sequel, as Biggar hones in on slavery. Being a sequel, at times it repeats points made earlier in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (indeed, my review of this later book also repeats critiques I have made of the previous one). Biggar is bold (and at times, too brash), but I think he is a valuable contrarian voice in the public sphere. He stirs up debate most are too demure to broach.

Just as with Colonialism, Biggar marshals an impressive array of facts and counterpoints in this book. He showcases how slavery has been universal and practiced since time immemorial but that it has also varied in its form. Not all forms of slavery were as horrific as the Atlantic slave trade; “Sometimes masters regarded [slaves] with a certain benevolence as members of their extended household, taking a kindly interest in their lives. Sometimes slaves were manumitted, usually by paying an agreed price, less often by getting baptised or being granted freedom in their master’s last will and testament” (p. 42).

Muslims, First Nations, and Africans (to name but some) have also practiced slavery, with many Africans abetting the slave trade by supplying their fellow Africans to European slave traders (and even before that, to Romans and Muslims, p. 106). At times, slavery was the alternative towards slaughtering enemy combatants or prisoners of war (the Geneva Convention isn’t exactly as old as Hammurabi’s Code). Some Africans practiced human sacrifice and Biggar wonders if slavery may not have been a better alternative to these ritualistic killings (p. 58). Historically, astoundingly, some slaves owned fellow slaves and some forms of slavery were for fixed terms. Biggar mentions the remarkable Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a slave who served as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire for almost 15 years and who himself amassed a vast fortune.

There is a movement today (again, largely on the radical left) that wants to atone for historical injustices. It is seen in efforts like the “land back” movement and, most relevant to this book, the call for reparations to be paid for the descendants of the enslaved. The call for reparations has advocates among Christians; Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson wrote a 2022 book promoting it and Biggar addresses the Church of England’s mission to ultimately pay hundreds of millions towards reparations in chapter 12 of this book.

But Biggar questions why slavery is singled out as an issue requiring redress today, nearly two centuries after it was definitively stamped out throughout the British Empire in 1834. Firstly, everyone alive today had no direct involvement with the Atlantic slave trade and so none of us were complicit in it. To force those who are not morally culpable of enslaving others to pay restitution for an atrocity we took no part in is itself a grossly unjust act. Biggar notes that some descendants of slaves insist that despite being entirely free, never having worn shackles, they suffer from trauma that has passed down through the generations; Biggar acknowledges that trauma may have lingering effects down through time but also cites scholars Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman who have critically analyzed the development of trauma as a way of attaining high moral ground that cannot under any circumstances be questioned or debated. With the widespread proliferation of mental healthcare, some might take Biggar, Fassin, and Rechtman to task for being too cynical and insensitive, but I do think those who have begun to interrogate “victimhood” culture have compelling points to make; as Rene Girard has observed, “Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power” (and on this point too, those who call for reparations often don’t offer realistic proposals for how governments are to pay the millions of dollars purportedly owed). Those calling for reparations also tend to downplay or neglect how former colonies were mismanaged and/or administered by corrupt rulers after gaining independence and that this incompetence and corruption have largely contributed to present suffering.

Biggar doesn’t reject reparations wholesale; he approves of “the German government’s ‘repentance’ of the Nazi regime’s theft of Jewish property, in the form of restitution or compensation, after the Second World War. In that case, the identities of the Jewish wronged and the Nazi wrongdoers, and the close relationship between original victims and surviving family members, were all clear enough. And the harm done was definite and quantifiable. In these circumstances, reparation and compensation made good sense” (p. 120). But Biggar asserts that the far longer passage of time has complicated what is owed to the descendants of slaves.

Biggar also makes the case that whole classes of people who were not slaves still toiled in burdensome and exploitative work. It is only relatively recently that employees enjoy benefits, vacation, protection from employers, and reasonable work week (4oish hours). Medieval serfs had no such security. Do the descendants of royalty or the feudal nobility owe the descendants of serfs compensation? Do the descendants of factory owners owe reparations to the descendants of factory workers who conducted their labour in unsafe, exploitative conditions (p. 122)? Even if one wants to maintain that slavery is the exclusive victim group entitled to compensation, why do advocates for reparations not also forcefully demand that the descendants of whites enslaved by Muslim raiders also deserve payments? And what of human beings brought into the world through the (admittedly, forced) sexual union of a white master and a black female slave?

Biggar accuses reparations advocates of neglecting to take into account the large sums of money the British Empire spent in suppressing the slave trade while other nations continued the practice. Portugal was responsible for a far larger proportion of the total number of Africans enslaved - 5,841,468 or 46.7 percent (p. 39). “Approximately 12.5 million Africans were enslaved by Europeans from 1501 to 1875” compared to “a conjectured 17 million enslaved first by Africans and then sold to Arabs from” roughly between 700 - 1900; the African/Arab totals are greater, being a much longer time period, but this does showcase how rampant African slavery was throughout history (p. 44). Consideration must also be given that states during the time of the Atlantic slave trade were much smaller in the scope of their power and in their overall finances; it was only in the mid-twentieth century that the administrative state ballooned the size of governments, their tendrils more rapacious for control (pp. 89-90).

Biggar offers astute guidance in how we are to judge the past, noting that obvious truths to us today may not have been quite so obvious to our ancestors (and that what we take for granted as moral today may be condemned as evil by our descendants). And yet, Biggar also acknowledges he is a Christian and that this shapes his ethics, declaring, “My Christian ethical viewpoint involves the belief that there is an objective moral reality that precedes, frames and dignifies with significance all human choices: there are universal moral principles” (p. 18). Biggar calls himself a moral realist; this stance allows him to acknowledge human limitations and failings, unlike many of his critics who too unfairly expect humans to be perfect paragons of virtue.

But for a Christian ethicist, I sometimes wonder if Biggar isn’t Christocentric enough in his ethics. Since the time of St. Paul, the Church has possessed a canonical text - the Book of Philemon - which is all about slavery. If Biggar truly believes there is an “objective moral reality,” shouldn’t the injustice of slavery have been as obvious to Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin as it was to John Wesley and us today (even admitting that some forms of slavery were more tolerable than others, surely oppressive, exploitative slavery has also existed throughout time)? What of the Old Testament’s command to free slaves after seven years (Jeremiah 34:14-15)? It does seem as if there was slavery in the Middle Ages (though how often is this ever discussed?), but given that Biggar is keen to point out that some forms of slavery were more tolerable than chattel slavery, I wish he actually spent time explaining the evolution of slavery in the West. Some of his arguments seem quite flimsy indeed; again, he claims that the losers in war were often enslaved rather than killed or imprisoned, but were African peoples like the Mali launching invasions of Europe? Hardly, and given that Biggar is focused primarily on British slavery, he can’t use such an argument. OK, so Africans were enslaving their fellow Africans and offering them for sale to Europeans; no one was forcing the Europeans to buy Africans and treat them like mere property.

There is a war for the soul of the West today. With Biggar, I agree that those on the left tend to be guilty of oikophobia and are too dismissive and ignorant of the past. By continually condemning our past, we virtue-signal to our peers that we are obviously not like our benighted, barbarous ancestors. As Biggar stresses, we may indeed find the views and ethics of our forebears reprehensible and deserving of censure, but we must also take into account the context in which they lived and in which their beliefs and practices were shaped.

But at times I think Biggar lets our ancestors off the hook too easily. This is largely because as a Christian I don’t believe I can easily separate myself off from the past - again, that’s what many on the left want to do when they want to “cancel” certain historical figures. If the Church is the household of God then it includes John Wesley and William Wilberforce the abolitionists and it includes the “precious Puritans” like Jonathan Edwards who owned slaves. Biggar can keep insisting that Muslims and indigenous peoples owned slaves, but as a Christian theologian and ethicist, surely he agrees that followers of Jesus are to live to a higher standard; and that is as true today as it was during the peak of the British slave trade. If there is an objective moral reality as Biggar claims, then surely chattel slavery should have been denounced and rejected from its very inception in the British Empire. He writes:

slaves remained radically dependent on their master’s will and accordingly vulnerable. Because slavery had not had any legal status in England for centuries, the common law was completely silent on the status and treatment of slaves. Thus, the colonies were left free to formulate their own codes, which typically gave owners almost complete control over the movements of their slaves, whose company they kept and how they behaved. Unlike indentured servants, they “effectively had no legal redress against maltreatment (p. 42).

Shouldn’t the nation that produced such prodigious legal minds like Thomas More and Richard Hooker have ensured there were firm codes that protected the rights and well-being of those God created (even if not ensuring slavery was entirely illegal, at least some measure of security)?

Biggar complains that the economic historians Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson “stray far beyond their professional expertise into the sociology of race and inequality in contemporary Britain and into the ethics of ‘restorative justice’ but it’s quite common for academics to address topics beyond their niche specialty; hasn’t Biggar the theologian and ethicist delved more into history in his most recent work (p. 170, n. 40)?

Reparations is a more tightly-argued book than Colonialism and, despite my critiques, I am entirely in agreement with Biggar that reparations and the quest for righting historical injustices are flawed and should not be pursued. I note with much irony that if the radical (and largely irreligious) left is guilty of a secularized Augustinianism that deplores our ancestors as hopelessly immoral and unjust without allowing the charity of historical circumstance to temper their condemnations, at times I think that Biggar is prone to covering up Britain’s past wrongs with a “cheap grace.”

[Ken Sampson · Rating 4 out of 5]

[30 Oct 2025] A detailed, thoughtful and analytical response to recent demands for reparations - paid by the UK to Caribbean nations, previously British colonies, who were involved in the slave-trade. He has done his research and provides evidence that contradicts many of the assertions made. Britain certainly participated in the transatlantic slave trade, but was a relatively late comer to it and was possibly in context only a minor player. He tells the shocking tale of historical slavery from across the world, including those Britons, particularly the Cornish, hundreds of whom were kidnapped into African slavery in the 17th century. The manner that slaves were treated in all places was abominable, but extreme savagery occurred elsewhere. The universal nature of African slaves being sold by other africans is described. Then he analyses the economy and concludes that contrary to the trope of Britain engorging itself with unbelievable wealth and riches - the wealth was focused on a very small group of people and its contribution to the UK economy was minimum. The fact that Britain - unique among nations - realised early that Slavery was morally wrong and outlawed it and then spent what in todays terms would be billions of pounds and many lives trying to stamp it out all over the world is told.

He looks at the assertion that Caribbean nations have suffered in their development as a direct consequence of slavery. He compares and contrasts the different nations and concludes that post independence governance has had a much more significant impact on their social and economic progress. He looks at the links between modern British racism and slavery and concludes that the link is tenuous when contrasted to much more significant racism in other countries with no history of involvement in slavery.

He looks at how the left-wing of British politics enthusiastically embraces the 'guilty as charged' theory and how this fits with their nationalist, colonial and historical revisionism. He is incredulous that the Church of England has accepted 'their guilt' without question and is committed to impoverish the ordinary parish to pay for their part in historical investments in the trade - investment that made then no money.

This short book is well written and clear and succeeds in presenting an alternative view on the reparation debate. What is less well covered and not explored is the rights of descendants to hold emotions about the experiences of their ancestors or their ethnic groups - of course, they are entitled to be angry and to express their anger, and of course, likewise the descendants of the perpetrators of crimes should be able, if they wish, to apologise for their ancestors actions, but demanding trillions of pounds as a method of correcting an historical wrong seems to be unproven by the author of this book.

[Christian Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a present to me, and I wasn't sure what to expect, however I found it a very informative and interesting book.

When we think of 'Reparations' in our modern world, we tend to think of crowds of angry demonstrators marching through streets, emotive adverts of the current situation in former colonial territories, and judgemental comments from those who are perhaps more privileged than others.

But that's just it - it's emotion. Not looking at things in their proper context or historical setting creates misconceptions and falsehoods which we then truly believe without questioning.

The book not only looks at the context, but also who was behind the wider context, e.g. the large slavery enterprise on the African east coast, not to mention elsewhere in the world. The facts are displayed, sourced, and argued calmly. It also seeks to correct errors found elsewhere which helps to clear the 'emotive air' around the topic.

I'd thoroughly recommend to those who aren't versed in the subject, but have 'heard things' through the media and would like to broaden their understanding of the topic.

"Advocates of British reparations for slavery invariably downplay African complicity in slave-trading. But Africans had been enslaving and selling other Africans since Roman times. Europeans merely furnished them with a new, if larger, market."p.54

"One estimate has it that raiders from Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli along enslaved between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Another estimate reckons that the Muslim slave trade as a whole, which lasted until 1920, transported about 17 million slaves, mostly African, exceeding by a considerable margin the approximately 11 million shipped by Europeans across the Atlantic." p.36

[Word Muncher · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the reasons Britain doesn't have to pay reparations. I love the way this is written factually - like a thesis that has to clarify. I always think the British are so logical, so I'm not going to kiss ass, but we should all read this. Just to clear the air, misconceptions and to know the facts.