Black Atlantic was the name of an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge UK last year (2024).

It’s a mea culpa because a slave owner gave Cambridge University the money to build the museum. He made his money from pineapples in the Caribbean – and used slave labour to run his business.

Twelve and a half million people were transported to the New World to make money for the European entrepreneurs, often with State backing and with scientific connivance concluding that Blacks were lower in the brains department, and less human.

Ten million seven hundred thousand arrived, so almost two million died on the way. One slave owner / shipper was George Dickinson., who made five voyages on three ships, between 1763 and 1768, transporting a total of 725 captives across the Atlantic: 97 died.

Assuming the numbers are typical for all voyages, then 725 divided by five voyages is 145 slaves. Twelve and a half million slaves at 145 per voyage equates to over 86,000 voyages.

I wanted to resist tutt-tutting at the terrible deeds. I had to work to keep my own feelings and not be swept along with the tide of feelings that are kind of expected in a mea culpa exhibition.

So many stories, so many strands. We should be educated; I have little doubt about that.

How should we feel? I am part of a minority that has been everywhere up and down the social and economic ladder or hierarchy. How should dyed in the wool white English people feel? Many of them will have great grandparents who lived miserable toil-filled lives. They too have their stories.

In a place like Cambridge there will be more than a sprinkling of people who come from privileged families. Perhaps they will feel uncomfortable? Should they feel more uncomfortable than the poor? People from poor backgrounds might feel they are off the hook.

The truth is that if the profits were kept by the wealthy, they didn’t conduct the slave trade all by themselves. There would have been people from every class without whom the system would have ground to a halt immediately.

How quickly did the racial stereotypes filter into the way everybody from the top to the bottom felt about Black people?

And today should ‘we’ be making amends? And how? Exhibitions may raise awareness but they don’t pay the bills of today's former slaves.

And if, as it was, that the whole system was driven by money, then who exactly is the 'we' who should pay compensation?

And if so then how much? Europe took off like a rocket on the back of the profits from the slave trade.

What about all the compounded benefits that have spread everywhere?

Should there be a discount because the world would not be as advanced as it is without the initial capital that drove technological advances in which everyone can now share?

And again, who is this ‘we’? Are we all the same in that given any excuse we would do the same?

Or would we?

Not now, today of course, but under the influence of the environment prevailing then. Of course we would not be cruel – but that seems a poor excuse for turning human beings into energy sources against their will.

After all, we live in stratified societies. In some the gap between the rich and the poor is so great that we could make a case that many are serving life sentences not that far from slavery.

And what about the intermediaries, the North African traders, the tribe-on-tribe enslavement? How would we allocate responsibility?

Then There's The Trade Eastwards

That was west across the Atlantic, but what about eastwards to the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent?

For more than a thousand years the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, and East African slave trades transported millions of Africans to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.

The numbers are harder to get to because the passages weren't documented the way the comparitively short-lived trans-Atlantic save trade was.

But historians have taken the time to put estimates together, and the best estimates are that between eight and fourteen million passed through the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade routes from the 7th century until the early 20th century.

Putting it all together, slavery was a universal truth for the past thousand years.

How's that for a comment on the human race?

The Environment

I think it is fair to say that this is the first era worldwide where many people see the damage we are doing to the natural environment and wish to stop and reverse it.

That seems to me to be a turnaround in perspective that sits easily with the turnaround in perspective of people who would not be slave owners even if it were made legal tomorrow. And that inner world of the mind is what really drives the world we see outside. Isn't that so?