Labi Sifre doesn't also mention that Britain jacked it in and then spent the better part of a century hunting down slave ships (often American) until the slave trade ceased?

Nor that the European angle on the slave trade was just part of a huge network of African slavers - by Africans, for Africans, on Africans? Certainly the Europeans were the major "consumers" on the West coast, but there was a shitload of slavery going on between tribes across the continent, and trading slaves to the Middle East.

I'm not a denier in any shape or form. Slave transports rank alongside the Irish Famine as one of the most dreadful things that Britain was responsible for. But it's long past, so what would "compensation" accomplish? None of those who suffered are alive today. So who gets paid?

The various West African countries whose people were taken? But those countries haven't suffered from slavery. They've certainly suffered from dictators, propped up by imperialism from first the UK, Belgium, France and Germany, and then from the US and USSR. And from a lack of investment brought by civil wars and violence, which has led to underinvestment, low education and corruption. Slavery isn't the cause of their problems.

Or the Caribbean countries where they were shipped to, where British firms ran colonies, and whose descendants still live there? Probably the closest fit. But Britain also invested in schools and government setup in these countries before independence, with the result that I've read reports of Jamaican kids getting better schooling than kids in Britain. France (the other main colonist) OTOH didn't put anything into infrastructure, so for those countries, see "West Africa" for dictators, etc, and add drug cartels.

Or should Britain give the money to the US itself, to be channelled to Afro-American causes? But the US fought a civil war to remove slavery, in which many thousands of whites died so that blacks could be free. And even them, Jim Crow and subsequent oppression by whites kept the inequality going. The primary cause of black Americans' suffering is not the British who transported them, but the white Americans who oppressed them after transportation.

And then there's the question of who does the paying. It's pretty obvious that there's no shipping lines running sailing ships any more. Of the zillion ships of the time, how are you going to tell how much of existing shipping lines' current funds would have come from that? Especially given that most shipping lines went defunct long after slavery was abolished, so it's clearly continued good management and not slave-related funds which have influenced the survival of shipping companies.

In the same vein, it'd also be nice if mining companies paid out to the descendants of miners (not slaves, but unable to leave their jobs) who never reached more than 40 years old due to black lung, coal/fire-damp or simply the dangers of the job. Or clothing companies to the descendants of hatmakers who died from mercury poisoning. Or any country to the soldiers and civilians killed in the various wars across Europe to decide which bunch of murdering bastards got to rule us, or (like WWI) just because some silly bastards wouldn't back down. It ain't ever going to happen though.

At some point, we have to say that life back then was, to use the famous phrase, "nasty, brutish and short". Mostly it ain't so now and we know better, which is why Western countries (the countries themselves and private citizens) pump a ton of aid into Africa and other impoverished nations. We could then get into the problems of the World Bank stifling African development, but that's irrelevant to the slavery issue.

Graham.