Liddle on Apologies

Rod Liddle's recent Spectator piece about apologies is shockingly poor: it gets basic facts badly wrong, and the reasoning looks self-refuting.

Blair didn't, as Liddle claims, apologise for (the British role in) the slave trade: he merely expressed regret. This fell short, quite deliberately, of an apology. The Ashanti didn't control the slave trade: the King of Dahomey's the only plausible candidate there is; there is no reasonable sense of the word control in which even he controlled the slave trade.

Further, there's good empirical evidence of slavery's impact on African economic development.

Annoyingly, Britain wasn't the first nation to declare slavery ethically and morally repulsive. It's been known since whenever that slavery is repulsive: defenders of slavery tend to concede its ugliness, then look for reasons it should continue anyway -- Aristotle concedes that slavery is unpleasant; the master is entitled to treat the slave as a living tool, because the slave isn't really human, lacking as he does the reason that's supposed to be a mark of full humanity.

But if Liddle meant to say Britain was the first country to put an end to slavery or the slave trade, that's false: the first major defender of outright abolition was Jean Bodin, a medieval French lawyer; France, Denmark and Portugal abolished the slave trade and slavery before Britain; the Netherlands, unlike the British, paid reparations on emancipation; even the Act abolishing slavery in the British Empire deliberately exempted territories then owned by the British East India Company.

Educationists, Liddle says, now teach that slavery was an invention of the British, and that it began and ended with British involvement with the trade. That's both false and irrelevant. It's also misleading: he's equivocating on the meaning of 'slavery'. It's certainly true that there's involuntary servitude in the countries he mentions; indeed, there's still involuntary servitude in the UK when people are jailed for crimes. But that's nothing to do with the racial chattel slavery once prevalent in the New World. For the first time in recorded history, one race was declared the perpetual property of another race. There's a nice line in David Eltis' The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas which makes the point: during negotiations between the French and British military commands in 1747, they agreed and committed to paper the claim that any black person, anywhere, was a slave, and was to be treated as merchandise if captured. Racial chattel slavery more or less began and ended with New World slavery. (It's interesting that Eltis thinks even Nazi and Soviet war slavery were distinct from New World slavery in this respect.)

Suppose that Britain had been the first nation to declare that slavery was ethically and morally repulsive. That makes no odds for the apology. Worse, it threatens Liddle's other argument: if Brits should now feel proud of their nation's past deeds, with which they had nothing to do, there's no reason why they shouldn't also feel shame at the less-nice bits of their past -- and no reason why they shouldn't apologise.

The only reason he supplies for not apologising is that one can apologise only for what one has done (as an individual) -- so, presumably, only slave-holders and slave-drivers can apologise for the slave trade. But that's inconsistent: if one can apologise only for what one has done, slave-holders can apologize only for and to those they enslaved, not for the trade itself. And in any case, the view is just false. Individual people can and do represent groups: the Queen represents the nation; the Prime Minister the state (and sometimes the nation); the MP his constituents. When the PM acts in his capacity as PM, those acts are the acts of the nation: when he commits troops to war, it's the nation at war, not the PM. The nation isn't limited to those people alive at the time of the act: this is the same nation that abolished slavery, as he concedes. This is also the nation that fought in the second world war, which is why repayment of the American war loan continued into 2006, when almost all those alive when the loan was granted were dead, and when most of those whose taxes paid for the latter instalments were born long after the loan was taken out. Nations, through their representatives, can and do act freely, seeing as they choose between alternatives. If they can act freely, they can be held responsible when they act wrongly; they can also begin to discharge that responsibility by recognizing their wrongdoing. In apologising, Gordon Brown is speaking for the nation (and the state) which did these terrible things; he's acknowledging the harm they did; as the properly-empowered representative of the nation, he has the power to do so.

One might almost say that Liddle owes his readers an apology.