Britain did more to abolish slavery than any other nation

I should make it clear here that when I use the term slavery, I am using it in the sense of chattel slavery.

There is a modern tendency to broaden the definition to capture things which no one prior to the 20^th century would have seen as slavery. These include indentured labour, or even low wages or poor working conditions.

Australia has the Modern Slavery Act 2018, which conservatively advances the definition of slavery by including a category of “slave like”. If enacted in 19^th Century Australia it would most likely have made apprenticeship “slave like”.

There is a reason that a young person might be apprenticed to someone called a “master”. That master could use force to ensure the apprentice stayed at work and did as he was told, just as I can order my dog around. But my dog is a chattel, whereas the apprentice regains all of his rights after a defined term.

Indentured labour as practiced in the 19^th century, such as the employment around the Pacific of South Sea Islanders, Indians, Chinese, and even Europeans such as Finns, was also similarly as brutal as an apprenticeship. In return for free passage to and from the country of their indenture they received wages, food and housing, but were bound to work out their time.

This sounds barbaric to us, but even our most modern anti-slavery instrument describes this only as “slave-like”.

These distinctions are often absent from public debate when the charge is unreasonably made that Australia once sanctioned slavery through the use of indentured labour.

It’s almost as though we want to magnify our blemishes so we can mix it with the worst in the moral turpitude Olympics.

Is there a defence for the original involvement of Britain in the slave trade?

“Everybody was doing it” is not generally regarded as a good moral argument. In its guise as “I was just following orders” it was rejected at the Nuremberg Trials. But everybody was doing it, and we are all creatures of our time, so it is difficult to see how the British could have avoided some level of involvement.

Most of us believe in the concept of historical progress, but for this concept to make any sense things must have been worse in the past, and they frequently were.

But we don’t have the luxury of living simultaneously in the present and the past, and undoubtedly some things we routinely do today will be viewed as immoral and inhumane in a couple of centuries’ time.