In his new book, The Big Payback, the British comedian Sir Lenny Henry has called on the UK Government to pay £18tn in reparations for slavery to black British people.
Having spent the past five years researching a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world, what struck me especially about Sir Lenny’s intervention (apart from the figure of £18tn, which is equivalent to between six and seven times the size of the UK’s economy), was the continued dominance of the transatlantic trade in public discourse about slavery.
While the West has engaged in critical discussions over this egregious phenomenon for many years, the same cannot be said for swathes of the Middle East: a region in which slavery and the accompanying trade endured without pause from the seventh to the 20th centuries.
