Slavery was neither central to America’s founding nor the primary source of the country’s subsequent prosperity. Yet both ideas have gained currency in recent years, making it likely that the nation’s slaveholding past will figure prominently in commemorations of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Over the past two decades, the New History of Capitalism has transformed debates about Western development by restoring slavery to the center of the story of modern economic growth. A burgeoning literature now contends that slavery was not simply a moral atrocity intertwined with capitalism but the essential engine that powered the rise of the Atlantic economy itself. According to this interpretation, slave labor generated the capital accumulation, commodity production, and financial sophistication that made the modern West rich. When British politician Kemi Badenoch publicly opposed this argument, critics accused her of minimizing slavery’s economic significance. Yet the central empirical difficulty with the enrichment thesis remains unresolved: if slavery is such a powerful generator of prosperity, why did societies organized around slavery remain poor for most of human history, despite slavery existing across nearly every major civilization?
Well, isn’t this interesting?
Over there at Mediaite is this headline: “Pope Leo Makes Historic Public Apology for Vatican’s Complicity in Slavery,” but silence on reparations.
Reparations, its proponents insist, are payments white Americans owe black Americans for enslaving them, a practice that ended 163 years ago. These advocates would have us believe that seven or eight generations after the fact, the limitations and inequalities of slavery still hold slavery’s descendants back and deny them their chance at the American dream. And somebody has to pay.
Setting aside the logic of that claim for the moment — while noting its similarity to the familiar liberal mantra: “Vote for us, and we’ll give you stuff!” — let us consider the practical question: Who exactly should pay whom?
The United Nations General Assembly, led by Ghana, recently passed a resolution by a 123-3 vote declaring that the “transatlantic” slave trade was the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity. The resolution demands “reparatory justice” for “Africans and people of African descent” due to its “scale, duration, systemic nature, and brutality.”
Why focus just on the transatlantic slave trade? Because the United Nations is engaged in a long-running con to extract reparations from the West by accusing it, and specifically the United States, of perpetrating the most nefarious crime in history.
African nations that cashed in on the slave trade have some cheek in demanding a bung from Britain.
The debate on slavery reparations is showing no signs of dying down. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution urging members to apologise for the slave trade and to pay reparations to African countries.
Spurred on by the so-called reckonings over racism in the United States and its legacy of slavery, many Canadian activists have attempted to import America’s divisive racial politics into Canada. However, examining slavery in Canada on its own terms and in good faith does not result in an identical discourse.
A report released Wednesday by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy — titled, “Slavery in Canada: The Facts Rarely Told” — is a fascinating and grim study into the country’s dark history of trafficking in human beings.
Ghana was famous for raiding and selling off rival tribes!
And it exists to this day …
Slavery in Ghana
They are slavery’s littlest victims: children on fishing boats and at gold mines. Free the Slaves works to foster a climate where child rights are respected and enforced—and kids are protected from harm.
The UN is a corrupt joke
More slaves were held by Africans than were EVER sent across the Atlantic
7 in every 1000 Africans is a slave TODAY: 10 MILLION people
It took 300 years for 10M slaves to cross the Atlantic 🤦♂️
And the Arab Slave Trade in Africans continues TODAY!
So… https://t.co/YzVa42Z9yv pic.twitter.com/xRj844LlSN
— Rafe Heydel-Mankoo (@RafHM) March 25, 2026
h/t Patti Jo
The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.
The resolution – proposed by Ghana – called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.
‘We have paid the price in the blood of our ancestors’: Britain faces new UN push for slavery reparations worth trillions from African and Caribbean nations
Britain and other former colonial powers face a fresh demand from African and Caribbean states to atone and make reparations for the historic slave trade that could cost taxpayers trillions of pounds.
The president of Ghana used a speech at the United Nations in New York today to attack the ‘deafening silence’ from European states ‘enriched’ by the abduction and forced labour of more than 12 million Africans over four centuries.
John Dramani Mahama lashed out before he presents a new resolution, backed by the African Union and Caribbean states, seeking formal recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as a ‘grave crime against humanity’.
What about the wrongs of black people that were slavers and sold other blacks to Arab Muslims and Europeans? Arab and Black Muslims that enslaved whites decades after slavery was outlawed in western countries? pic.twitter.com/FYV2XyG1O5
— j newnam (@jnewnam2) March 22, 2026
Funding from a group founded by George Soros has supported the slavery reparations campaign against Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF), established by Hungarian investor Mr Soros and now led by his son, Alex Soros, has donated vast sums from its $23bn (£17.2bn) endowment to progressive causes.
The foundation has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups seeking to claim reparations from Britain for slavery and colonialism.
Ideological obsession with the transatlantic slave trade prevents insight into the Arab-Muslim slave trade.
Nazism and Bolshevism—the ideological world scourges of the twentieth century, threatening the complete destruction of Europe—may be buried as historical phenomena. However, the world does not stand still. And the enemies of the “open society,” as described by Karl Raimund Popper, never rest for long; they are always on the move, plotting and calculating. Some of them are skilled at ingratiating themselves and pose as humanists, pretentiously speaking on behalf of the “victims” of the world, but they are impostors, to be sure—and totalitarians at heart. Whatever the rhetoric, their ultimate goal is invariably to overthrow the West.
AS THE row over the Church of England’s push to pay out £100million in slavery reparations flared up at last week’s General Synod, leftist members tried to suppress dissent by branding opponents a risk to the wellbeing of black people.
The Church Commissioners, the body which manages the C of E’s £11billion investments, is having to set up a separate charity for the reparations scheme, named Project Spire, and then get permission from the Charity Commission to pay in the £100million for disbursal to beneficiaries in the Caribbean.
San Francisco is ringing in the New Year by pushing for reparations for the city’s black residents, to the tune of $5 million per person.
How will they pay for it? Well, the ordinance creates a fund of both private and public monies to cover the payments. Mayor Daniel Lurie signed the ordinance into law on December 23. The bill was unanimously passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in early December.
San Francisco’s mayor has signed an ordinance creating a reparations fund for black residents while admitting the cash-strapped city does not have any money to fund it.
The city’s board of supervisors voted 11-0 to establish the fund, though no dollar figure was attached. Mayor Daniel Lurie said he signed the legislation to recognize years of effort by an advisory committee and others to create the fund.
California was never a “slave state”.
