The reparations debate has a selective relationship with history. The Arab slave trade, which moved at least nine million Africans over thirteen centuries, is largely absent from it. The East Africa Squadron, which Britain deployed to suppress that trade, is entirely absent from it. Both omissions serve the same narrative purpose.
The Arab slave trade predates European involvement in African slavery by nearly a thousand years. It ran continuously from the seventh century until well into the twentieth, long after the Atlantic trade had been abolished. It was, by most measures, at least as brutal as the transatlantic trade. The mortality rate on trans-Saharan slave routes was savage. The systematic castration of male enslaved people to prevent reproduction was standard practice. The demand was not for agricultural labour but primarily for concubines, domestic servants, and eunuch palace guards. None of this features in the standard reparations narrative.
Britain’s response was to send warships. From the 1850s onwards, the Royal Navy maintained a presence in the Indian Ocean specifically to intercept Arab slave dhows. After 1873, that presence was formalised, treaty-backed, and permanent. Britain pressured the Zanzibar Sultanate into abolishing the trade. When resistance was encountered, it was overcome by force. The main Zanzibar slave market was closed. Roughly 1,000 dhows were captured and 12,000 people freed.
None of this appears in CARICOM’s ten-point plan. None of it features in the standard account of Britain’s relationship with slavery. It does not fit the required story, which is one of Britain as perpetrator, not as the nation that spent a century fighting slavery on two oceans simultaneously.
The omission is not a minor oversight. It is a structural feature of an argument that depends on presenting an incomplete version of history. The complete version is considerably more complicated, and considerably less useful to those seeking to extract financial commitments from the British government.
