Stand firm, King Charles Britain owes no apologies for slavery

When is the Muslim world going to apologize for its slave raids in Central and Eastern Europe that made off with millions of captives?Not any time soon, we can assume, since no one is asking it to apologize and presumably no one ever will. The same isn’t true in the United Kingdom, where there’s a hot debate over whether the country should apologize over its participation in the transatlantic slave trade — in what would be a stark expression of double standards and Western guilt. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, whose contemporary Labour Party has a taste for self-abasement, wants to have “difficult conversations” over such an apology, and says that it’s “the patriotic thing to do.”He is “offering a structured dialogue with those affected by the transatlantic slave trade,” never mind that Britain abolished the trade more than two centuries ago.It’s perverse for the UK — pressured by Caribbean countries within the British Commonwealth — to consider a formal apology, given that slavery was a universal phenomenon and Britain had an honored role in snuffing it out. The ancient Egyptians embraced slavery, and so did the Greeks and Romans.Often, enslavement was the price of military defeat in the ancient world.After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the Byzantines, the Vikings and Central Asian societies all relied on slave labor. They weren’t alone; the institution spanned every type of society.Historian Stewart Gordon notes that Ethiopia’s legal code in the mid-13th century “recognized slaves as central to the economy and defined the acquisition and holding of slaves as the natural order of things.”In the 16th century, he writes, Ethiopia “was a full slave society.”The transatlantic slave trade couldn’t have operated without the participation of West African rulers, who took slavery for granted long before European slavers showed up and continued the practice after they left. Something that’s almost never mentioned in t...