Slavery, History, and the Church: Why Reparations Without Truth Fail
Slavery is routinely presented today as a uniquely Western crime, narrowly framed around the Trans-Atlantic trade. That history must be taught, remembered, and condemned without reservation. But when it is isolated from the wider human record, it becomes a distortion rather than an education. A truthful account of slavery—historical and contemporary—reveals a far broader and more unsettling reality: slavery has been a recurring human sin across civilisations, religions, and centuries, including in the Islamic world, against Africans, Europeans, and early American citizens, with legacies that persist into the present.
To speak credibly about human dignity, we must tell the whole story.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Particular Horror
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, approximately 12.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the Americas, with millions more dying during capture, transit, or early enslavement. This system was distinctive for its industrial scale, its racialisation of bondage, and its codification of chattel slavery in law, whereby human beings and their descendants were treated as inheritable property. The moral enormity of this crime is undeniable and rightly occupies a central place in Western historical memory.¹
Yet it was neither the first large-scale slave system nor the only one operating during this period.
The Arab-Islamic Slave Trades: A Thirteen-Century System
Running parallel to—and long preceding—the Trans-Atlantic trade was a network of slave routes spanning the Islamic world. From the seventh century until the early twentieth, Africans were transported across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean into North Africa, the Middle East, Persia, and beyond. These trades operated for approximately 1,300 years, vastly longer than the Atlantic system.²
Estimates vary due to sparse documentation, but historians commonly place the number of Africans enslaved through these routes between ten and seventeen million.³ Enslaved persons were used as agricultural labourers, domestic servants, soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs. Mortality rates were often severe, particularly on Saharan routes and through castration practices that left little demographic trace.
Unlike Atlantic slavery, this system was not racialised in law, but religiously and civilisationally structured, with enslavement justified by juridical categories governing unbelievers, tribute, and conquest.
Language, Race, and Enduring Social Hierarchies
The cultural legacy of this history remains visible. In several Arabic dialects, the term ʿabīd—literally “slaves”—has been used pejoratively to describe Black people, reflecting the long entanglement of race and servitude. While not universal, its persistence in some contexts signals how historical slavery shaped social hierarchies that endure into the present.⁴
Afro-descendant communities in parts of the Middle East and North Africa continue to report discrimination rooted in these inherited assumptions, often within societies that publicly deny the relevance of slavery to their own past.
The Forgotten White Slaves: Europeans in Islamic Bondage
Almost entirely absent from contemporary education is the enslavement of European peoples by Barbary and Islamic corsairs. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, pirates operating from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Moroccan ports conducted sustained raids across the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.
Modern scholarship estimates that between one and 1.25 million Europeans—Irish, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and even Icelandic—were enslaved during this period.⁵ These were not isolated incidents at sea. Coastal villages were attacked, populations abducted, and entire communities destabilised.
Ireland was especially vulnerable. In 1631, Barbary corsairs raided Baltimore, County Cork, seizing over one hundred villagers who were sold into North African slavery. Similar raids struck Cornwall, Devon, Sicily, Sardinia, Galicia, and in 1627, Iceland itself. Captives were chained in bagnios, forced into hard labour or galley service, and pressured to convert as a means of survival.
Among the most famous captives was Miguel de Cervantes, enslaved in Algiers for five years. His writings offer first-hand testimony to a vast, institutionalised slave economy operating openly in the early modern Islamic world.⁶
American Citizens Enslaved: The Barbary Crisis
This same system ensnared citizens of the newly independent United States. After losing British naval protection following the American Revolution, American merchant vessels became targets for Barbary corsairs. Crews were captured, imprisoned, and enslaved in North Africa.
By the 1780s and 1790s, dozens of American sailors were held in bondage in Algiers and Tripoli. Leading American statesmen formally protested to North African authorities, complaining that free American citizens were being enslaved as a matter of policy rather than accident. Diplomatic correspondence from this period makes clear that enslavement was defended by Barbary rulers on religious grounds.⁷
These crises eventually led to the First and Second Barbary Wars, America’s first overseas military conflicts, underscoring that slavery was not merely something Western nations perpetrated—it was something inflicted upon them.⁸
The Catholic Church and Slavery: Doctrine, Redemption, and the Ransoming Orders
Any honest account of slavery must also address the role of the Catholic Church—not through caricature, but through history as it actually unfolded. The Church existed within slave-holding societies for centuries, often constrained by political realities, yet it consistently articulated principles that undermined slavery at its root and created institutions dedicated to the liberation of captives.
From late antiquity onward, Catholic doctrine affirmed the equal dignity of all human beings before God. Slavery was never regarded as a sacramentally constitutive status: slaves could marry validly, enter religious life, and receive the sacraments without distinction. While the Church did not possess the temporal power to abolish slavery universally, it persistently limited, moralised, and delegitimised it.
This opposition became concrete in response to the enslavement of Christians by Islamic powers. Entire religious orders were founded explicitly to redeem captives. Most prominent among these was the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, commonly known as the Mercedarians, founded in 1218 by Peter Nolasco. Their charism was singular: the ransom of Christians held in slavery.
The Mercedarians took a fourth vow, pledging to offer themselves as hostages in exchange for captives if no other means of redemption were available. This was not symbolic. Friars crossed into North Africa, negotiated with slaveholders, and in some cases literally substituted themselves into bondage so that others might go free. Alongside them laboured the Order of the Most Holy Trinity (Trinitarians), founded in 1198. Together, these orders redeemed tens of thousands of captives over several centuries.⁹
At the level of magisterial teaching, papal condemnations of slavery developed with increasing clarity. Pope Eugene IV’s bull Sicut Dudum (1435) condemned the enslavement of newly converted peoples in the Canary Islands and demanded their immediate liberation.¹⁰ Pope Paul III’s Sublimis Deus (1537) affirmed that all peoples are fully human and incapable of being reduced to property.¹¹ Pope Gregory XVI’s In Supremo Apostolatus (1839) condemned the slave trade in unequivocal terms.¹² Pope Leo XIII’s Immensa Pastorum (1888) reiterated this teaching, calling slavery a grave offence against human dignity.¹³
Catholic societies often failed to live up to these principles. But the principles themselves were clear, consistent, and productive of concrete institutions of resistance, redemption, and mercy.
Slavery in the Modern World
Legal abolition did not end slavery. In many Islamic-majority countries, abolition came remarkably late. Mauritania did not abolish slavery until 1981, and credible estimates suggest tens of thousands remain in conditions of hereditary servitude.¹⁴
In Libya, open slave auctions of African migrants were documented by journalists and international organisations in the past decade. In the Gulf states, the kafala system binds migrant workers to employers who often confiscate passports and restrict freedom of movement—conditions widely described as modern slavery.¹⁵
Most chillingly, the so-called Islamic State explicitly revived slavery in the 2010s, issuing religious rulings to justify the enslavement and sale of Yazidi women.¹⁶ This was not an aberration, but a deliberate retrieval of pre-modern doctrines.
The Church of England and the Error of Reparative Moralism
This fuller historical record exposes the slavery-reparations initiative of the Church of England as a category error—historical, moral, and legal. The decision by the Church Commissioners to allocate £100 million of historic endowment funds to a reparations programme does not represent repentance rightly understood. It represents institutional confusion, built on contested history and sustained by ideological pressure rather than truth.
As set out publicly by Katie Lam and other parliamentarians, the legal difficulty is elementary. The funds derive from Queen Anne’s Bounty, a charitable trust established for the support of Anglican clergy and parish ministry. Trustees possess no general moral discretion to divert such funds to unrelated causes. To do so risks breaching fiduciary duty and the Charities Act 2011.¹⁷
The historical justification collapses under scrutiny. Claims that the Church “profited from slavery” rely heavily on a 2019 internal report that was neither peer-reviewed nor adversarially tested. The report conflated South Sea annuities—government bonds—with equity exposure to the slave-trading South Sea Company. In fact, the Church’s direct shareholding was marginal, brief, and loss-making.¹⁸ When this factual basis failed, the argument shifted to vague moral association.
The revised claim—that Church funds may have “benefited from people who likely profited from slavery”—is so broad as to be meaningless. Applied consistently, it would implicate nearly every historic institution in Britain.
More troubling still is the racial logic underwriting the scheme. Beneficiaries and victims are distinguished not by lineage or evidence, but by race. This assigns inherited guilt and grievance to the living for acts committed by the dead—an approach incompatible with Christian moral reasoning.
The irony is acute. Britain’s distinctive relationship to slavery lies not chiefly in participation, but in abolition. Britain outlawed the trade early, expended enormous political and financial capital suppressing it internationally, and lost thousands of naval personnel in that effort. Many leading abolitionists, including William Wilberforce, were devout Anglicans whose faith animated their public action.¹⁹
The pastoral cost is immediate. At a time when thousands of Anglican churches face disrepair, closure, or clergy shortages, diverting £100 million away from parish life is a material abandonment of present duty. Polling cited by parliamentarians indicates that approximately 80% of Anglicans oppose the policy, preferring the Church to focus on worship, ministry, and church repair.²⁰
As an established church, the Church of England is not merely a private body. Its actions set precedents for universities, heritage trusts, and national institutions, with potential consequences for taxpayers when historic assets fail.²¹
The Christian response to slavery has never been retrospective financial redistribution to unidentified claimants. It has been truth, personal repentance where guilt exists, restitution where victims are identifiable, and conversion of life. Historically, this was expressed not through bureaucratic moralism but through doctrine, discipline, and sacrifice—including religious orders that redeemed captives at the cost of their own freedom.
A Church that forgets history will misuse it. A Church that replaces truth with moral posturing will lose credibility. And a Church that seeks redemption through money rather than fidelity will discover that salvation is not purchased, but received through conversion of heart.
¹ David Eltis & David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010).
² Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New Amsterdam, 1989).
³ Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
⁴ Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1990).
⁵ Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
⁶ Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; biographical accounts of his captivity in Algiers (1575–1580).
⁷ Diplomatic correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson concerning the Barbary States (1785–1795).
⁸ Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars (Hill and Wang, 2005).
⁹ James William Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).
¹⁰ Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum (1435).
¹¹ Paul III, Sublimis Deus (1537).
¹² Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus (1839).
¹³ Leo XIII, Immensa Pastorum (1888).
¹⁴ United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Mauritania country reports.
¹⁵ International Labour Organization, reports on the kafala system (2017–2023).
¹⁶ United Nations Human Rights Council, reports on ISIS crimes against the Yazidis.
¹⁷ Charities Act 2011; parliamentary correspondence to the Church Commissioners and Charity Commission (2024–2025).
¹⁸ Church Commissioners for England, Historical Links to Slavery report (2019) and subsequent parliamentary critiques.
¹⁹ William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slavery Campaigner (HarperPress, 2007).
²⁰ Parliamentary briefings and polling data cited by MPs opposing the reparations fund (2024).
²¹ Evidence submitted to the Charity Commission regarding precedent risk and ultra vires use of charitable endowments.
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