Letters: Britain was not the only nation complicit in slavery

His eye-rolling about ‘what about the Vikings and the Romans, since these states don’t exist’ does not get away from the reality that the descendants of these powers occupy known geographical states today – it can’t be too hard to join the dots and establish blame. Easier still is to identify many of the other nations descended from historical empires involved in taking slaves (spoiler alert: virtually every dominant power through history and still going on today – evil stuff, yes, but not unique to Britain). If Banner is not prepared to pursue these cases, why go after the UK solely? Sounds like academic virtue-signalling to me (see previous ‘not going to happen’). If he really wants to chase someone down, why not go after the people who made money out of it: the merchants. It’s easy to find them; they got generous compensation in 1835-43 for loss of their ‘property’ on slavery being made illegal in UK territories. The list of complicit includes the royal family (the Royal African Company, with James II as governor). That makes more sense than penalising the general population today, who did not benefit from slavery and whose forebears could – and some did ...