Daniel Hannan: The Absurdity of Demanding Reparations for Slavery

I am descended from slaves. So are you. From slave-owners, too. Given the history of the human race, it could hardly be otherwise.

Slavery was the normal form of social organization from the discovery of agriculture onwards. It may have been common among hunter-gatherers long before that, but the evidence is inconclusive. What we do know is that ownership of human beings is at least as old as civilization. The cities of Ur and Sumer, of Egypt and Persia, of the Indus Valley and Xia Dynasty China were built by forced labor.

Slaves raised the Acropolis in Athens and the Pantheon in Rome. They piled up the ziggurats of Meso-America. Incas, Maoris, Apache: All accepted slavery as part of the natural order. An Aleutian tribe kept a special caste of boys raised as girls for the sexual gratification of its chiefs. An early Indian clan bred slave children for the specific purpose of sacrificing them. Slavery was so endemic in Africa that it became more common following the abolition of the Atlantic trade.

This history is what makes arguments about reparations so bizarre. The people paying up would be statistically certain to have both owners and owned in their family tree; so would the people accepting compensation.