This is not an argument for indiscriminate punishment of contemporary Britons. Quite the contrary. It is an invitation to British institutions to investigate themselves honestly, and the documentary ground for doing so is unusually solid. Legitimate standing to negotiate reparations should belong to the injured and their descendants, not to intermediaries who have discovered a profitable enthusiasm for ancestry, rural Jamaican-accented vocabulary and darker complexions. Ima

A country that could look at its own ledgers without flinching, and then act with invention rather than evasion, would have done something no empire ever managed. It would have converted the smell of guilt into the fragrance of institutional courage. That is a form of national pride worth cultivating — the pride of a nation that chose honesty over amnesia, and creation over denial. That, to me, would be Sweat 4.0. And it is the one genuine reparative odour that no billione

Who supplied the energy and intelligence that made the extraordinary accumulation of wealth from chattel slavery possible?