How the West Profited from Slavery — and Still Refuses to Settle the Bill

 The Unpaid Debt

This week, a criminal complaint filed in Switzerland did something remarkable: it dragged the question of slavery out of the realm of apology and into the realm of law. Three Swiss cantons — Zurich, Bern, and Solothurn — stand formally accused of aiding and abetting the transatlantic slave trade, in a legal challenge that forces a country long celebrated as a neutral bystander to history to confront its own ledger.

Switzerland never planted a colonial flag in Africa. It didn't need to. Historians estimate that between 1719 and 1830, Swiss merchants, banks, and city governments helped finance the forced transport of more than 170,000 enslaved Africans — roughly 2 percent of all captives carried on European vessels. A 2020 study commissioned by the city of Zurich itself found that the city held shares in the British South Sea Company, whose ships deported 36,494 Africans during the period of Zurich's investment, and that Zurich's semi-governmental Zinskommission Leu bought Danish bonds that funded slave trading in the Danish West Indies. Zurich's textile industry, meanwhile, produced the very indienne fabrics used as currency to purchase human beings in West Africa, and later fed its cotton mills with fiber picked by enslaved hands in the American South.

The complaint against the three cantons is unlikely to succeed in a courtroom. That is almost beside the point. Its real charge is moral: someone, somewhere, must finally be asked to answer.

The Durban Walkout

If you want to understand why Switzerland's reckoning is only arriving now, look back a quarter-century to Durban, South Africa. In August 2001, the United Nations convened its World Conference Against Racism in the symbolic heart of the anti-apartheid struggle. The agenda, pressed by the African Group with the support of Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, was explicit: colonialism and slavery were not merely historical tragedies but crimes with present-day economic consequences, and they demanded remedies.

The West's response set the template for everything that followed. The European Union, represented by Portugal, tried to bracket — effectively delete — the entire language of remedies from the agenda, while the United States sought to bracket the single word "compensatory." Western delegations reportedly discussed among themselves what levels of non-cooperation they might adopt if the compensation question gained momentum. On September 3, 2001, the United States and Israel walked out of the conference entirely; historians and diplomats have long noted that the withdrawal was driven not only by the fight over language on Israel, but by a reluctance in Washington to open the door to slavery reparations at all.

The final declaration was a masterpiece of diplomatic evasion. It acknowledged slavery — especially the transatlantic trade — as a crime against humanity, but added the crucial qualifier that it "should always have been so," a legal sleight of hand that acknowledged the horror while denying it any retroactive force. The document recognized that slavery and colonialism had "undeniably contributed" to the poverty and underdevelopment of the Global South — and then committed to nothing beyond development programs framed as "partnership."

Three days later, the planes hit the World Trade Center, and Durban vanished from the news. The pattern of refusal, however, continued. Ten Western countries boycotted the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva; fourteen boycotted the 2011 commemoration, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. By 2021, thirty-eight countries — including the European Union as an institution — refused to participate in the twentieth-anniversary event.

The Ivied Plantation

If governments have been the architects of this forgetting, elite universities have been its curators. Consider the documented record. In 1838, the Jesuits who ran Georgetown College sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children to sugar plantations in Louisiana to keep the institution solvent. Researchers estimate that between 12,000 and 15,000 living descendants of those 272 people have been identified. Georgetown's response, after years of pressure: an admissions preference for descendants, and a fund of $400,000 a year. Since 2016, the university has admitted 16 descendants. Sixteen seats, out of more than twelve thousand living heirs.

Harvard, whose report found slavery "integral" to the university's rise, pledged $100 million in 2022. Andre Perry, a Brookings scholar who has studied reparations, called it "somewhat of an insult" relative to what the institution could afford — noting the simple logic that since cash was exchanged in the buying and selling of human beings, cash should be part of the remedy. Duke's William Darity, the leading economist of reparations, has observed that most universities have gone little further than renaming buildings and erecting memorials. Brown University, after its students voted overwhelmingly for reparations, confirmed there is no active process to identify or pay descendants at all.

The most telling comparison is arithmetic. Princeton Theological Seminary pledged $27.6 million; the University of Glasgow, £20 million for research; Brown, $10 million. Set against endowments measured in the tens of billions — Brown's alone approaches $7 billion, built in part, its own 2006 report conceded, on wealth generated by the slave trade — these are rounding errors. Universities have proven extraordinarily skilled at converting a debt into a donation, and a crime into a curriculum.

The Arithmetic of Evasion

What links the Swiss cantons, the Durban walkouts, and the university endowments is a single, consistent position refined over decades: acknowledge, apologize, and never pay. Western democracies have accepted almost every element of the historical record — the numbers of the enslaved, the profits, the compounding of that wealth into modern fortunes — while rejecting the one conclusion the record logically demands. The UN's own declaration conceded the causal chain from slavery to present-day poverty; it simply declined to attach a price to it.

This is why the criminal complaint in Zurich matters beyond its legal prospects. It represents a shift in strategy. If the institutions that profited will not pay voluntarily — if conferences are boycotted, if referendum votes are ignored, if $100 million is offered against a debt measured in trillions — then descendants and their advocates will take the fight wherever a door opens: municipal councils, courtrooms, shareholder meetings, and the court of public opinion.

The West taught the world a phrase at Nuremberg: crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations. It has spent the quarter-century since Durban ensuring that the principle would never be applied to its own foundational crime. The Swiss complaint asks the impolite question that all the apologies and all the plaques and all sixteen of Georgetown's seats are designed to foreclose: not were we involved? — that is settled — but when do we pay?

Until that question is answered honestly, every expression of regret will remain what it has always been: an invoice, carefully itemized, carefully drafted, and never, ever sent.