The 1807 British medal that answers Jamaica’s reparations campaign
Britain’s 1807 bronze medal was not a souvenir. It was a warning in Arabic to African traders that the slave trade was finished. Jamaica’s reparations campaign ignores that record, the Navy that enforced it, and every slaver who was not British.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: a bronze medal Britain handed West African slave traders in 1807 answers Jamaica's reparations campaign better than any Caribbean cheque.
Jamaica wants billions of pounds from the United Kingdom for slavery. Figures as high as £10 billion get floated. Here is one answer to that demand. It is not a number. It is a single bronze medal.
On the face, a European and an African shake hands among huts and palm trees while people dance and work the fields. Around the rim: "We are all brethren." Underneath: "Slave trade abolished by Great Britain, 1807."
Flip it over and there is no picture. Only Arabic. Museums at Greenwich and Dartmouth's Hood Museum translate it as a notice that the sale of slaves was prohibited in 1807 of the Christian era, in the reign of George III, and that, verily, we are all brothers.
Zachary Macaulay commissioned it. Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint in Birmingham struck it. The museums say it was meant to stop Arabic-speaking traders from driving slave caravans to the coast. Those were very often Muslim Arab merchants from the interior who could read the script. That is who the medal was for.
It is not a souvenir. It is not money. It is a warning written in the reader's own language, and Britain backed that warning with a navy.
The way this history is taught now, you would think Englishmen invented slavery in the 1600s. They did not. Slavery is as old as civilization. The Torah regulates it. The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters. The Quran treats bondage as a fixture to be managed. Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Chinese, Vikings, Ottomans and African kingdoms all kept slaves.
What had never happened before was a movement that called it wrong and spent blood and treasure to stop it.
Those reformers were overwhelmingly evangelical Christians. Wilberforce. Clarkson. The Clapham Sect. And Macaulay, a Scot who kept the books on a Jamaican plantation, got religion, and spent the rest of his life fighting the trade. That moral turn is the story, not a footnote.
The Atlantic trade ran for roughly 350 years. The Arab slave trade ran for about 1,300, from the seventh century into the twentieth. Low estimates for the Saharan routes alone run to six to 10 million. Ronald Segal, in Islam's Black Slaves, puts the Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes together at 11 to 14 million.
There is no large Black population in Arabia today the way there is in Brazil, Jamaica or Alabama. Most of the men were castrated. Most of those died. Survivors sold as eunuchs at seven times the price of an uncut man.
Britain backed the 1807 ban with the West Africa Squadron, patrolling out of Freetown, Sierra Leone, from 1808. Over about 60 years it captured roughly 1,600 slave ships and freed about 150,000 Africans. Some 1,600 British sailors died between 1830 and 1865 alone, by the Royal Navy museum's count.
The full campaign cost nearly 5,000 British lives. Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape put the cost at about 1.8 per cent of GDP a year for six decades. NATO's target for an entire military is 2 per cent of GDP, and allies talk about moving that toward 5 per cent.
Canada is not even at 2 per cent. Britain spent nearly that amount for two generations on other people's freedom and got nothing back except dead sailors: the most costly international moral action in modern history.
Put another way, Britain spent more per capita fighting the slave trade than Canada spends today on its entire military.
In 1833, Parliament abolished slavery across the Empire and freed about 800,000 people. Britain bought the owners out for £20 million, about 40 per cent of the national budget. Nathan Rothschild and Moses Montefiore arranged the 1835 loan. Measuring Worth puts that near £133 billion today, roughly C$250 billion.
The Treasury confirmed the last of it was paid off on Feb. 1, 2015. Anyone who paid tax in Britain before that date was still paying for the end of slavery.
Britain pressed Brazil until that trade ended in 1850. Sir Bartle Frere shut Zanzibar's great Indian Ocean market in 1873. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962. Oman in 1970. Mauritania in 1981.
Against that record sits today's campaign.
Caribbean governments run a reparations commission. The Brattle Group says Britain owes 14 Caribbean countries US$24 trillion, about seven times the British economy. At the Samoa Commonwealth summit, Keir Starmer said no. Other leaders put it in the communiqué anyway.
On March 25, the UN General Assembly voted 123 to 3 to brand the transatlantic trade the gravest crime against humanity and urge reparations for it. Not the Arab trade that ran four times longer. Britain abstained. Only the United States, Israel and Argentina voted no. Commissioners lobbied London in July. The Commonwealth summit in Antigua, Nov. 1 to 4, puts it back on the table.
Nobody invoices Zanzibar, Algiers or Riyadh. Nobody invoices the descendants of the African kings who sold the captives. Only the country that spent 60 years and nearly two per cent of GDP stopping the trade.
No force in human history has done more to free slaves, stop the trade and enforce that ban than the United Kingdom. The one arguable exception is the American Civil War, which freed four million people and cost more than 600,000 American lives. Costlier in blood. Nothing else comes close.
The bronze handshake and the Arabic sentence were what abolition looked like on the beach. It is over. We are all brethren.
Would anyone strike a medal like that today?
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COMMENTS
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Elizabeth Gordanier commented 2026-09-23 15:33:31 -0400Hi Angela. Yep, anti-semitism is the flavor of the month, year etc. I agree people are stupid, lazy, and uninformed. I am a historical researcher and the narrative out there is INCORRECT -
Angela Watt commented 2026-09-23 10:42:41 -0400Anti Semitism seems to be an excuse for people who don’t have control over their lives. They HAVE to blame someone & the Jews are, historically, the ones who are always blamed. People are simply lazy, uninformed & stupid (which btw is a choice). -
Angela Watt commented 2026-09-23 10:21:24 -0400It’s basically a money grab & the Caribbean trying to blackmail the U.K. I hope they’re unsuccessful!! “Good grift” is exactly what this is!!
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Elizabeth Gordanier commented 2026-09-22 21:08:59 -0400Britain shipped Irish kid to Jamaica after fathers were executed
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-09-22 20:38:49 -0400Greedy Caribbean countries would love a huge pay-out rather than fix their economy. And Jamaica was once wealthy until they voted in socialism. So naturally people in those countries latch onto any excuse to demand reparations.
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Bernhard Jatzeck commented 2026-09-22 20:35:34 -0400Never let the truth interfere with a good grift.
