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Condemning European complicity is fair, because they were complicit.
But it cannot be done non-reciprocally while ignoring the broader context. Slavery has been practiced across civilisations for millennia, including in parts of Africa and the Middle East into modern times.
Estimates from the Global Slavery Index indicate millions still live in forms of modern slavery today – forced labour, forced marriage, and descent-based servitude – particularly in parts of Africa and Arab states. The condemned West is almost entirely free of slavery, while the condemning accusers still practice it at intolerable rates.
What distinguishes the West is not the original sin of participation (shared by many societies), but the fact that Western civilisation, drawing on the initial Roman note on slavery’s tension with natural freedom, became the first civilisation to abolish it systematically and by force.
Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1807 and Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 were followed by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which patrolled the coast for decades, intercepting slave ships and freeing tens of thousands at considerable cost in lives and treasure. This was an unprecedented use of naval power in the name of a universal moral principle aligned with the natural law ideals the Roman jurists had acknowledged but not fully realised.