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The past is a foreign country but only in the same sense that America, Russia and China are. Yes, if you live outside the world’s most powerful nations, your day-to-day life isn’t wholly decided by what their governments choose to do and how their people live, work and consume. But, for good and for ill, your own choices are influenced by what goes on there. Similarly, your own life outcomes are shaped by both your immediate past and those of your family and country.
Not every piece of the past holds equal power and weight for everyone. The decisions of Joe Biden or Jamie Dimon are more consequential for my own prosperity and life choices than those of a schoolteacher in Milwaukee. And like many people today, I am descended from both slave-owners and from slaves. But the slaves in my family tree fall much further back, something reflected in terms of their diminished influence on my own life prospects compared with others.
As a new project by Reuters helps show, the influence of the transatlantic slave trade, in which I am historically lucky enough that my family’s history of buying and selling slavery is nearer to the present than our history of enslavement, still retains considerable influence. Every living US president, other than Donald Trump, and 28 sitting senators are direct descendants of slave-owners. This is unsurprising: if you want to get ahead in any field, it helps to be rich and well-established, and in the US, if you are rich and well-established, the transatlantic slave trade is probably somewhere in your ancestors’ portfolio.
What was more striking was some of the responses. Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic senator for Illinois, described the discovery as “gut-wrenching”. But the news was unsurprising, given that Duckworth can trace her family tree back to the beginning of the United States of America. If you have even a scrap of white American ancestry, unless you think that your ancestors in the northern states were Regency-era ESG pioneers, you will be descended from people who benefited from the trade.
Still, when confronted with evidence of historical wrongdoing, such reactions are often the default. The impulse to apologise when you discover an awful truth about your past is, I think, an admirable one. But it comes at the cost of seeing a national or global problem as one that can be fixed by personal apologies or public shaming.
The transatlantic slave trade is the most difficult of problems. Long ago enough that no one is left to apologise directly, but close enough to shape outcomes. And present, too, at the foundations of the most important democracy and largest economy in the world.
But a similar tendency to see societal problems as ones that can be fixed through expressions of regret is present even in far less fraught areas. In the UK, a number of historical decisions mean that cities outside London are considerably less productive and well-connected than equivalent cities in France, Italy or Germany. At every panel on regional development, you are therefore likely to see someone either apologise for hosting the event in London or congratulate themselves for running it in Manchester or Birmingham
But the reason why Manchester is less productive than Lyon isn’t that think-tanks don’t host panels there. Some of the problem is bad luck, but some is due to malice. Part of why Manchester is less productive than Lyon is because for centuries the British parliament prevented new universities from being set up due to successful lobbying by Oxford and Cambridge. This means that institutions such as the University of Manchester are younger and have smaller endowments than they otherwise would.
If, like me, you went to Oxford or Cambridge, part of why your degree enjoys a social cachet is that you still gain an indirect benefit from the historical decision to hobble Oxbridge’s rival institutions.
And while apologies can be welcome, they don’t fix anything. Actually fixing the past tends to cost money and upset people. It’s tempting, therefore, to instead talk about how awful it is, to apologise for your ancestors, your choice of venue or your history. But seeing big, structural problems as things that you should simply say sorry for, rather than things that need big, structural solutions isn’t helpful. It’s just narcissism.
People and places that have been dealt a bad hand by history don’t need apologies or hand-wringing from those of us with the dumb luck to get a good one. Mostly, what they really need is a plan to redress the imbalance — and the money to make it happen.
stephen.bush@ft.com
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