If slavery accounted for 11 per cent of GDP at its peak, as one study suggests, this was “of only modest significance”, and Africans, who captured and sold other Africans into slavery were equally complicit. Biggar is particularly incensed that those who argue for reparations so often fail to take into account the effort that Britain put into abolishing first the slave trade in 1808 and then slavery itself in 1834. Biggar, a former professor of moral theology at Oxford, a Church of England priest, and more recently a Conservative life peer, argues his case forcefully and rigorously with detailed statistics backed up by pages of references.