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Slavery is our guilty secret — not of the past, but of the present. It is reported that Cambridge University is devoting considerable effort and resources to exposing its past links with the

slave trade. Yet that trade, which Britain abolished in 1807, has already been the subject of countless books and articles. More recent forms of slavery, from forced labour camps to people

trafficking, are far less well understood. In a letter to the Editor of The Times, Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University castigates Cambridge for ignoring the current use of slavery on

a vast scale by such regimes as North Korea, in favour of a politically-motivated investigation of centuries-old endowments by slave-owners or traders of colleges and other academic

institutions. The distinguished historian, author of over a hundred books including one on the slave trade, argues that such “virtue-signalling…is not only questionable for a charity but

also an endorsement of notions of hereditary guilt”. Professor Black suggests that the Left has shifted focus away from the Holocaust towards the slave trade “as an alternative and

equivalent — inaccurately so, as the purpose of slavery was not to kill slaves”. He dismissed the idea of universities offering reparations to the descendants of slaves as “absurd, both

practically and philosophically”. It is hardly coincidental that the Cambridge project has been initiated by the university’s Canadian Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, whose academic

background is human rights. “We cannot change the past,” Professor Toope says, “but nor should we seek to hide from it. I hope this process will help the university understand and

acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history.” Post-colonial guilt has motivated Canada, Australia and other countries to offer compensation to indigenous peoples, with Toope

playing a key role. In the United States some of the wealthiest private universities, including Yale and Princeton, have been driven to address their own connections with the toxic legacy

of slavery by renaming buildings and researching past links, though none has yet proposed paying reparations. Here in Britain, Glasgow has led the way. Following an investigation, the

university has undertaken a programme of “reparative justice”, which includes setting up a centre for the study of slavery. Such exercises are harmless in themselves, but they ignore the

elephant in the room: modern slavery. Here in Britain, many thousands of people are known to be working illegally under appalling conditions, without pay or freedom of any kind. They are

found in many industries, including agriculture, hospitality, domestic service and, of course, prostitution. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was intended to address this burgeoning global

scandal, and has been widely imitated around the world. This Act may well be compared by future historians to the early 19th-century legislation which abolished first the trade and later the

possession of slaves throughout the British Empire. Theresa May deserves great credit for promoting this Act as Home Secretary, but there is much more work to be done by the police and

other agencies before Britain can claim to have solved the problem. Meanwhile, the Global Slavery Index estimated last year that in 2016 some 40 million people were living as slaves,

including those in debt bondage and forced marriage. Other estimates are even higher, but it is impossible to obtain reliable statistics in highly secretive regimes such as China, which have

used labour camps as a punishment for political dissidents and others for many decades. Disputes over definitions of slavery have long bedevilled debate, while advocates of cultural

relativism have questioned how far Western norms should be applied to the very different traditions that prevail in, for example, the Muslim world. In some African, Middle Eastern and Asian

states, slavery has never been abolished in practice. As many as 4.4 per cent of the population of North Korea is believed to be living as slaves, probably the highest proportion in the

world. Given the urgency of addressing this contemporary scandal, it seems reasonable to question the necessity and rationale of such projects as the one just announced by Cambridge. Let

academics examine the original sources of the funds that pay their salaries, by all means. But in educating the young, they should focus far more on the task of ridding the present world of

slavery than beating their breasts about past guilt. As Hamlet puts it, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?”