The debate about the West’s moral debt to its former colonies is often too one-sided. Those who point to Britain’s extraction of wealth from India, for example, tend to overlook the impact of social reforms that for the first time gave benighted lower-caste Indians the chance to read and write, or that protected upper-caste widows from sati, where they were expected to throw themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyre. There is no moral abacus that can settle the pros and cons of each instance of colonialism. In the case of slavery, no debate is necessary. The African slave trade was a crime
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