In 1833 Britain abolished slavery across its empire, and it paid compensation.
Not to the enslaved. To the owners. Twenty million pounds, roughly forty percent of the national budget, paid to slave owners for the loss of their "property." The people who had been owned received nothing.
The loan raised to fund that payment was not fully repaid until 2015. For nearly two centuries British taxpayers, including the descendants of the enslaved living in Britain, were paying off the debt incurred to compensate their ancestors' owners.
France went further. Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti, was the most profitable colony in the world in the eighteenth century, worked by around half a million enslaved Africans. When they overthrew French rule in the only successful slave revolution in history, France demanded reparations. From Haiti. For the loss of France's property.
In 1825, under threat of invasion, Haiti agreed to pay. It did not finish until 1947. The debt is a direct and documented cause of its poverty today.
Belgium's King Leopold ran the Congo as his personal property from 1885 to 1908. Forced labour and mutilation killed an estimated ten million people. The rubber and ivory paid for his fortune and his monuments in Brussels.
None of this is an accusation. It is accounting. The states kept meticulous records of colonial revenue precisely because the revenue mattered so much. Eric Williams traced how plantation profits became the banks, ports and capital of industrial Britain.
Now follow the ledger forward.
The Muslim communities of Western Europe descend, overwhelmingly, from colonised peoples: the Raj, French North Africa, the Dutch empire. They did not arrive by accident. The colonial relationship had already laid the channel. After the war, Europe needed labour, and the channel carried it.
They were placed where their ancestors had been placed. The lowest-paid work: mills, sanitation, transport, care. The worst housing: tower blocks, peripheral estates, banlieues. Outside the networks through which the majority built wealth.
Then, a generation or two later, politicians look at unemployment rates and low attainment in these communities and ask what is wrong with them. Their culture, perhaps. Their religion. Their failure to integrate.
The question has an answer, and the answer is not in the communities. It is in five centuries of a system that classified certain peoples as available for extraction, put them to work for others, and kept them from the means of accumulating anything for themselves.
The wealth of Europe was taken from the colonised world. The descendants of the colonised world now live in Europe. And Europe's response is to ask why they are poor.
When the bill for slavery was finally settled, it was settled with the owners. Notice who is still being asked to account for the outcome.