Scottish auction sells Zanzibar slave neck irons

A small auction house in the Scottish Highlands is discovering that in modern Britain, markets are tolerated only when they trade in the right kinds of history.

According to The Guardian, Cheeky Auctions in Tain, Ross is listing a set of 18th-century neck irons linked to the Omani-Arab slave trade in East Africa, with an estimate around £1,000. The sale is explicitly framed as “Challenging History”. The auctioneer, Marcus Salter, argues that selling the item forces confrontation with the past rather than allowing museums to quietly warehouse it. He also notes a mundane but important truth: “No matter what happens there’s going to be money made out of it from somewhere.”

That statement is both obvious and heretical. The moral objection raised by Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy—who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations—is that trading such objects is “continuing to profit from the slave trade” and that these items should be “looked at in horror”, not treated as collectors’ curios. A local customer, Nigel Murray, calls the auction “vile”, adding that an auction is how enslaved people were sold, and that this is “making more money out of it”.

The legal reality is less cathartic. Caecilia Dance, a London lawyer who has advised on restitution of Nazi-looted art, told The Guardian there is “no specific law against” trading slavery-linked objects. That matters because the conflict is not really about one set of shackles; it is about whether political actors can create de facto contraband through public pressure, platform rules, and reputational threats.

Salter says they checked with the selling platform and were told the chains are considered a “historical artefact” and therefore permissible. That is the quiet modern censorship pipeline: not Parliament, but payments, platforms, insurers, and trade bodies deciding what is “allowed” after a quick compliance consultation.

If Britain decides that certain categories of historical objects may be owned only by approved institutions, the predictable consequence is not moral purification. It is a black market with worse provenance, more forgery, and less documentation—exactly the opposite of what serious historians, archivists, and even museums need. Prohibition does not eliminate demand; it merely selects for the least scrupulous suppliers.

There is a coherent alternative that does not require criminalising ownership: voluntary “public interest stewardship”, including donation, sale, or long-term loan to museums in consultation with affected communities, as Dance suggests. But the key word is voluntary. Once the state—or its outsourced moral enforcers—starts treating private possession as suspect, the line between “challenging history” and sanitising it becomes a political decision enforced by coercion.

The same people who insist society must “face history” often demand that uncomfortable artefacts disappear from ordinary commerce and private hands. Nothing says confrontation like hiding the evidence behind institutional doors.