Whenever I speak in public about slavery and the slave trade, the question of reparations is one of the first from the floor. Ten years ago, the issue was rarely raised. Now the debate is getting louder and more insistent. Like many others, my initial response was to dismiss it. But there is a serious social debate about reparations, especially in the US, which simply can't be ignored.
The immediate context, of course, is the growing awareness of the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Here, unusually, is an apparently remote historical episode which not only retains a powerful emotional resonance, but which seems to have thorny contemporary consequences. The history of slavery is not dead and gone.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the sense of grievance and communal hurt among the descendants of slaves is profound—more than most white people realise. Although the reparations debate is sustained by that mood, it has more specific origins. The post-1948 settlements between Germany and Israel form an obvious starting point, but so too is the widespread awareness that in 1833 the British parliament compensated slave owners to the tune of a massive £20m for the loss of their slaves. Not a penny was paid to the enslaved. Demands for reparations have a long pedigree, but first took off in the US. In Britain they were promoted by the late Bernie Grant and Anthony Gifford, but were given a major global boost by the 2001 UN world conference against racism in Durban.
Complex accountancies have been calibrated to "prove" how much the old slave-owning powers owe to the descendants of their former victims, sometimes with sums running into trillions. This line of argument is unlikely to make any political headway. Which politician could hope to sign up to such massive indebtedness? But that does not mean that reparations is a forlorn issue.
At its simplest, the debate about reparations concentrates attention on difficult issues of collective guilt, national responsibility, and how far the past can be judged by the standards of the present. This, of course, applies to other areas of colonial and imperial history, and to such things as the aerial bombardment of German cities. Yet what gives the reparations discussion an added edge is the abundant evidence that Britain profited so substantially from the Atlantic slave system.
For decades, the historical argument about the slave trade has circled around Eric Williams's thesis about the huge contribution made by slavery towards Britain's rise to industrial power and the claim that by the start of the 19th century the slave system was no longer in Britain's broader economic interests—and that therefore its abolition was not a moral or disinterested act. Slavery was certainly a system which brought prosperity to Britain long before the period we associate with the industrial revolution. But it was a system which was booming at the very point the British turned against it. In the the 1780s and 1790s, when the abolition campaign took off, there were more slave ships, carrying more Africans across the Atlantic, than ever before. If those most intimately involved—the traders, merchants, planters and financiers—felt that the slave trade was in decline, they kept their worries to themselves.
Not only did the British abolish the slave trade when it was highly profitable, the abolition act of 1807 was followed by an aggressive abolition policy, especially in the Atlantic, by the Royal Navy. This was costly in manpower, money and even lives. Had there not been abolitionist navies in the Atlantic after 1807, how many more Africans would have been ferried into Brazilian and Cuban slavery? Where's the evidence that the south Atlantic slave trade would have died away? There is a case for arguing—as does Christopher Brown in his recent book Moral Capital—that after 1807 Britain paid reparations of a kind through its anti-slaving policies in the Atlantic. This is unlikely to deflect current demands. But at the very least, it is clear that abolition in 1807 was not pursued for British self-interest.
Little of this seems to have had much impact on the reparations debate, which focuses on the 150 years before 1807. In this view, abolition seems a mere sideshow which, at worst, serves to deflect public attention from the main issue. This was indeed a worry which many of us have had in the build-up to the 2007 anniversary. Commemorations of 1807 might become a smokescreen of self-congratulation covering the horrors of the pre-1807 story.
Lurking over the whole debate is the powerful sense of collective guilt: a sense that here was a historical sin which needs to be addressed (an argument that would have pleased the evangelical abolitionists around Wilberforce). Like the arguments about financial reparations, this is an ultimately pointless line of debate. Yet, again, it touches on a theme which might offer a useful way of thinking about reparations. 2007 has seen a remarkable wave of cultural and political initiatives focusing on the slave trade and slavery. At the time of writing, for example, I've given 30 talks on abolition in the past ten weeks. Something has changed: those traditionally sparse attendances in drafty halls have given way to full houses and interested audiences. Large numbers of people—the majority of whom, so far, have been white—want to engage with the story.
The current swirl of interest, from parliament down to small local organisations, from major projects funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to local radio and newspapers having their say about abolition, all and more are generating a serious debate about the British past. When I first began to work on slavery in the late 1960s, a colleague dismissed my research as an interest "in bongo drums." Today, African slavery is seen as a critical historical force in the shaping of the western world.
If reparations are to have any lasting meaning, they must surely involve edging towards a greater understanding of slavery, not as an exotic, distant issue but as an institution intimately involved with the emergence of modern Britain. If we need to make good the shortcomings of the past, we need to know and understand what happened. Reparations as historical understanding will have a greater importance than the drafting of unreal and unattainable financial settlements.
