White British involvement in Atlantic slave-trading and slavery for over a century-and-a-half up to the early 1800s amounted to “the Black Holocaust, the British genocide”, according to Sir Hilary Beckles, historian, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, and chairman of the Caricom Reparations Commission, which seeks to “establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the governments of all the former colonial powers” in the Caribbean region. Chattel slavery on the sugar plantations of the West Indies was a unique atrocity that made a major contribution to the economic industrialisation of Britain and thereby to British prosperity today. The abolition of slavery in 1833 compensated the slave-owners but not the slaves. The Caribbean descendants of slaves now suffer intergenerational trauma, resulting in poor social and economic outcomes. Britain, therefore, owes reparations.
That conclusion would follow, if the preceding statements were true. But they aren’t.
First, slave-trading was by no means a peculiarly white European enterprise. Black Africans had been busy enslaving other Africans and selling them to the Romans and then to the Arabs long before Europeans arrived on the scene. One estimate has it that Arab raiders from Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli enslaved between one million and 1.25m Europeans from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th. Another estimate reckons that the Arab slave trade as a whole, which lasted from the seventh century AD until well into the 20th century, transported about 17m slaves, mostly African, considerably exceeding the 11m shipped by Europeans across the Atlantic, albeit over a shorter period from 1526 to 1873.
And contrary to Beckles’s claim that African chiefs opposed the slave trade, the Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, has said that when the slave trade was abolished by the British, “Africans were against abolition…. Of those who were sold [as slaves] and had offspring… [s]ome returned home… [and] became, in turn, slaveholders and bought slaves for their correspondents who remained in Brazil. Africans resumed this trade after abolition.”
While plantation slavery in the West Indies was among the most cruelly oppressive, the use of slaves on a massive scale for hard labour was neither invented by Europeans in the Caribbean nor confined to it. As Mohammed Bashir Salau has shown, slave plantations were established by Omani Arabs on the coast of East Africa, and by the Fulani in the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria, in the 19th century. Indeed, the Caliphate became “one of the largest slave societies in modern history”, equalling the United States in the number of its enslaved (four million).
Nonetheless, can it be claimed that British slavery was uniquely brutal? Not obviously. Of the plight of a white European slave owned by an Arab master on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, the historian of Algiers, Henri Delmas de Grammont, wrote in 1885: “as chattel of whomsoever chose to buy him, he would be utterly without rights or a will of his own, his very life forfeit to the whim of his new owner, who could resell him, overload him with work, imprison him, beat him, mutilate him, kill him, without anyone interfering.” The experience of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote who was enslaved in 1575, bears this out. According to a first-hand witness, Cervantes “was on the verge of losing it [his life] on four different occasions when he was nearly impaled or hooked or burned alive...”.
Once the politically driven focus on British involvement has been loosened, and Caribbean slavery is allowed to sit in its global and historical context, the question arises: Given that world-history is littered with instances of equally inhumane slavery, given the widespread complicity of Africans themselves in the transatlantic slave trade, and given that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slavery two centuries ago, why single out the British today to make historic redress?
And no, the low life expectancy (compared to Europeans) of African slaves, due to malnutrition and overwork, does not amount to a “Black Holocaust” under the widely accepted definition of genocide. As the 1948 UN Convention understands it, genocide comprises a set of acts committed “with intent” to destroy an ethnic group “as such”. Slave owners had no interest in killing Africans, since dead slaves were unprofitable and replacing them was expensive.
The extent to which Britain’s industrial wealth was built on the backs of African slaves is controversial. In his seminal Capitalism and Slavery (1944) the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued that profits from the slave trade made “an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development”. Other Marxists, such as Beckles, follow him. Most economic historians, however, land somewhere near Kenneth Morgan’s judgement that, while “it would not be unfair to claim that the slave-sugar trading complex strengthened the British economy and played a significant, though not decisive, part in its evolution”, the profits from the trade were not “a major stimulus for industrialisation in Britain”.
The most recent contribution to the debate has been made by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson in their Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (2023). They argue that “the role of slavery in the process of industrialisation and economic transformation... has been generally underestimated by historians.... Slavery, directly or indirectly, set in motion innovations in manufacturing, agriculture... shipping, banking, international trade, finance and investment, insurance...”. But David Eltis, historian of slavery in the Americas, is sceptical: Spain and Portugal also had large slave empires during the same period but never showed traces of industrialisation. Moreover, all the innovations that Berg and Hudson claim were facilitated by the slave system, he claims, “could just as easily have stemmed from conditions in British society that were not replicated in other European countries”.
The case for reparations gains plausibility by belittling the 50-year-long struggle by British abolitionists to end slavery within the British empire, and by obscuring its context: namely, that slavery, in one form or another, was a universal institution, practised since the dawn of history on every continent by people of every skin colour. In 1700s North America the Comanche did it, as did the Fulani in West Africa and the Māori in New Zealand in the 1800s. This is the background against which to appreciate that the British were among the first peoples in history to abolish both the trade and the institution.
Yes, securing sufficient parliamentary support for abolition required paying compensation to slave-owners. But compromise is a common requirement of political success. Moreover, the compensation of slave-owners also served the interest of those emancipated slaves unable to find land on which to subsist—for, without it, the business model of many plantations would have collapsed and with them opportunities for wage-earning employment.
If the case for reparations belittles British abolition, it completely ignores Britain’s subsequent use of its dominant imperial power to suppress slave-trading and slavery from Brazil, across Africa, to Australasia throughout the second half of the empire’s life. In the 1820s and 1830s the Slave Trade Department was the largest unit in the Foreign Office, responsible for international treaties against slavery and agreements with foreign powers to seize slave ships. And in middle of the 19th century, Eltis reports, the Royal Navy deployed up to 13 per cent of its total manpower to prevent slave-ships leaving West Africa. Shortly before his death in 1865 Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, wrote that “the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade”.
According to Eltis, transatlantic suppression alone cost British taxpayers at least £250,000 per annum—equivalent to between £1.67bn and £1.74bn, or between 9.1 and 11.5 per cent of the UK’s expenditure on development aid, in 2019—for 50 years. Taking a broader view, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape estimated the economic cost to British metropolitan society of the anti-slave trade effort at roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over 60 years from 1808 to 1867. Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: in 2021 the UK spent 0.5 per cent of gross national income on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.
Hilary Beckles claims that colonial governments left the British West Indian colonies completely unprepared to stand on their own economic feet after they gained formal independence in the 1960s. But Tirthankar Roy, the Bengali-born professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and co-author of The Economic History of Colonialism, strongly disagrees: “The claim that Caribbean states were not able to ‘find their feet’ at independence around 1962 is total rubbish. Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados had the highest average income and literacy rates in the region, incomes per head were three to four times that in the long-independent Dominican Republic and Haiti, literacy rates were around 15 [per cent] in Haiti and 75-80 [per cent] in Jamaica. Almost certainly, public health was also similarly advanced.”
As for the present economic woes of Britain’s former colonies in the West Indies, Roy has this to say: “Jamaica after independence was particularly badly governed and saw a deep stagnation during 1972 and 1984, when standards of living actually fell. There are few countries in the world not engaged in civil war that had as bad a growth record as did post-independence Jamaica. Average income recovered only so much that its real average income is now what it had been around 1975. Overall, the West Indies region saw rather little economic growth in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, when many Asian countries (colonial or not) forged ahead. The reason was bad and corrupt government, not the burden of colonialism.”
DeLisle Worrell, former governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, confirms this when he writes that “the essential transformation” of Barbados from “an economy based on export agriculture with poor human development in 1945, to one based on tourism, with an HDI score that puts the country in the top category of human development”, was achieved in the 1950s and 1960s—that is, during the late colonial period before independence in 1966.
Between slavery in the early 19th century and the present, many other causal factors have intervened. Those include emancipation and late colonial economic development. They also include the agency of the members of independent Caribbean governments. This helps to explain why different post-colonial states have performed very differently. Whereas in 2019 Jamaica had a GDP per capita of $5,500, Barbados had one of $19,000. What’s more, according to World Bank data, in 2020 life expectancy in post-slavery Barbados was 24 years higher than in post-slave-trading Nigeria, while literacy in Barbados in 2014 was almost 40 percentage points higher than in Nigeria in 2018, and gross national income per capita was 482 per cent higher.
The principle that those who have benefited from an injustice should compensate its victim is moral common sense. However, as the moral philosopher Onora O’Neill wrote in her essay, “Rights to Compensation”:
“Claims to compensation have to show that continuing loss or harm resulted from past injury. This is all too often impossible where harms have been caused by ancient or distant wrongs… Is everybody who descends (in part) from those who were once enslaved or colonised still being harmed by those now ancient and distant misdeeds? Can we offer a clear enough account of the causation of current harms to tell where compensation is owed?”
The riotous jungle of history overgrows and obscures the causal pathways. O’Neill concludes that our focus should lie on addressing present injustices rather than trying to untangle historic ones: “It may… make more sense… to redress present disadvantage, whatever its origins.”
So, yes to development-aid from prosperous Britain to relatively unprosperous Caribbean countries. But no to reparations for historic slavery.
