The Lies Used to Stop any Conversation About Paying Slavery Reparations
Alan Lester debunks all the arguments used by those trying to stop a discussion about compensating the descendants of slaves
Recently the news has been full of people outraged at the very idea of discussing reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery. I’m an historian, not an activist for reparations. I get why the idea of them is galling to those who believe they’ll result in hard-pressed British taxpayers transferring cash to distant strangers who were never enslaved themselves. I think there’s a constructive conversation to be had about a form of reparative intervention that is in the UK’s national interest but pressing for that is not my primary concern as an historian. Correcting misinformation about the past is. And there has been plenty of misinformation on reparations circulating in the media.
These are the top five evasions, falsehoods and deflections serving to block a discussion.
1. Repeat the mantra “We owe nothing because we abolished slavery”
The argument goes like this: Britain was the first country to abolish slavery, but not only that. It made other countries stop it too. Once Britain realised that slavery was wrong, it continued to expand its empire, but only to put down slavery elsewhere. The nation put vast sums of money into this endeavour on behalf of humanity as whole.
Some push the argument further. Not only do we owe nothing, but the descendants of the enslaved should actually be grateful to ‘us’ for doing this. Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that former colonies should pay Britain reparations.
Let’s take these claims one by one
‘Britain was the first country to abolish slavery’: well, no it wasn’t. Britain’s abolition of slavery came in two phases. In 1806 Parliament passed an act outlawing Britons’ participation in the slave trade. Denmark had moved towards the same measure a few years beforehand. In 1833, a further act was passed to abolish the institution of slavery itself in certain colonies – those in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius.
This act of abolition occurred after enslaved people had overthrown their French colonial rulers in Haiti and banned the ownership of people, and after slavery had been progressively abolished in some South American countries and in the northern states of the USA. Indeed, the British Act for the Abolition of Slavery was informed by these precedents.[1]
Prior to the abolition of the slave trade, in the period from 1740-1807, Britain was the dominant enslaving nation and it trafficked more Africans than any other country except Portugal/Brazil.
Once in the American and Caribbean colonies, these captives were put to work on plantations and succeeding generations of their descendants were born into, and lived their entire lives, in slavery. Their unpaid work helped to catalyse Britain’s industrial Revolution, making Britain the most advanced and prosperous economy in the world for much of the ensuing century.
‘We made other countries stop too’. This claim refers in part to the activities of the West Africa Squadron, which intercepted other nations’ slave trading ships on their way to the Americas and ‘liberated’ their captive cargo. Only it didn’t. It reassigned these people as unwaged ‘apprentices’ for 14 years in other parts of the Empire, where their labour was required by colonists. Many ended up working alongside or instead of enslaved people, and without payment, in the very places they were headed to before interception.
Some of the same voices opposing a conversation about slavery have also opposed a memorial to the victims of the slave trade in London, proposing one to the sailors of the West Africa Squadron instead. Commemorating the lives of the sailors, though, is secondary to their determination to deflect, from slavery to antislavery.
This is not to say that the Royal Navy was an insignificant force in suppressing the slave trade after 1807. Some 1,600 British sailors died in the course of their duties reassigning some 150,000 African captives, and there is little doubt that, for most, the experience of being an unpaid ‘apprentice’ was marginally better than that of being legally enslaved. In a few cases considerably better.
Britain was by far the most significant power attempting to prevent continuance of the slave trade once it had abandoned its own, but not the only one. France committed a smaller number of ships, but a greater proportion of its fleet at various times and the USA, Spain and Portugal also contributed to the antislavery patrols.
The claim that ‘we put down slavery’ elsewhere relates to British colonial officials forcing other polities in both West and East Africa to sign antislavery treaties. However, there was not a single instance where such an intervention was unaccompanied by another motive, be it the interests of palm oil traders, geostrategic considerations in the Indian Ocean or most favoured nation trading status. There are no examples of a purely humanitarian annexation, although the British public was often persuaded to the contrary.
Even where Britain annexed new territory on the pretext of suppressing domestic forms of slavery (a very sincere motivation for many), various forms of forced labour continued to be employed under British rule. In the assault on Kumasi in 1874, African porters were kidnapped from along the coast to carry the ‘antislavery’ expedition’s equipment and supplies against the Ashanti. In the 1830s, Indian indentured workers, transported to the Caribbean and elsewhere to replace freed slaves, were treated almost as badly, and in the 1860s-80s, Pacific Islanders were kidnapped to work on Australian sugar and cotton plantations in a process known as ‘Blackbirding’.
The Empire continued to expand after slavery then. But the expansion was not driven by antislavery, and it did not suppress other forms of forced labour.
Then we come to the ‘vast sums being expended to put down slavery’ claim. The West Africa Squadron’s costs have been massively inflated, and twisted logic is often employed to suggest that the £20 million in compensation paid to slave-owners and their descendants upon abolition in 1833 is part of a case against reparation for descendants of the enslaved.
The myth behind this ‘logic’ is that British taxpayers paid the £20 million to slave owners for the freedom of the enslaved and received nothing in return. An act of pure benevolence.
The money was split between slave owners in Britain (absentees), the Caribbean, the Cape Colony & Mauritius (whose slave owners had to wait a little longer than those in Britain). It was raised not through taxation but in large part through a loan brokered on European money markets. The resulting debt was bought and sold by various financial institutions, until it was finally settled, along with other Government debts, in 2015. Another part of the compensation was handed over directly to slave owners in the form of government bonds.
Although the ‘ordinary British taxpayer’ did not pay for the compensation in any direct sense, they did experience the benefit, to differing degrees and over an extended period, as slave-owners invested their windfall in factories, mines, railways, banks, insurance companies etc.
Some invested their funds in new colonies using ventures, including in the Australian colonies.
In other words, the compensation loan gave a further stimulus to the British economy at the very end of the Atlantic slave system. The best account of this is Nick Draper’s book The Price of Freedom.
Why the descendants of enslaved people, who were never awarded any compensation for what they had endured, and who entered the labour market without any assets, should be grateful for this boon to their former owners, and to the beneficiaries of an industrialising Britain, is hard to fathom.
A final point about sums expended to end slavery and where they went: the most infamous case is the payments demanded of Haitians to compensate France once they freed themselves. France recognized Haitian independence only at the price of 150 million francs. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, in an article in The Atlantic
“Haiti made payments totaling 112 million francs over the course of seven decades, or about $560 million in today’s dollars … With the help of 15 leading economists from around the world, we modeled what might have happened if that money had gone into the Haitian economy, rather than being shipped off to France without getting any goods or services in return. Our estimates found that over time, the payments to France cost Haiti from $21 billion to $115 billion in lost economic growth. Put in perspective, that is anywhere from one to 8 times the size of Haiti’s entire economy in 2020.”
In every case where large sums have been paid as compensation for slavery, the money has been awarded to perpetrators and their descendants, rather than to victims and their descendants.
2. Insist on False Historical Equivalences
The first prominent example is present in the Brexit activist Daniel Hannan’s recent intervention against any reparations conversation.
This is the tactic of equating trans-Atlantic slavery with Viking raids, Roman, or Islamic forms of slavery, none of which transformed the modern world and created persisting geographical and racial disparities in the same way as the system of Atlantic slavery.
The second false equivalence is the assertion that conditions of enslaved people in the Caribbean were no worse than those of many British workers at the time.
It is of course nonsense to suggest that because working conditions in each instance were bad, they were therefore equivalent. A host of experiences arose from African captives’ status as chattel – experiences rarely if ever endured by ‘freeborn’ Britons.
Africans’ villages were raided by slavers who put them in chains and force-marched them to the coast to sell to European slave traders. African captives were forced into overcrowded ships’ holds and trafficked to another continent, around a tenth dying from the unimaginable conditions of the Middle Passage.
Enslaved people were assets insured as if livestock. As the property of their owner, they could be publicly flogged for ‘cheekiness’, broken on the wheel, or executed for running away. Women were raped to ‘breed’ new workers.
Enslaved people’s husbands, wives and children could legally be taken from them and sold to another slave-owner at the whim of their existing owner. After emancipation, the priority for many was finding family. Most were unable to.
British workers, including children, endured exploitation and horrendous working conditions. Some, especially domestic servants were raped by employers, and many lived on the edge of starvation and died in industrial ‘accidents’.
There’s no doubt that some endured worse conditions than those enslaved people who were ‘lucky’ enough to be owned by relatively benign planters. But they were not chattel, and that makes a difference.
3. Blame Africans Instead
Aside from ‘we abolished slavery’, perhaps the next most common refrain from those objecting even to a conversation is “Africans captured & sold other Africans”. Yes, they did. Two considerations though:
It’s commonly believed that reparations from Germany to Israel were justified after that other great modern crime against humanity, the Holocaust. But it was not only Germans who were complicit in that crime.
People of many nationalities informed on Jews, murdered them, and yes, under duress, even some Jews were informants. Should the reparations that helped build Israel’s merchant fleet and electricity grid not have been paid on this basis?[2]
It was the European demand for captives to traffic across the Atlantic that utterly transformed West African patterns of domestic slavery. So disruptive was it that most polities faced limited choices: either be raided or become raiders.[3]
It was Europeans who fuelled the depopulation & destabilization of swathes of West Africa in much the same way that it was the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust, entangling others in their web of complicity.
4. Take Britain out of the Equation
An especially pernicious deflection is the idea that, because GDP per capita is higher in the Caribbean ($10,300 in Jamaica) than in West Africa ($5,700 in Nigeria), the descendants of enslaved people actually benefitted from their ancestors’ trafficking.
Leaving aside the use of figures from notorious tax havens like the Cayman Islands and the very poorest African countries to exacerbate the differences, and without dwelling on the morality of expecting victims of a crime to be grateful to perpetrators, this argument overlooks a significant fact. The British Atlantic slave system was a triangular one with three, not just two, regions involved.
It’s convenient to leave Britain out of these GDP comparisons. Britain enriched itself by taking captives from West Africa to the Caribbean, depopulating and destabilising the former and leaving the population of the latter without assets.
If we want to understand Atlantic slavery’s imprint on the world of today, we need to compare the GDP per capita of the UK with those of West Africa and the Caribbean, not the two exploited regions with each other.
The figure for the UK is $54,100, roughly five times higher than Jamaica’s and ten times higher than Nigeria’s.
5. Misrepresent what’s being demanded
It is not just the past that conversation blockers are misrepresenting. Activists and politicians from across the African diaspora have been discussing the nature of reparations and how to press them on Western governments for decades, even if those demands feature only periodically in the UK media.
The figure of $18 trillion (actually $17.14 trillion) owed by Britain to Caribbean countries is widely discussed at the moment, but it is not a cash sum being demanded for repayment. Presenting it as such is causing entirely unnecessary outrage.
Simplifying a bit, $17 trillion is the Brattle Group’s calculation of how much the UK would owe, were it ever to repay the unpaid wages of generations of enslaved workers, damages for a profound modern crime against humanity, and interest to bring the sums into the present.
This is not being demanded as a cash sum.
Unfortunately, people on both sides of the debate have muddied the waters over this, creating fears of even poorer Britons having to pay extra taxes. CARICOM’s ten point plan is the best brief guide to what is being demanded. This plan would be modified in the course of discussion, if and when a serious conversation begins.
At present, both unintentional mischaracterisation and deliberate misrepresentation are major obstacles.
The reparations being demanded are not, for the most part, ‘backward looking’. They are certainly not the opposite of the more ‘forward-looking’ assistance in areas like climate change that Keir Starmer insists on. They may well end up being one and the same thing, once a conversation starts, since they include technology transfer, which should be low carbon technology, debt relief and investments in health care and education. Some of the demands will prove politically impossible even if better understood, but one thing is certain: they are not going away.
Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex in the UK and Adjunct Professor of History at La Trobe University in Australia. He the editor of The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism, Hurst, 2024. This article is an edited version of a piece from his blog.
[1] Padraic X. Scanlan, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, Robinson, 2020; Kris Manjapra Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation, Allen Lane, 2022.
[2] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Holt, 1991.
[3] Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Slavery was, and STILL IS appalling
but what you're talking about is history
You are arguing that reparations are due from people who didn't gain anything from it to people who didn't suffer from it.
(yes, I know lots of aristocracy gained from it - so maybe concentrate on them, be nice if eg Charles paid Inheritance Tax)
(racism is a different argument)
we need to move on and address the issues in the present and future.