Reparations 2 – Review of ‘Britain’s Slavery Debt’ by Michael Banner. # 176. 15/10/2024.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome, to a continuation of the series on Reparations - with today’s Times saying that ‘Reparations for slavery ‘are not on the agenda’’for this month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, and referring to the reparations figure given in Michael Banner’s book reviewed here. It is a discussion that is not going away.
Reparations 2 – Review of ‘Britain’s Slavery Debt’ by Michael Banner.
Michael Banner is Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a leading moral theologian. He acknowledges that the moral crime of Britain’s use of slavery in the Caribbean only came late to his attention (as for our society as a whole) but here addresses the issue with the vigour and enthusiasm of a convert.
After an Introduction, his approach is to begin with a thorough survey of the history of Britain and the Caribbean, divided into three ‘acts’: the period of colonisation and slavery itself up to 1837; Abolition itself, including the payment of £20 million compensation to the slave-owners, followed by the continuing oppression of the black population; and then the twentieth century story of neglect and independence.
This ‘painful’ history is followed by a chapter on ‘The Demands of Moral Repair’, which involves a suggested four elements: acknowledgement, attentive listening, apology and recompense – illustrated by a scenario of a hospital responding to causing a major injury to a patient, and then supplemented by the story in Luke’s gospel of Zaccheus’s reparatory payments to those he had cheated.
Banner then looks at eleven objections to reparations; mostly dismissed as ‘not very good’, but with greater weight given to four that are listed (though two and three here seem to be conflated by Banner so as to make three!): they can not be commensurate to the vast harm that was done, the injustice of ‘visiting the sins of the father’s on their sons’, we can’t be sorry for sins we are not responsible for, and reparations risk negatively reinforcing a sense of victimhood and racial division.
Having established his case, Banner then goes on ‘From Principle to Practice’, assessing how much should be paid in reparations – ‘money seems likely to be essential to any scheme of reparations in relation to slavery’ (p 107). He dismisses the argument put forward in America by Darity and Mullen that seeks to cover the wealth gap between black and white (what about Hispanic, East Asian and other ethnic groups in the USA!) which gives a bill of $7.95 trillion. More modestly, he chooses to start from the £20 million Parliament designated to recompense the slave owners and so notionally the value of the slaves, which he then translates into present values and adds a 4% annual interest to arrive at around £30 billion, but then adds on ‘a value for that unremunerated labour’ (p 113) of the total number of 2.3 million Africans forcibly transported, so arriving at £105 billion. He then allows ‘for the years of economic exploitation after emancipation to arrive at £250 billion. (A postscript refers to the subsequently published Brattle Report commissioned by the University of West Indies Centre for Reparation Research which estimated $24,000 billion as the appropriate amount).
As regards footing this bill, Banner sees an injustice in the poor or recently arrived in Britain having to pay (though surely everyone now living in Britain is the beneficiary of the national wealth in-part generated by slavery, including those here who have family roots in the Caribbean?) Instead Banner sees the proposal of ‘A Wealth Tax for the UK’ as an appropriate way to raise the money, on some estimates assumed to raise £260 billion and so neatly just covering his estimated reparation figure. Its disposal should have no trace of ‘a colonial posture’, but should be at the choice of the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) nations themselves.
Banner then addresses the cynics who say that it can never happen by invoking the long, often seemingly impossible yet ultimately very successful journey of the abolitionists themselves, meanwhile outlining the specific initiatives already underway at his Cambridge College and the Church of England.
Banner has given a powerful indictment of the evil impact and consequences of Britain’s enslavement of African people in the Caribbean. Given the continuing substantial imbalance in wealth between the country of the enslavers and the countries of the enslaved surely, then – if it is accepted that there should be some expression of moral accountability between nations – Britain owes recompense to the nations of which it was the sole creator.
But the path from historic evils to present recompense is much more tangled than Banner recognises.
Putting a financial figure as recompense to past evils is impossible.
A significant flaw in Banner’s presentation is that his examples in the ‘hinge’ chapter on moral repair connecting past evil to present response are inadequate. Both the extended discussion of hospitals paying damages for injury to patients and the shorter reference to Zaccheus’ reparatory response to Jesus’s welcome are here-and-now responses to here-and-now mistreatment. Further not only did they happen in a brief time frame they also happened in the context of functioning laws, either of Britain today or first century Israel. Neither of those frameworks apply to slavery in the Caribbean. Rather we are in uncharted territory; both the international examples he refers to – German reparations after WW1, or payment to Israel after the Holocaust – are also recent event examples. By contrast what Banner proposes is the compression of evil accumulated over several centuries into a present response when the primary victims are long deceased, as are the perpetrators. History can not be re-run. British people have to accept that we can not make amends to the millions of people that we brutalised, exploited, or murdered. They are well beyond any opportunity for us to repair. We can do no more than simply recognise our guilt.
Banner causes confusion caused by focussing on two distinct issues – at times he seems to be focussing on reparations for the unremunerated labour of people now long gone (where justice is now impossible), and at times on reparations to adjust present imbalances between the Caribbean nations and Britain. But his financial estimates seem to be working on the former, which is implied by the fact that his basic starting point is the £20 million indemnification paid to the slaveholders for the loss of their ‘property’ in 1837. But the tides of history have reconfigured the landscape since then. Banner dismisses too easily the comparison (in a similar time frame) with the Barbary enslavement of kidnapped coastal Europeans to work particularly as galley slaves in north Africa by saying ‘they have no very obvious successors’ (p 75). But they do, if on the principle that unremunerated labour should always be compensated for. Theoretically a moral case could be made that the Irish, for example, are owed reparations for the damage to their coastal settlements and the unpaid labour of their enslaved dead, and that the present peoples of Algeria and Tunisia have benefitted from that labour and should recompense. But of course the tides of history, not least the French colonial occupation, have washed that particularly configured relationship far beyond recognition. Whilst the old shape of the slavery-shaped Britain/Caribbean relationship is still more recognisable, nonetheless it has changed sufficiently over several historical political and economic developments for a simple transference of past injustice into present repayments to lose straightforward conviction.
Caribbean slavery did not happen in a vacumn.
Past evils always had a before and after, and a geographical as well as an historical context. Banner’s history relies heavily on Professor Hilary Beckles construction, but Beckles’ account of Britain’s slavery debt is a largely two-dimensional account of the relationship between the enslavers and enslaved, and its continuation in the Caribbean. But historical events always have a before and after. Had slaves not been taken across the Middle Passage they would still have suffered, albeit less considerably, if they had remained as slaves in West Africa. (Indeed perhaps worse if they had been offered as human sacrifices in Benin). Nor are the descendants of those who remained in West Africa necessarily better off. As noted last week Barbadians now have a tenfold greater income than those who remained in Benin.
Arguably, as a major source for Banner, Beckles over-eggs the cake as regards present Caribbean suffering. Whilst he writes ‘The post-colonial economy has remained poor, fragile, an embarrassment to market developmentalism’ (‘How Britain Under-Developed the Caribbean’, p13), Orlando Patterson quotes the ‘Global Banking and Finance Review 2018’ as saying that Jamaica is ‘among the five best places in the world to start a business’ (in ‘The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament’, p 338). Patterson also notes that a Jamaican’s life expectancy of 76 years (2019) is near the top third of nations, and higher than Hungary (p 330). On the Human Development Score, a composite of life expectancy, education and living standard, Barbados is ranked 58 out of 189 countries, and Jamaica ranked 97 (p 31). This hardly vindicates Beckles’ claim that ‘Poverty is the primary product of British rule’ (p 218). Part of the issue here is that as regards economics Beckles, a Barbadian historian, and Patterson, a Jamaican Harvard-based sociologist, play for different teams, as indicated by Beckles left-wing hostility to ‘market developmentalism’ as opposed to Patterson’s more positive acceptance of the present global economic system.
The consequences of enslavement were not entirely negative.
Given the brutality of slavery, the physical and sexual exploitation, the suppression of traditional language, religion and culture, and the legacy of continuing impoverishment that followed, it may seem callous to suggest that the period of slavery and following also left positive outcomes. Britain left behind an infrastructure of railways, harbours and airports that were important for the new nations, especially given the importance that tourism came to play in their economies (19.5% of Jamaica’s GDP, exceeding all other sources – Patterson, p 335). It also left behind impressively resilient democratic institutions and a free press. If the attempt is made to compute the vast evil of slavery and the period following, then the benefits must also be recognised.
The long-tern effect of that brutal abduction of African slaves into the western system of trade and manufacture has meant that the descendants of those who suffered so appallingly under slavery now often live lives of relative comfort. Black Americans are the wealthiest black people on the planet; the GDP per capita for Barbados is almost $17,000.
Banner’s case, then, is not watertight. He does not make a clear argument as to why slavery in the Caribbean should stand out from innumerable acts of brutality and evil in the past committed outside of any system of mutually accepted law, so that it should uniquely require payment of reparations. His attempt to assess an objectively justifiable figure for reparatory payment starts from an arbitrary base, working from the indemnity paid to slave-owners in the 1830’s, adding on the suffering and unpaid labour of several million largely unknown slaves, and then compounds on the basis of further assumptions. The whole abstract enterprise carries an air of unreality.
And yet his historical narrative requires a response. Britain grew rich on that slave labour, and continued to be wealthy, even if there is debate as to how important a component slavery was in generating the wealth. Meanwhile the ‘hell on earth’ experience of the slaves was followed by continuing exploitation and poverty of their descendants until, and then beyond the ending of Britain’s political control of the islands.
‘Tough. Get over it’ is one possible response, and one consistently taken by past and present perpetrators of great evil. But should Britain, motivated by disinterested moral obligation, self-respect, and a self-interested intention to accrue soft power by acting with decency, actually find ways to publicly acknowledge and financially make recompense for the great evil we have inflicted on millions of innocent people? I plan to return to that next week.