Welcome. A longer blog on a controversial current issue. It is an exploratory ‘sighting shot’. I would value responses and discussion, especially from those with a wider and deeper grasp of the issues than I have.
Reparations – a Sighting Shot.
The issue of whether Britain should pay Reparations for its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and for its profits from slavery in its Caribbean colonies has been around for several years (see, for example, Professor Hilary Beckles ‘Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide’, 2012). However the recent visits to the Caribbean of Prince William, and then Prince Edward, has led to demands from several Caribbean leaders that Britain should be paying compensation to the various islands for the evil wrought upon them by slavery. In parallel, in the United States there have been demands – endorsed in various ways by most of the contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination – that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves in the USA, with similar demands burgeoning in Britain.
This blog is entitled a ‘sighting shot’ as it is a first attempt to delineate an appropriate response in often uncharted territory, with few agreed ground rules, and with widely diverging responses available. Thus, on the one hand there have been attempts to compute the damage caused by slavery and so form some estimate of what would justly be the recompense for the theft of life and labour, alongside physical brutality and psychological well-being. On the other hand, there are those who would argue, to use Prof Nigel Biggar’s words, that ‘The riotous jungle of history overgrows and obscures simplistic solutions’. A similarly negative view is held by conservative black Americans such as Thomas Sowell or Glen Lourie.
So what follows are seven questions about the justice of paying reparations, focussing primarily upon Britain’s role in Caribbean slavery, but with an eye to the wider issues of how wrongs can be compensated for on an international or global scale. Sowell speaks disparagingly of ‘The Quest for Cosmic Justice’; but can major historic injustices be at times rectified, at least partially?
1. For what cause should reparations be paid?
History, it hardly need be said, is full of injustices. Here and now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inflicting several thousand deaths and billion pounds worth of damage on Ukraine, plus possibly even greater damage through starvation and death in poor communities across the globe through the disruption of Ukrainian and Russian grain and other food supplies. It is unlikely that Russia will repay on anything like a commensurate scale. Will China compensate if it transpires that Covid arose from a failure in their laboratories? What repayment for the lasting and catastrophic damage to the world’s climate should be paid by countries such as Britain who led the way in using fossil fuels to achieve industrial success?
Clearly no reparations can be made to the Caribs and Arawaks who ceased to exist as a result of European colonisation of the Caribbean. But what of the suffering and disappropriation of indigenous peoples in the Americas or Australasia, or tribal groups elsewhere? Should the British who colonised Malaysia compensate the Malays, and possibly the long-settled Chinese? Or should Malays compensate the original orang asli(jungle people) who they disappropriated? Conquest and subjugation, brutal suppression or effective genocide, are running themes throughout history. Our Old Testament includes first person experiences of slavery in Egypt and captivity in Babylon, plus prophetic rebukes of the injustices perpetrated by neighbour upon neighbour, eg Amos 1:3 to 2:3).
Payment of reparations for long previous wrongdoings have been very much the exception not the norm throughout history. Indeed, the basis by which the people of one generation are called to compensate for the evils of previous generations can not be easily settled; nonetheless, presently enjoying the clear benefits of those past evils provides the framework for the case.
2. For how far back in history are reparation claims valid?
Whilst some slaves were in the fields cutting sugar cane in the Caribbean, other 18th century contemporaries were in the galleys rowing boats in the Mediterranean? Why Should Britain pay reparations but not Algeria? And what of those who have been predators in Britain – the Normans, the Danes, the Romans? Nigel Biggar quotes the philosopher Onora O’Neill: ‘Claims for 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’ (The Times 04/05/2019, italics mine). Whilst the purport of the quote is that such retrieval is impossible, a stronger case can be made that indeed, in the case of the Caribbean islands, the loss and harm are continuing. This is indicated both by the islands having been endowed by the British (as also the French) with economies perilously dependent on the vagaries of one cash crop, sugar; and perhaps more especially that artificial societies had been created of people taken from various linguistic and ethnic groups, with the suppression of outward religious or cultural identities, and under the violent and at times sadistic power of alien authorities. The reality of slavery-induced trauma passing from generation to generation may seem elusive but requires serious consideration. Certainly such wounds that are not easily healed, creating a legacy with long term consequences. "A race has been freed, but a society has not been formed," wrote Governor Harris of Trinidad in 1848 (in P Curtin 'The Two Jamaicas', p158).
In his Preface to 'The Sociology of Slavery' Orlando Patterson wrote: "Jamaica and the other West Indian islands are unique in world history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar". As the begetter and beneficiary of those 'artificial' and unique societies Britain has a still incomplete responsibility to contribute to repair.
After Abolition in 1837 there were not the economic or social resources in place to create thriving successful economies and societies. Lloyd George’s comment that the Caribbean islands were ‘the slums of the Empire’ reflected badly (as slums do) more on the creator than the inhabitants.
Reparations as a bloc payment to Britain’s Caribbean possessions is both a fairly clear-cut administrative decision, and – because of the Caribbean island’s unique history – does not leave the door open to a wide range of reparatory claims for other numerous and more complex historical injustices (which I assume has been an inhibiting factor in British Government’s reluctance to concede a case for reparations).
3. How do we determine who should be reparators?
Historical injustices, as noted above, raise questions of why some and not others should be expected to pay reparations. Clearly the scale of the injustice is not determinative. More African slaves were taken east and north by Arab slavers that west by European and American slavers. The fact that the former have left fewer descendants, often because they were castrated, hardly exonerates the nations of the Middle East. Nor, in fact, should the West and Central African rulers who sold their fellow Africans as slaves be let off the hook. The fact simply seems to be that Britain and the United States went on to benefit economically from enslavement far more than other involved parties (including Brazil’s massive importation of slaves).
So why did Britain and the United States benefit in the way that others did not? The profits that slave plantations generated is an obvious answer, but the reality is more complex. The North Atlantic societies had developed to a point where wealth could both increase and diversify for a variety of economic and cultural reasons that did not apply to the cultures of both the Middle East and South America.
In ‘The Weirdest People in the World’, accounting for western exceptionalism, Joseph Henrich writes: ’Whether one prefers to focus on the economic and technological triumphs or the conquests and atrocities the question remains the same: How and why did this innovation-driven economic and military expansion explode out of Europe after 1500?’ For Henrich it was the distinctive emergence of voluntary organisations in medieval Europe (charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, universities) that gave rise to determinative characteristics. Out of this matrix came the ‘psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries’ (p 465).
To this extent demands that North Atlantic nations pay reparations for slavery is both an explicit recognition of the brutality and evil of their trade in and use of slaves, but also an implicit recognition of the positive qualities and practices of their societies, which from the late eighteenth century onwards were endowed with unparalleled wealth and effectiveness on the world stage. In that sense it needs recognising that demanding reparations uniquely from those societies is also an acknowledgement that they had developed characteristics that enabled them to thrive uniquely.
4. What weight do we give to countervailing benefits?
These qualities and practices need to be brought into the wider picture when considering reparations. The rule of law, commitment to regulated administrative practices, energy in technological and scientific developments that are seen to have universal value also emanated from slave trading nations. It is now widely disapproved of trying, as the colonial historian Marjorie Perham did in her 1961 Reith Lectures, to attempt ‘The Colonial Reckoning’. In ‘Empireland’, Sathnam Sanghera rules out the thought of making a balance sheet of colonialism, but comes close to it as did the 182 academics who criticised ‘The Case for Colonialism’ by the historian Bruce Gilley on the grounds that balancing that it was ‘absurd’ to place on a ‘plane of equivalence’ its ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ (Times letter, 08/12/2017). But this is mere sleight of hand – the costs are held to register, the benefits not. And there were benefits. Greater emphasis on an external rule of law, clearer administrative procedures, technological advance, the introduction of new sources of income, such as rubber in Malaya. That these were largely for the benefit of the colonial rulers does not rule out that colonial subjects have often benefitted. At independence life was often better in most Commonwealth countries than before colonisation
5. When is the payment of reparations completed?
Reparations have already been paid. The formation of Sierra Leone in West Africa for escaped or freed ex-slaves was consciously seen as a way of paying off Britain’s debt, as was the use of the Royal Navy through much of the nineteenth century to suppress the Atlantic slave trading of other nations, apparently using 15% of its ships, though this could be seen as a means from stopping competitors benefitting from an evil that we had abandoned.
There were other smaller scale contributions to compensation , such as Britain contributing to the costs of setting up the medical department of the University of the West Indies, at Mona, Jamaica in 1948.
Such was both the enormous volume of the suffering inflicted on slaves and the corollary of the very considerable profits made from it, that putting any value on appropriate reparations is arbitrary (as similarly is the mount that should be paid to individual victims of abuse, particularly sexual). Yet if, as this blog is suggesting some financial reparations should be made to Britain’s Caribbean ex-colonies, then some figure has to be agreed upon, and also an agreement made that this is the fixed and final amount. Issue closed. Or, to refer back to Hilary Beckles book, there must be a point when ‘Britain’s Black Debt’ has been paid.
This doesn’t rule out the expression of softer, but possibly more appropriate forms of sorrow. This means building greater awareness of the evil of slavery into our education system and national consciousness, including removing or correcting some memorials, and creating new ones that lament our enslaving past, as with the French Parliament's adoption of the Taubira Law annually “recognising the transatlantic black slave trade and slavery” every May 10th since 2001.
6. To whom should reparations be paid?
I have already answered this question in sections 2 and 6, but it is worth looking at some of the alternatives. The most stark has been made by the Democrat Presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson, in 2020 that cash repayments should be made to all descendants of slaves in the USA, which was manifestly unworkable. In effect the taxes of non-black Americans would be given to some black Americans who were well above average wealthy. What of people who had half or only one-sixteenth black slave ancestry? And what justice is there in giving a tranche of money to individuals at one point in time, which would not be received by either their predecessors or successors.
More realistic is the possibility of payments either to specific individuals, such as through scholarships, or to community organisations. As regards the former, Geoff Thompson of the University of East London has called on universities that benefitted from the slave trade to contribute to a fund supporting ethnic minority students. The weakness here, as often with any form of positive discrimination, is the tenuous or non-existent link between the sufferers (black slaves of two centuries ago, or even their most impoverished descendants), and the beneficiaries (people who quite possibly come from already privileged backgrounds).
Support for black community organisations, or programmes to address the needs of black communities has a stronger case in that it can be held to address the continuing inherited ‘generational trauma’ that is arguably a continuing consequence of historic enslavement and oppression, so that there is some connection between past sufferers and present beneficiaries. But it is questionable whether or not the linkage is sufficiently strong to by-pass government, church or voluntary organisation commitment to meet the needs of all disadvantaged communities, regardless of ethnicity, which I take to be the inclusivist as opposed to exceptionalist standpoint of the Sewell Report.
7. What is the likely benefit of reparations?
An important question! But perhaps one insufficiently asked. Certainly there is significance of reparations as a token of acknowledging past injustices – in that sense a ‘soft’ reparation. At a personal or community level the debilitating possibilities of generating ‘institutionalised victimhood’ needs considering.
At a national level, in terms of hard cash, Hilary Beckles has suggested creating a ‘sovereign wealth’ fund for Caribbean nations, which has the advantage of spreading the benefit over several generations rather than a short-term injection. Clearly this has the potential of doing identifiable good which should be celebrated, though it needs to be asked how significant would the drops be in relation to the ocean of economic and social need of nations struggling in an increasingly unfavourable international economic climate. In that respect Caribbean leaders who have public opinion supporting their demands for reparations need to be aware that even though successful nonetheless people’s expectations may well end up with disappointment.
Behind this ‘sighting shot’ seeking to gauge why, how and to whom reparations may be paid lies a longer-term strategic question. Are the interests of those who are descended from slavery in the Caribbean and North America best served today by looking back and seeking the rectification of past wrongs, or best served by leaving the past as past and moving on? The weight of opinion favours the former. The Henry Jackson Society investigation of whether Black Lives Matter does speak for Britain’s black population found that 61% of respondents favoured financial reparations, but without asking for much thought beyond the receipt of free money. But leading figures such as Tony Sewell, Katherine Birbalsingh and (possibly) Trevor Phillips would instead focus on taking opportunities now to create a better future as a more hopeful long term strategy rather than lamenting an irreversible past.