Advertisement
Christmas Special - Get your first 12 issues for just £12
SUBSCRIBE
Opinion

Slavery reparations: A rose-tinted view of empire stops us seeing what we really owe the Caribbean

Writer Eleanor Shearer argues that the UK government doesn't understand why Commonwealth leaders are asking for slavery reparations

Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends a session at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa. Picture by Ben Dance/FCDO

After Caribbean nations called for the issue of reparations for transatlantic slavery to be on the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting this week, Conservative politician Iain Duncan Smith was dismissive. “We have paid well over the asking price for anything to do with what happened because we were the ones who paid through the nose to stop it,” he told the Daily Mail. Former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg went one step further, posting on X that “They [the Caribbean] ought to pay us for ending slavery, it is not something any other country had done and we were motivated by Christian charity.”

While these are on the blunter end of interpretations of Britain’s imperial past, they still reveal something about the pervasive national story we tell ourselves about slavery and its aftermath. Growing up in the UK, I have heard a version of this story countless times in school, in the media, and in books and films about our heroic abolitionists. The story goes something like this: slavery was bad, but eventually, white people like William Wilberforce realised it was bad and the Royal Navy set about patrolling to suppress the evil trade. As Caribbean historian and prime minister of Trinidad Eric Williams said: “The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.”

There are some facts that complicate this picture. Take the long history of resistance to slavery by the enslaved themselves. Jacob Rees-Mogg is incorrect that Britain was the first country to end slavery; Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was three years after the end of the Haitian Revolution, the first successful revolt of enslaved people in what was then one of the wealthiest sugar colonies in the Caribbean. It’s true that abolitionists, Black and white, waged a powerful moral campaign in Britain through the 18th and early 19th Centuries, but without rebellions from Guyana to Barbados to Jamaica, the calculus would never have been so stark for the British state: end slavery or risk losing the colonies entirely if they follow Haiti’s example. Far from being passive recipients of white people’s charity, enslaved people in the Caribbean were the agents of their own liberation.

Eleanor Shearer. Image: Supplied

The Royal Navy’s efforts to suppress the slave trade, too, was not exactly a righteous crusade. When slave ships were captured by patrols in West Africa or the Caribbean, those on board were known as “recaptives” or “liberated Africans”, and the Navy would either forcibly enlist them in the armed forces or make them into indentured labourers for a term of 14 years. Around 55,000 recaptives ended up in the British Caribbean, mostly in the sugar colonies of Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad. In other words, the Royal Navy’s efforts to capture slave ships were bound up with the post-slavery labour shortages in the British Caribbean.  

The experience of the recaptives should be seen in the context of the wider Caribbean experience of emancipation, where even though slavery ended, other forms of exploitation and wealth extraction endured. In many places, workers had little choice but to remain on plantations, and in the 1930s, a British government commission into labour conditions in the Caribbean had findings so bad that its publication was suppressed until after the Second World War to avoid giving propaganda to the Nazis. This is hardly ancient history; the Moyne Commission first arrived in the Caribbean in 1938, when my grandfather was eight-years-old. It is a testament to just how long a shadow slavery cast over the region.

The first step of reparatory justice is challenging the triumphalist – and inaccurate – story of British heroism and the end of slavery. The second step is more complicated. Debates about reparations often move quickly onto the issue of money. This can certainly be part of repairing past wrongs, especially where institutions like the Church of England have traced the direct financial benefits they received from slavery. However, it is far from the only form reparations can take. The UK government might, for example, focus instead on debt forgiveness: high levels of government debt, the natural consequence of an imperial inheritance of poverty and ill-health, holds the Caribbean back from taking action against the devastating effects of the climate crisis, and represent a continued transfer of wealth from the region to the Global North.

Advertisement
Advertisement

Ultimately, the call for reparations is a call to recognise the fact that the legacy of empire is still with us. In his address to the Commonwealth leaders, Keir Starmer, though acknowledging the “hard” parts of Britain’s imperial past, claimed he wanted to focus on “looking forward” rather than on looking back. This misunderstands what reparatory justice is: it is about looking back in order to move forward. Only by understanding the origins of our present moment and the imprint that empire left on the world can we understand how to dismantle these outdated systems and built a better, more just future.

Eleanor Shearer is a writer and policy researcher whose research and fiction engages with the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Big Issue is demanding an end to extreme poverty. Will you ask your MP to join us?

Advertisement

Change a vendor's life this Christmas

This Christmas, 3.8 million people across the UK will be facing extreme poverty. Thousands of those struggling will turn to selling the Big Issue as a vital source of income - they need your support to earn and lift themselves out of poverty.

Recommended for you

View all
'In the moment it was great to be British': The uncynical positivity of a British citizenship ceremony
Steven Mackenzie

'In the moment it was great to be British': The uncynical positivity of a British citizenship ceremony

This Remembrance Day, let us remember the LGBTQ+ veterans dismissed and imprisoned
Craig Jones

This Remembrance Day, let us remember the LGBTQ+ veterans dismissed and imprisoned

I was walking my cockapoo when I saw a man taking a s**t in our street. This is what it taught me
Sam Delaney

I was walking my cockapoo when I saw a man taking a s**t in our street. This is what it taught me

The budget was a start from Labour – but we need much more to transform disabled people's lives
rachel reeves preparing for autumn budget
Chloe Schendel-Wilson

The budget was a start from Labour – but we need much more to transform disabled people's lives

Most Popular

Read All
Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits
Renters: A mortgage lender's window advertising buy-to-let products
1.

Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal
Pound coins on a piece of paper with disability living allowancve
2.

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over
next dwp cost of living payment 2023
3.

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know
4.

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know