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.”
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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.
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.
