Commonwealth nations are pressing King Charles for some form of reparations for slavery. This is a question that isn’t going away. Predictably, outraged online right-wingers are outraged about this.
But there are really two separate questions: should Britain pay reparations for slavery? And, if so, how?
The first question should be the easy one. Britain should pay reparations for slavery because we have already agreed to. We agreed to it a long time ago.
When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833–34, Parliament authorised £20 million in compensation — around 40% of annual government expenditure at the time. Payments went to roughly 46,000 claims, principally from owners and beneficiaries connected with plantations in the Caribbean and other slave colonies.
To finance the scheme, the government arranged a £15 million loan in 1835, organised by bankers Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, with the remaining £5 million coming from government funds. Compensation was paid during the 1830s, with the great majority distributed between 1835 and 1837. The problem is that we paid the compensation to the slave owners, not the people they had enslaved.
With hindsight, this was a catastrophic moral mistake. We gave enormous sums of public money to people who had already made fortunes from slavery while giving nothing to the people whose lives and labour had created those fortunes.
How did we get to this point?
A long history of unfree labour
The Romans certainly enslaved Britons. After major rebellions and military campaigns, captives were routinely enslaved. Following the Roman conquest beginning in AD 43, the suppression of Boudica’s revolt in AD 60–61 and subsequent campaigns in Wales and northern Britain, prisoners could be sold throughout the Roman Empire.
We don’t have reliable numbers, but over nearly four centuries substantial numbers of Britons must have been enslaved.
The Vikings also took slaves on a large scale. During the Viking Age, raiders attacked monasteries, towns and villages around Britain and Ireland and carried captives to Scandinavia, Dublin, Iceland and continental Europe, with some eventually travelling much further through trading networks.
Again, there was no census. But tens of thousands of people from Britain and Ireland were probably enslaved during the Viking Age.
The point is not that Roman or Viking slavery somehow excuses what happened later. It is that Europeans did not invent unfree labour when they began enslaving Africans. Europe already had a long history of extracting labour through coercion.
For centuries, serfdom tied millions of agricultural labourers to land and landlord. Serfs were not slaves — they could not normally be bought and sold as individuals — but neither were they free. They owed labour, rent and obligations to their lord and could face restrictions on movement and marriage.
The Black Death transformed the economics of labour. With a third to a half of the population dead, labour became scarce and therefore more valuable. Attempts by landowners and governments to hold down wages and preserve the old obligations increasingly failed. In England, serfdom went into a long decline and had largely disappeared by the early 16th century.
But the demand for cheap and controllable labour did not disappear with it.
From serfdom to the plantation
One of the first recorded European markets specifically selling Africans brought directly from sub-Saharan Africa was at Lagos in Portugal in the 15th century. In 1444, more than 200 enslaved Africans were brought there by Portuguese traders and divided up for sale. Lisbon subsequently became a much larger centre of the trade.
But this was still relatively small-scale compared with what followed.
Keeping enslaved labourers could be expensive. They had to be housed, controlled and prevented from escaping. Slavery became economically transformative when Europeans developed large-scale enterprises — particularly mines and plantations — where hundreds or thousands of coerced labourers could be concentrated in one place. The enormous expansion of the African slave trade therefore came not simply from Europeans discovering slavery, which had existed for millennia, but from the emergence of a new economic system capable of exploiting enslaved labour on an unprecedented scale.
This is central to the argument made by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery. Williams argued that the development of Atlantic slavery needs to be understood primarily as an economic story.
European landowners and merchants had always wanted cheap, controllable labour. As older forms of unfree labour declined, they looked for other ways of obtaining it.
Initially that did not necessarily mean Africans.
Before African chattel slavery became dominant in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, plantation owners made extensive use of indentured servants from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Men and women contracted — and sometimes were coerced — into working for a fixed number of years in return for passage across the Atlantic. Others were transported as prisoners or political captives.
Barbados provides perhaps the clearest example. During the first decades of English settlement in the 17th century, much of the plantation workforce consisted of European indentured servants. As the island moved towards large-scale sugar production, however, plantation owners increasingly turned to enslaved African labour.
This complicates the idea that the plantation system began with a simple racial division between white employers and black slaves. Planters wanted a large supply of cheap, controllable labour. European indentured labour provided part of the answer, but there were limits to how many Europeans could be recruited, coerced or transported across the Atlantic. More importantly, indentured servants eventually became free.
Plantation owners therefore had a powerful economic incentive to find another source of labour.
Slavery and racism
This brings us to one of Williams’s most provocative arguments. Britain did not initially turn to enslaved Africans because it had developed a racial theory saying Africans should be slaves. It needed cheap and controllable labour.
As the plantation economy expanded, enslaved Africans increasingly provided that labour. Race then supplied the justification for an economic system that had already begun to develop. Williams put the argument starkly: slavery was not created by racism; racism developed as a consequence of slavery.
That interpretation remains contested, and economics cannot explain every aspect of the development of racial slavery. But Williams’s central insight is important. Plantation owners were running businesses. They wanted land, labour and profit, and they chose the system of labour they believed would make them the most money.
Racism subsequently did something economically useful. It transformed exploitation into an ideology. Instead of admitting that Africans were being enslaved because their labour was profitable, Europeans could tell themselves that Africans were naturally inferior and therefore suited to enslavement.
An economic arrangement had acquired a racial justification.
The Americas needed labour
The European conquest of the Americas transformed the scale of the problem. Conquest, forced labour and Old World diseases caused catastrophic population losses among Indigenous Americans. Europeans acquired enormous territories containing valuable agricultural land, silver and other resources while simultaneously destroying much of the population whose labour they expected to exploit.
This created both a moral crisis and an economic one.
One of the people who exposed what was happening was the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. He had travelled to the Americas as a young man, initially participating in the colonial system himself, before becoming one of its fiercest critics. His accounts described the extraordinary brutality inflicted upon Indigenous people through conquest, forced labour and enslavement.
But Las Casas also illustrates the economic problem facing the colonists. The mines and plantations required enormous amounts of labour. Las Casas initially proposed what he thought was a solution. Instead of forcing Indigenous Americans to do the work, enslaved Africans could be brought across the Atlantic.
He did not invent the African slave trade, which had already begun, but he was among those who advocated expanding the use of African slaves in the Americas. His intention was to relieve the suffering of Indigenous people. The result was simply to transfer the suffering to somebody else. Las Casas eventually understood this. Later in his life he regretted his earlier position and concluded that the enslavement of Africans was every bit as unjust as the enslavement of Indigenous Americans.
There is something revealing about his mistake. The assumption underlying his original proposal was that the mines and plantations had to have a supply of cheap, controllable labour. The moral question became not whether people should be coerced into providing it, but which people could be coerced.
The rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade supplied the answer.
Slavery on an unprecedented scale
About 12.5 million Africans were put aboard slave ships bound for the Americas between the beginning of the 16th century and the abolition of the trade in the 19th. About 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and arrived.
Roughly 1.8 million did not.
There were, of course, other systems of slavery operating during this period. The Barbary corsairs of North Africa captured and enslaved Europeans, including thousands of Britons. This has become a favourite piece of social-media whataboutery: Europeans were enslaved by Africans too, therefore there was nothing particularly unusual about the transatlantic slave trade.
But that misunderstands both systems.
The Barbary corsairs were not simply “Africans enslaving white people”. They operated from ports such as Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Salé in a complicated Mediterranean world of Ottoman officials, North Africans, European converts and professional corsairs. Many successful corsair captains were themselves Europeans who had converted to Islam.
Their captives were certainly slaves and their treatment could be appalling. But the system also contained a substantial ransom economy. Captives might be released if their families, churches or governments could raise the money to buy their freedom, while others escaped slavery through conversion.
Most importantly, the scale and economic structure were completely different from the Atlantic plantation system. Tens of thousands of Britons were probably enslaved in North Africa over several centuries. Across the Atlantic, about 12.5 million Africans were put aboard slave ships.
And we can still see the consequences. There isn’t an impoverished population of millions of British descent living in North Africa today because their ancestors were transported there as slaves. Across the Americas and Caribbean, by contrast, there are tens of millions of people whose presence is directly connected to the forced transportation of their African ancestors.
That isn’t because Barbary slavery wasn’t slavery. It is because Atlantic slavery became something economically and demographically different: a vast system for supplying labour to plantations and mines across an entire hemisphere.
Human beings as property
There was another important difference. Atlantic slavery developed into a system of racialised, hereditary chattel slavery.
This does not mean earlier forms of slavery were benign. Roman slaves were property and could be bought, sold, beaten and worked in appalling conditions. But Roman society also had an established system of manumission. Some slaves were freed by their owners, bought their freedom or were freed in a master’s will. Freed slaves could become Roman citizens.
Manumission also existed in the Americas, so it would be wrong to say that nobody escaped slavery except through abolition. But freedom was not built into the system. An enslaved African transported to a British plantation was property and could remain property for life.
More horrifyingly, that status was hereditary. The children of enslaved women could themselves be born enslaved. Human beings were not merely being bought as labourers: generations of human beings became assets that could be bought, sold, inherited, mortgaged and used as security for debts.
In effect, human beings were bred as property.
That combination — enormous scale, racialisation, hereditary status and the treatment of people as capital assets — made Atlantic chattel slavery economically and demographically different from the earlier systems of slavery with which it is sometimes compared.
Somerset
In 1771 James Somerset, an enslaved African, escaped from his owner, Charles Stewart. He was recaptured and put aboard a ship to be forcibly transported to Jamaica. Somerset and his supporters applied for a writ of habeas corpus quoting Magna Carta. The case eventually reached the Court of King’s Bench, presided over by Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice.
In 1772 Mansfield ruled that English law provided no legal authority for Stewart forcibly to remove Somerset from England and sell him into slavery abroad. Somerset was released. It was a deliberately narrow judgment. Mansfield did not abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, or even definitively declare that every enslaved person became free the moment they set foot in England.
But its significance was enormous. If the property rights of a slave owner could not be enforced against an enslaved person in England, an uncomfortable question followed: why should those rights be protected elsewhere in the British Empire?
Somerset had not abolished slavery. But the supposed property rights of the slave owner were no longer unquestionable under English law, and the emerging abolitionist movement had acquired a powerful legal and symbolic victory.
The Zong
The Zong massacre of 1781 exposed even more starkly what it meant to treat human beings as property. The Zong was a British slave ship sailing from West Africa to Jamaica carrying more than 400 enslaved Africans. After navigational errors prolonged the voyage and the crew claimed the ship was running short of water, more than 130 enslaved people were deliberately thrown overboard.
There was an economic reason for killing them.
If enslaved people died from disease during the voyage, their deaths were an ordinary commercial loss for the owners. But if cargo had to be deliberately thrown overboard to save the ship and the remainder of its cargo, maritime insurance could cover the loss.
The owners therefore submitted an insurance claim for the people their crew had killed.
The insurers refused to pay, arguing that the loss resulted from the incompetence of the ship’s crew rather than an unavoidable emergency. The owners took them to court.
And initially, the owners won.
The extraordinary thing about the case is that the central legal question was not whether more than 130 human beings had been murdered. It was whether their deaths constituted an insured loss.
When the case subsequently came before Lord Mansfield, the legal issue confronting the court was whether enslaved people thrown overboard should be treated under insurance law in the same way as other cargo. New evidence about navigational mistakes and rainfall led Mansfield to order a retrial. There is no evidence that it ever took place, and the shipowners appear never to have received their insurance payment.
Abolitionist Granville Sharp tried unsuccessfully to have the crew prosecuted for murder. Instead, the deaths of more than 130 people had reached the British courts as a dispute between businessmen and their insurers.
The enslaved Africans aboard the Zong had become exactly what the economics of chattel slavery required them to become: assets on a balance sheet.
Why did Britain abolish slavery?
By the beginning of the 19th century, the economics that had sustained British slavery were changing. This is the other central argument made by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery.
Britain did not abolish slavery simply because, after two centuries of profiting from it, the country suddenly discovered its conscience. The economic interests of Britain itself were changing. The Caribbean plantation economy had created enormous fortunes during the 17th and 18th centuries. Sugar, tobacco and the trade in enslaved Africans had enriched merchants, plantation owners and investors and helped create a powerful West Indian interest in British politics.
But the Industrial Revolution was transforming the British economy. Manufacturing, industry and international trade were growing rapidly. The economic importance of the old plantation economy was declining relative to these new sources of wealth.
At the same time slavery was becoming harder to defend and more difficult to sustain. Somerset had demonstrated that the supposed property rights of slave owners were not automatically enforceable under English law. The Zong had exposed the grotesque commercial machinery required to treat human beings as cargo. Slave rebellions and resistance across the Caribbean added another cost and another source of insecurity.
Into this changing economic landscape came the abolitionists. For William Wilberforce and many of those campaigning alongside him, abolition was unquestionably a moral crusade. Their achievement should not be diminished. They transformed public opinion and made the horrors of the slave trade impossible for Parliament to ignore.
But moral arguments succeed politically more easily when they cease to threaten the most powerful economic interests in society.
Williams’s argument is that abolition became politically possible because Britain’s economic interests had changed. The forces that had once made slavery enormously valuable to the British economy were no longer as dominant as they had been. Other historians, most notably Seymour Drescher, have challenged this interpretation, arguing that slavery remained profitable and economically important when Britain abolished the slave trade.
The argument continues.
I find Williams more convincing. Britain had not stopped caring about money. It was becoming a different kind of economy. And that becomes obvious when we look at how Britain actually abolished slavery. Parliament did not simply declare that owning another human being was morally indefensible and set the enslaved free.
It negotiated a price.
We paid the wrong people
By 1833 the economic and political circumstances that had sustained slavery were changing. Abolition had become possible. But the interests of the slave owners still mattered.
So Parliament found a solution. It abolished slavery, but compensated the people who owned the slaves. Seen through the economic history of slavery, the decision becomes easier to understand. The British state recognised the property rights of slave owners and compensated them for the loss of an asset.It recognised no equivalent economic claim from the people whose labour had created the value of those assets in the first place.
We paid reparations for slavery. We just paid them to the wrong people.
So what would reparations look like?
Two hundred years later, the opportunity to correct the original mistake has gone. The people who were enslaved are dead, as are the people who owned them. We cannot take the £20 million back from the slave owners and give it to the people whose lives and labour were stolen. Nor is there any sensible way of calculating what an individual living today should receive because of something done to one of their ancestors eight or ten generations ago.
The £20 million Britain committed to compensating slave owners represented around 40% of annual government expenditure at the time. Nobody seriously imagines Britain making a comparable commitment today, but it demonstrates the seriousness with which Parliament treated the economic interests of slave owners.
There are plenty of possible modern responses: payments to governments, debt relief, infrastructure, education, healthcare or scholarships.
My preference would be much more explicitly economic.
Use reparations to provide long-term capital for start-ups and growing businesses in the Caribbean and other societies whose economies were shaped by slavery. Funds could invest alongside local entrepreneurs, provide patient capital to businesses trying to scale and recycle the returns into the next generation of businesses rather than simply spending the money once.
If Williams was right that slavery was fundamentally an economic phenomenon, then an economic answer makes sense.
Slavery extracted labour and wealth from one group of people for the benefit of another. Reparations cannot compensate the people from whom that wealth was originally taken, but they can help create businesses, jobs, assets and locally owned wealth in the economies that system left behind.
Two hundred years too late, we cannot pay the right people. We can at least invest in creating the economic opportunities their ancestors were denied.