Transatlantic slavery, capitalism and the case for reparative justice

Issue: 184

Steve Philip

This article seeks to build a Marxist case for reparations related to transatlantic slavery—an issue that has recently returned to the political agenda of the left and crossed over into mainstream discussions. Until recently, reparations were often seen as a matter for, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words, “unserious black nationalists”.1

However, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has awakened a new generation of activists eager to address both contemporary and historical racist injustices, giving the reparations debate a greater resonance.2 The toppling of the statue of the once prominent slave trader Edward Colston during a BLM protest in Bristol in June 2020 became a lightning rod for a series of debates. These included reviews of institutions with historic connections to slavery. The National Trust’s review of its country houses’ connections with slavery continues to induce weird and negative responses from right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail. The Church of England initially established a £100 million fund to address past wrongs due to slave trade links, but this was deemed to be insufficient, and it is now looking to raise £1 billion.3

On an individual level, some of those who have learnt their ancestors profited from slavery have paid reparations, leading to the founding of the campaign group Heirs of Slavery. A notable case is that of Laura Trevelyan, who quit the BBC to pursue reparative justice.4 However, the oppressed should never rely on the largesse of wealthy British families. Consider another slave owner descendant, Charles Gladstone, who also apologised for his family’s involvement in the trade. His ancestor, John Gladstone, father of William Gladstone, was among the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, but the current-day Gladstone family has only offered a symbolic payment to the University of Guyana and to other projects instead of full reparations.5

There is also a hypocrisy when it comes to how reparations are viewed by the most powerful states. Reparations are often presented as toxic or divisive when claimed by representatives of formerly colonised nations. However, they were presented by the British government as entirely legitimate when it came to demanding compensation in the aftermath of the First World War, for instance through the punitive reparations imposed on Germany.

Nonetheless, political pressure for some form of reckoning with slavery, one of the greatest crimes against humanity, continues. In November 2023, a new partnership between the 55 members of the African Union and the 20 states of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) formed to lobby European governments to pay for “historical mass crimes”. There have also been grassroots campaigns in Europe, including in Dorset, where the local branch of Stand Up To Racism has campaigned against the Drax Hall Estate, responding to calls from Caribbean activists such as Hilary Beckles. They have demanded that the now former Conservative MP for South Dorset, Richard Drax, who lost his seat at the recent election, pass his Drax estate of 625 acres to the people of Barbados.6

In this article, I aim to bring a Marxist perspective to the reparations debate, explaining how the ruling classes profited from the colonial trade. I argue that the newly formed working class of the time gained no benefit that could prevent it from acting in solidarity with the enslaved and their descendants. Finally, I examine what can be learnt from the history of campaigns for reparations and evaluate the arguments of the left on reparations.

Transatlantic slavery and early capitalism

To understand the case for reparations, it is necessary to explore the nature of historic transatlantic slavery and its enormous importance for the development of British capitalism. We can begin with a passage from Karl Marx’s Capital, in which the author describes the processes of primitive accumulation, out of which capitalism was born:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield… The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order.7

The 15th century discovery of the “New World” by the colonial powers sparked off rivalry between them, initially centred on Portugal and Spain. Subsequently, the rising powers France and England would wage incessant war, not just for territory in the Americas, but also for black enslaved people to work in the colonial plantations. This led to what the author Howard W French describes as “a Scramble for Africans; control over the supply of black labour and over the patches of cane-growing soil that they were forced to work on”.8 As Marx argues, this was essential to the take-off of British capitalism:

These different moments [of primitive accumulation] are systematically combined together at the end of the 17th century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection [of domestic markets]. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.

Transatlantic slavery was a key feature of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The emergence of new social relationships within capitalism, between a class of wage labourers and capitalists, would have far-reaching consequences. One of the results of this social process was the creation of fresh demand for colonial products, such as sugar and tobacco, and the establishment of an expanded internal market. Early capitalism was the force that drove the transatlantic slave system, a system that amounted to a form of extended primitive accumulation based on non-economic coercion: brute force used to extract a surplus for the nascent ruling class. As Chris Harman writes: “slavery did not produce the rise of capitalism but was produced by it”.9 Systemic slavery, then, was a hybrid form, with elements of feudal and capitalist exploitative techniques, used to help drive early capitalist development. To consolidate capitalist relationships, the British state, which helped to develop and defend transatlantic slavery, also introduced other changes at home to provide stability and secure the transition, including the Acts of Enclosure, the Poor Laws and the Vagrancy Acts. These were directed against the emerging working class back home—and those who were unable or unwilling to work in the early industrial system.

Up until the mid-20th century, little mention was made by historians regarding the relationship of slavery to British economic development. Then, in 1944, Eric Williams, inspired by the insights of the Trinidadian Marxist Historian C L R James, published Capitalism and Slavery, in which he presented what has become to be known as the “Williams thesis”.10 It is summarised by Solow and Engerman: “(1.) slavery was an economic phenomenon; and thus racism was a consequence of, not the cause of, slavery; (2.) the slave economies of the British West Indies caused (the strong version) or contributed greatly (the weaker version) to the British Industrial Revolution”.11

Williams describes the triangular trade between Britain, the African continent and the Caribbean as well as its impact on newly developing industries:

By 1750 there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected to triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.12

Williams outlines the extensive economic networks linking the Caribbean colonies with Britain. For example, the shipbuilding industry received a direct stimulus as ships were built to carry the enslaved, with sufficient capacity and speed to travel to Africa and the “Sugar Islands”.13 Then there were the ancillary trades, such as carpenters, painters, insurance firms, and so on. As a consequence of the trade, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow would become great seaport towns. Williams also details the financial relationships that helped establish the banking and insurance sector, along with the development of heavy industry.14

The extent of the wealth and power of absentee plantation owners and merchants is detailed by Williams, including their vast country estates and mansions, charitable donations and the buildings and endowments granted to churches and colleges. He vividly illustrates how British “civilisation” was built upon the horror of slavery, corrupting all elements of the ruling class. As he puts it: “The triangular trade made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development. The profits from this trade fertilised the entire productive system of the country.” Note that Williams does not claim here that slavery “caused” the Industrial Revolution:

It must not be inferred that the triangular trade was solely and entirely responsible for the economic development. The growth of the internal market in England, the ploughing-in of the profits from industry to generate still further capital and achieve a still greater expansion, played a large part.15

The Williams thesis underwent considerable attack from mainstream historians who argued slavery made only a modest contribution to early British capitalism. For example, David Richardson claims the trade provided a “more modest stimulus to the growth of British industrial production than Williams imagined”.16 Stanley Engerman’s figure for the contribution of the slave trade and plantations is less than 5 percent of total British national income in the early part of the Industrial Revolution.17 By contrast, the Marxist historian Robin Blackburn’s thorough examination of the evidence suggests that profits from the triangular trade could have contributed between 20.9 and 35 percent to British gross fixed capital formation.18 In a more recent work, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson draw on Blackburn and the neglected work of the historian Joseph E Inkori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, to develop their approach, setting the transatlantic trade within the global economy. They argue that the trade should more accurately be referred to as a “diamond trade”, due to the connections with the East Indies trade and the re-export of colonial products. Another innovation is to discuss how plantation profits also arose from financial intermediation and speculation. Investigation of these various connections suggests that profits could be made right along the transnational production chain, through production, processing of primary goods and trading. In their view, the income generated was perhaps equivalent to 11 percent of the British Gross Domestic Product by the end of the 18th century.19 They also argue for a “multiplier effect” of the trade, as the slave and plantation trades were the hub for the development of wider innovations in the 19th century:

Slavery, directly and indirectly, set in motion innovations in manufacturing, agriculture, wholesaling, retailing, shipping, banking, international trade, finance and investment, insurance, as well as in the organisation and intensification of work, record keeping and he application of scientific and useful knowledge. Slavery was formative in the timing and nature of Britain’s industrial transition.20

Ultimately, they find that Williams’s critics, from the 1950s to the 1990s, worked with an erroneously narrow model of profits accruing to slave owners and plantation managers.

Which individuals or institutions enabled and benefited from the transatlantic slave trade? A call for reparative justice needs to identify specific individuals, institutions or firms from whom to demand financial compensation. Where imperial apologists acknowledge any harm, they allege that the whole of British society had a stake in the business, rendering compensation enormously difficult. However, by accessing the comprehensive database of British slave ownership, made available by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, a different picture starts to emerge.21 The database records who received financial compensation for the loss of their “property”. It reminds us that it was primarily specific individuals who profited from the trade. This leads us to an exploration of the role of the British state, its ruling class, financial institutions and royal family.

The role of the British state and ruling class

The British state played a pivotal role in transatlantic slavery. Following mercantile economic policies, it “created a zone of imperial free trade for its merchants and manufacturers, offered them protection, and gained favourable terms for their entry to other markets”.22 It granted a monopoly over the British slave trade to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa (1663) and its successor, the Royal African Company (1672). The latter company transported 84,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas between 1680 and 1692. The British Navigation Acts of 1651-96 ensured that all trade from the colonies was restricted to English ships. The acts not only helped expand the British navy but were key to the expansion of London as a port. Throughout the 18th century, the state also supported wars over trading rights and colonial possessions in the Atlantic.

Another means by which the state assisted slave owners, traders and merchants was to create the legal framework for the exploitation of unfree labour. What developed in the Caribbean, as discussed below, was the designation of a specific race as “legal non-humans, perpetual property and reproductive chattels”, no different in law from forms of property.23 English law allowed the imposition of this legal status of humans as chattel in the Caribbean even if this was not permitted back in mainland Britain. As Hilary Beckles points out, the British state was aware that the commerce in enslaved Africans was a crime against humanity but nevertheless implemented legal frameworks and facilitated the trade to reap the resulting profits.24

The rapid expansion of markets and trade created fresh demands for labour. Initially, indentured servants and transported convicts worked the plantations, but they could not satisfy demand, particularly given the rigours of work in disease-ridden tropical conditions. European slave owners and traders sought a cheaper and more plentiful supply of labour from the African continent. As Williams writes:

Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had not to do with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour…the planter…would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was nearer than the moon.25

Racialised slavery then helped to systematise and popularise the notion that the Africans enslaved were “subhuman” and had no claim to justice and rights. Their supposed “subhuman” status was used to justify their treatment in a period of history that enshrined ideas of freedom and equality in society but gave only white Europeans an opportunity to realise these aspirations. Racism, the defensive ideology of the plantocracy, the class of sugar-planters and slave merchants, travelled from the oral tradition in Barbados in the 17th century to Edward Long, one of the fathers of English racism. His diatribe, The History of Jamaica, would be published in Britain in the late 18th century, helping to crystalise racist pseudoscience.26

The inhumanity of chattel status for Africans came to light with the notorious “Zong affair” in 1781. The Zong was sailing from Ghana to Jamaica with 442 enslaved Africans aboard, twice the number it was meant to carry. The ship’s owners claimed that, as water was running low, they had to throw 132 of the weaker enslaved people, including men, women and one child, overboard. However, it was revealed in court that heavy rain had fallen before the last of those killed drowned, alleviating the water shortages. Those who were weak and ill were worth more to the slave owners dead than alive because their “owners” could claim the insurance for their full value.27 The coldly calculated murder of enslaved Africans as mere chattel would be an early spark in the developing abolitionist movement in Britain.

The Zong case also shows how the actions of the planters and slave traders were interwoven with those of finance and insurance. Indeed, in the stages of capitalist take-off, lending and borrowing were an important aid to the process of competitive accumulation. Early British manufacturers required credit to fund their investment in capital, and the finances often came from those who had profited from the slave trade. Many bankers of the 18th century transitioned from the slave trade into finance. Berg and Hudson discuss how the slave trade shaped financial innovations—international payments, trade credits, mortgage lending and insurance included. Britain was an extreme case in the extent to which profits from the slave trade did not simply return to the slave owner or plantation boss but were widely dispersed throughout the economy.28

The British royal family is also implicated, with its role in the slave trade beginning with the support of Queen Elizabeth I for John Hawkins’ slaving expeditions in the 1560s. He was honoured with a coat of arms featuring a nude African bound with rope. During the reign of King Charles II, from 1660 to 1685, the crown and members of the royal family made major investments in the African slave trade. Charles also granted the charter of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa, which, as mentioned earlier, had a monopoly over the trade on the west African coast. He also lent them a ship, called the Blackamoor, while reserving for himself the right to two-thirds of the value of any gold mines discovered. The Duke of York, later King James II of England, oversaw the company. By the 1680s, thousands of enslaved people were being transported each year, many of them with their skins branded “DY” to represent the Duke of York’s claim over them.

However, we should not overstate the connection between monarchy and slavery—the central connection is with the rising capitalist system. Notably, it was under Oliver Cromwell, after he had beheaded King Charles II’s father and proclaimed his Protectorate, that the “Western Design” of 1655 was announced. The Crown took possession of Jamaica; in response to a long-standing aspiration among the emergent bourgeoisie, the Caribbean was placed at the centre of English foreign policy. This provided a boost to slavery and the plantation system, which would continue to develop with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.29

The crime against humanity

If money…comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek…capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.30

The scale of state-sanctioned human trafficking and the genocide of indigenous communities is almost beyond imagination. The initial stage of colonisation of the Caribbean involved the violent appropriation of land and the dispossession of indigenous populations such as the Kalinagos communities of the Lesser Antilles (sometimes described as the “Caribs”).31 Between 1492 and 1730, the indigenous population of the Lesser Antilles fell by 90 percent. The devastation was met with resistance by the Kalinagos, such that, in 1772, “Governer Leyborne of Dominica informed the British government that ‘nothing else than a total extirpation of these poor infatuated would be satisfactory!’”.32

The crushing of indigenous resistance was the prerequisite for the construction of the plantation economy, which in turn required the forcible transportation of enslaved Africans. The volume of the slave traffic crossing the Atlantic has been subject to debate, but estimates suggest that somewhere in the range 12-20 million people were taken from Africa. The rigours of travel from the interior of the continent and the Middle Passage—the transport from Africa to the Americas by ship—seriously depleted the numbers.33 The mortality rate of the enslaved for the Middle Passage was initially as high as 20 percent, falling to about 5 percent by the 1800s.34

Conflicts, even wars, were engendered by European slavers simply to provide enslaved people. The export of arms to Africa, used by slave traders and African states for the purpose of expansion and defence, was big business. James Walvin legitimately asks: “Did Africans war upon their neighbours because of the aggressive and economic imperatives intruded into the region by Europeans?”35 As Africa was militarised to facilitate the trade, communities were drawn into a wave of self-defence, conducting raids upon neighbours and fighting Europeans. Unsurprisingly, this process involved the creation of African client states, whose function was to supply the slave trade. As the trade intensified, “it set into motion forces of heightened chaos and political destruction in West Africa that became almost impossible for most polities to escape”.36 The argument that African leaders were complicit in the slave trade, and therefore that reparation demands of the European powers should be dismissed, conveniently omits the broader context of coercion, militarisation and resistance by many Africans.

Not only did this process result in the horrors of slavery itself, but the impact on Africa was a massive reduction in its population, a significant factor in what Walter Rodney would later describe as the “underdevelopment of Africa”.37

Enslaved Africans were carried across the Atlantic in conditions akin to depictions of hell. During the Middle Passage, those enslaved were chained, packed like sardines in the hull of ships, without any specific place to relieve themselves. They defecated and urinated on themselves. The average space allotted to an enslaved person was six feet long, sixteen inches wide and about three feet high. Naturally, unhygienic conditions, endured for about three months, led to the illness and death of many of the enslaved.

There was resistance and attempts to escape. Some 15 major revolts were recorded aboard West Indian Company ships from 1751 to 1775. In an effort to prevent escape, suicide or revolt, Africans were chained below deck. Aside from the number who lost their lives during the Middle Passage, millions of those who survived died young, shortly after reaching the “New World”.

Once they reached a plantation, each gang would work punishing hours. Stronger enslaved people were typically expected to work a full day in the cane fields—sunup to sundown—with a two-hour break at midday, followed by an alternating shift in the mill at night. Hence, those in prime condition would work ten hours one day, 16 the next, excluding their midday break. This would be the regime in a “well-run” plantation; some planters would have sought to extract even more from their captive labour force.

Unsurprisingly, the mortality rate was high, with planters estimating that the young Africans brought to their estates had an average life expectancy of little more than seven years. The Barbadian Colonel Henry Drax of Drax Hall wrote in his notorious Instructions for the management of Drax-Hall, and the Irish-Hope Plantations of the need to replace 3-5 percent of the enslaved workforce each year due to death.38

The captive Africans were surrounded by the concentrated firepower of planters and their free employees. Around four-fifths of the total population of an island might comprise the enslaved. To maintain order, the whip and stocks were ever present threats, as were other routine punishments, often severe and humiliating. Those suspected of rebellion were subject to elaborate, sadistic violence, including being burnt alive or broken on the rack.

At the heart of the anti-slavery campaigns toward the end of the 18th century was a focus on the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the nature of their family life. This reflected a reality in which plantation owners did not regard non-consensual sex with enslaved women as rape because they were treated merely as the property of the slave owner. Pregnant women would continue to work in the plantation until shortly before they gave birth, returning to the gang a few weeks after. Pregnancy was no barrier to receiving a whipping for minor misdemeanours.

The working class, the ruling class and the slave trade

Responsibility for the transatlantic slave trade lies with the ruling institutions, wealthy families, private “adventurers” and business leaders at the time. Every part of the ruling elite and its state were implicated in a trade in African bodies “patronised by royalty, blessed by the clergy, and practised by the aristocracy and gentry”.39

The experience of the oppressed and of the British working class in this period differs sharply from that of the ruling elite. Marx’s friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels, would vividly illustrate the experience of the new working in class in cities such as Manchester as it industrialised. He describes how the working class lived in filthy, cramped housing; the unsanitary living conditions, with noxious fumes from the factories and degraded or adulterated food; subject to epidemics such tuberculosis or measles, with little or no medical support. He would describe these conditions as a form of “social murder”, commenting on workers being used metaphorically like “slaves”.40 It would be cold comfort to this working class that they could have sugar in their tea or drink rum in exchange for these conditions. Rather than counterposing the oppression of workers in Britain to the even more horrendous and brutal oppression of those enslaved in the colonies, we should identify them as two sources of wealth for the emerging capitalist class—with slavery providing a huge impetus to an early British capitalism that would always rest also, and increasingly so, on the exploitation of the mass of workers.

Engels’s portrait of the working class was penned in 1845, a few years after the freedom of the enslaved in Britain’s Caribbean colonies would be achieved, under the terms of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. With the kind of obscene logic that only capitalism can deliver, reparations were paid by the British state—but only for the slave owners and other investors. Slave owners were awarded a grand total of £20 million, around 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual budget, and a figure estimated to be equivalent to about £16.5 billion today.41 The compensation was funded by a government loan, using financial instruments that were still being repaid by taxpayers, including workers and many descendants of enslaved people, up until 2015.42 The anti-reparations argument that current generations should not be made financially responsible for the sins of long-dead slave owners is confounded by this stark fact of the public debt for the compensation paid to slave owners. The enslaved were to receive nothing in the immediacy after the 1833 act, aside from being bound to their previous owner as apprentices, whereby they had to work unpaid for up to six years before being “free” to participate in paid labour.43

It is argued by imperial apologists that reparations for slave owners was a price worth paying for emancipation. However, this ignores the mass resistance and developing political forces which were in the process of making abolition inevitable. Resistance was not confined to radical democrats in Britain, the Quaker movement and the wider abolition movement. It also, critically, included the actions of the enslaved themselves. For example, in 1791, a slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture broke out in Saint Domingue, present day Haiti, but then a rich French colony, and struck a massive blow to slavery. This historic event, leading to the establishment of the free Black Republic in 1804, became an inspiration to many in the region.44 After the then Haitian President Aristide raised a demand for reparations of $21 billion in 2003, the French and US government conspired to violently depose him.

There were uprisings in Barbados in 1816, in Guyana in 1823 and in Jamaica in 1831.45 When the Jamaican slave rebellion was supressed, the British Naval commander for the West Indies, Vice Admiral Charles Fleming, admitted: “The only reason why [those enslaved] are tranquil now, is that they…hope to be emancipated.” He added that, were they not freed, “insurrection will soon take place”.46 These revolts galvanised the anti-slavery movement and hastened the demise of British slavery. This combined with the political pressures produced by the need for Britain’s “corrupt Hanoverian oligarchy” to recruit soldiers and sailors to wage war on Napoleonic France, with the abolitionist cause helping to give them something for which to fight.47

To claim, as some liberals do, that we are collectively responsible for this crime against humanity is to ignore the motivations of our ruling class in seeking to expand its wealth from the exploitation of unfree labour (alongside “free” labour). It also ignores how the spoils of this extracted wealth have been distributed in a class-divided society. The working poor, who could be press-ganged into working on ships or who felt forced to toil in the early cotton mills, have little in common with the rising class of merchants or manufacturing industrialists. Slavery in no way created prospects for social advancement, with all the attendant privileges, for the disenfranchised poor.

The contrasting values of the working class and the ruling class tend to reflect the organising logic of capitalism. From this perspective, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 comes as little surprise. Poor whites in Virginia fraternised readily with the enslaved to the consternation of the ruling elite. The upper classes quickly introduced the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 precisely to create and harden divisions between the races and prevent this kind of solidarity among the oppressed.48

The potential for such solidarity extended to the working class in Britain. Adam Hochschild comments of the cotton workers of Manchester that they “may have been so receptive to abolition because its tens of thousands of workers, flooding into this new ‘town of the uprooted’ from an impoverished countryside, knew what it was like to be strangers”.49

During the struggles against slavery, new political tools were used, including petitions and boycotts. When a petition from Manchester against slavery arrived at parliament in 1788, it contained more than 10,000 names, one out of every five people in the city. A year later, parliament had received 103 petitions for abolition, signed by up to 100,000 people. In addition, it was estimated that half a million people boycotted slave grown sugar from the West Indies. “Fair trade” sugar, grown in India, became the fashionable alternative for workers.50

Historic examples of reparations

It is worth considering the wider history of reparations, before considering the case of slavery in more detail. War reparations, compensation payments paid by the defeated, have a history from the Napoleonic War, through both the First and Second World Wars, to Kuwait’s demands on Iraq after its 1991 invasion. These reparations took the form of cash payments, transfer of intellectual property rights, return of seized goods and even forced labour. The idea of reparations for war was enshrined in international law as early as 1907, with the Hague Convention. In 2005, the United Nations published its Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation, although these are of limited efficacy without being enforced by states.

Among the successful claims for reparations are those against Germany by victims of the Nazi Holocaust, which by 2005 amounted to $95 billion (adjusted for inflation). In 1951, the Israeli state also requested reparations from West Germany, which would amount to an inflation-adjusted $36.5 billion by 1987. More recently, in 2013, a compensation claim was brought against the British Foreign Office by 44,000 Kenyans who survived frequent beatings, rapes, torture, forced labour and in some cases castration at the hands of British forces during the “Mau Mau” independence struggle. The British government paid out £19.9 million in costs and compensation to more than 5,228 victims. The then foreign secretary, William Hague, made a formal apology, noting: “Torture and ill-treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn.” However, mindful of the myriad crimes of British imperialism, he added: “We do not believe that this settlement establishes a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration”.51

There are clearly double standards: European states have offered financial compensation to some victims of human rights abuses, but they cannot summon the will to carry out a similar restitutive process for the descendants of enslaved people. Nonetheless, it was the legal victory won by Kenyans that inspired the establishment of a Reparations Commission in the Caribbean, with a focus on linking present day ills to the role of historic slavery and colonial rule.

Reparations for slavery campaigns

There have long been calls for financial compensation for slavery. Ottobah Cugoano, a British-based black abolitionist and former enslaved person, called in the 1780s for “reparation and restitution”.52 The Leicester-based radical and anti-slavery author Elizabeth Heyrick echoed this call in 1826, in a section of an abolitionist pamphlet under the heading “Thoughts on Compensation”, in which she unfavourably contrasted the claims of the slave-holders with those of the enslaved: “To the slave-holder, NOTHING is due;—to the SLAVE, EVERYTHING”.53

However, many of the historic discussions of reparations have been centred on the United States. While slavery across much of the Caribbean was being challenged by revolts in the region, along with abolitionist movements elsewhere, a “second slavery” would persist and indeed flourish in the US South, along with Brazil and Cuba, from 1800 to the 1880s.54

The first demand for reparations there came from an elderly former enslaved person, who made her case in Massachusetts. In 1783, Belinda Sutton had partial success in suing for a pension from her former owner, to compensate for her unpaid labour.55 During the Reconstruction period that followed the 1861-65 Civil War, which had ultimately ended slavery in the US, many black abolitionists also supported the idea of providing those formerly enslaved with land. On 16 January 1865, four months before the end of the conflict, the Northern general William T Sherman issued Special Field Order No 15. This confiscated land corresponding to an area of approximately 400,000 acres along the Atlantic coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to Florida’s St John’s River, aiming to resettle around 18,000 of those formerly enslaved and other black people displaced by the war. Sherman would later order the army to be allowed to rent out mules to the new landowners, hence the slogan “Forty acres and a mule,” which would come to symbolise the promises made during the Reconstruction period.56 After Andrew Johnson replaced the assassinated Abraham Lincoln as president, the promise was broken.57 More generally, after the legal abolition of slavery in the US, those formerly enslaved were denied full citizenship and faced growing racial violence, forcing them to fight for resources to survive.

The first movement for reparative justice was the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, set up in 1896, which had 600,000 members and demanded pensions as a form of reparation. According to Ana Lucia Araujo, “upper-class African Americans, including most clergymen, scholars and politicians” opposed the movement for pensions, focusing instead on attempts to win voting rights and access to education. It was black working-class people who insisted that those demands could not solve the immediate needs of elderly freedmen and freedwomen.58

The nature, and ebb and flow, of reparative justice demands in the US reflects the class struggle and the political context. The term “reparations” became widely known after the First World War, featuring in some of the speeches of the black nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey, although not playing a central role in them. He led a major “Africa for the African’s” campaign in the 1920s, centred on the idea of a return to the continent from which their ancestors had been taken.59

Otherwise, between the World Wars, there was little movement in the campaign for reparations. Leaders of the Civil Rights movement that emerged in the post-1945 period did not raise financial and material reparations as central elements of their agenda. However, in the late 1960s, after the assassinations of the black nationalist leader Malcom X and the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, the debate within the movement shifted to re-engage with demands for reparations.

The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X’s organisation up until his departure in March 1964, added to its claim for a separate state: “a demand that ‘our former slave masters’—in the form of the US government—provide ‘fertile and minerally rich’ land and fund the territory for the first 20 to 25 years, or until the residents were self-sufficient”. The Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black power organisation, raised reparations in its programme: “We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of 40 acres and two mules”.60

However, it was the 1969 Black Manifesto that set out the most systematic and elaborate plan. James Forman, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which worked with activists he met in the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was important here. He sought to take over a liberal initiative known as the Black Economic Development Conference. Their manifesto demanded $500 million in reparations to be paid for by white Christian churches. It was Forman’s belief that white religious institutions were implicated in racist and capitalist exploitation of black people. 61

The money was viewed as part of an effort to strengthen black organisation, for instance through purchasing land and the establishment of a National Black Labour Strike Fund. For Foreman, reparations were part of a revolutionary project:

Reparations did not represent any kind of long-range goal in our minds, but an intermediate step on the path to liberation… Our demands…would not merely involve money but would be a call for revolutionary action, a Manifesto that spoke of the human misery of black people under capitalism and imperialism, and pointed the way to ending those conditions.62

Subsequently, in the 1970s, the issue of reparations became more prominent in black radical circles in the US, but by that time the question of using reparations to revolutionise society was increasingly subordinated to demands which were primarily reformist: making a legal case for reparations and arriving at a financial figure to be paid to each black citizen.

This reflected the impasse reached by the radical black movements during that time. Groups such as the Black Panthers, much of whose base consisted of disenfranchised young black people in ghettos, were subject to ruthless repression by the US state. The Panthers were torn between an insurrectionary struggle that could not successfully break the state, efforts to ally with forces to their right and engaging in community projects to “serve the people”. Other militant groups of the period, such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and its counterparts in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, focused on organising black workers and were at times a powerful force within sections of industry. However, their inability to connect their struggles with those of the far larger number of white workers—and the lack of political clarity required for the longer-term project of building a revolutionary party—led these organisations into crisis. As the militancy subsided, Richard Nixon’s administration would consciously seek to create a black middle class, whose interests increasingly diverged with those of the mass of black workers, while many former black militants would be drawn into the Democratic Party machine.63

Black activists and the reparations argument

Today, within the US and in the wider discussions of reparations that extend to the Caribbean and beyond, there are three main strands of argument: first, reparations viewed primarily through the lens of financial compensation; second, reparations as part of a reformist programme of demands; and third, reparations as part of a revolutionary project. I will consider each in turn.

Reparations as compensation

For some, reparations are primarily viewed in monetary terms, sometimes with a limited programme of further economic demands for black citizens only.

In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a landmark essay, “The Case for Reparations”, setting out a case for financial reparations.64 Coates outlines in depth the profound institutionalised racism in the US. As one sympathetic commentary on his essay puts it: “We refuse to acknowledge slavery as our original sin. We pretend that white supremacy is not suffused in our national DNA”.65

A major focus of recent initiatives along these lines has been to calculate how African Americans have enriched US society and offer individual cash compensation to the descendants of those enslaved. For instance, a 2023 pro bono project by the Brattle law firm arrived at an enormous sum of $100-131 trillion for damages due to transatlantic slavery.66 A congressional act first introduced in 1989, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, was recently revived, leading to the establishment of a task force to examine reparations in the state of California. Estimates run as high as $800 billion owed to the black residents of that state alone.67 A Brookings paper on reparations proposed that DNA testing could be used to determine lineage and hence qualification for reparation payments.68

Coates has not been without his critics. One leading black intellectual in the US, Cornel West, has criticised Coates as a representative of the neoliberal wing of the black struggle. For West, Coates offers a fatalistic and pessimistic picture of white supremacy, while reaping the benefits of the success of figures such as Barack Obama who manage to join the upper echelons of the US establishment. West writes: “Note that his perception of white people is tribal and his conception of freedom is neoliberal. Racial groups are homogeneous and freedom is individualistic in his world. Classes do not exist and empires are nonexistent”.69

In a similar vein, Cedric Johnson has penned “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him”. In it, he argues the reparations argument is rooted in a black nationalist politics that ignores “class and neglects the way that race-first politics are often the means for advancing discrete, bourgeois class interests”.70 As I discuss below, Johnson and West are right to highlight the importance of class and to challenge elements of Coates’s reliance of a version of black nationalism. However, Johnson is not right to argue that reparations are “not a political issue that emerges from the discrete experiences and felt needs of the majority of blacks; instead, it is a moral claim advanced primarily by national black political elites and anti-racist liberals”. In truth, there is overwhelming support for reparations in the US among black people: with three-quarters of black Americans supporting them according to one survey.71 Campaigning for financial reparations does not automatically diminish the struggles of those challenging institutionalised racism within the judicial system, education, and so on, or those engaging in class struggle more generally.

Nonetheless, a socialist position on reparative payments to individual citizens does differ from the approach set out by Coates and others. First, Coates’s critics are right to point to the problem of framing reparations with a notion of white supremacy, in which all white people in the US are viewed as complicit in historic slavery. Second, practically, there is the danger of entering a quagmire when it comes to identifying the recipients of reparations, risking a descent into a reactionary cultural nationalism focused on who is more deserving.

These objections help explain the CARICOM approach, along with that of a recent Dutch reparations programme, in which former enslaving nation-states offer a reparative programme, financial and symbolic, distributed to a state in the Global South or to non-governmental organisations. They avoid the issue of paying cash to individual black people. Similarly, on the question of raising funds, Steve Cushion’s extremely useful Up Down Turn Around proposes that applying an additional corporation tax to big business offers a more appropriate solution.72

Reparations as reform

The second strand sees reparations as a policy within a broader social democratic style reformism. In this view, reparations can effect national racial reconciliation, offering a moment for moral reflection and unity.

Manning Marable, a black socialist intellectual who died in 2011, provides a radical version of this, advocating reparations as an element in a wider “remaking of American institutions, which he [saw] as premised on and structured around white supremacy”.73 In Marable’s view, addressing material differences between black and white Americans was an important prerequisite of the goal of black emancipation.

Another reformist strand is represented by the CARICOM demands, encapsulated in its ten-point reparation plan:

1. A Full Formal Apology.
2. An Indigenous Peoples’ Development Programme.
3. Funding for Repatriation to Africa.
4. The Establishment of Cultural Institutions and the Return Of Cultural Heritage.
5. Assistance in Remedying the Public Health Crisis.
6. Education Programmes.
7. The Enhancement of Historical and Cultural Knowledge Exchanges.
8. Psychological Rehabilitation as a Result of the Transmission of Trauma.
9. The Right to Development through the Use of Technology.
10. Debt Cancellation and Monetary Compensation.
74

The fact that such demands are conceivably realisable within the framework of capitalism does not mean that revolutionary socialists stand aloof from them. The types of demands set out by CARICOM can help to provide a framework for mobilising a “united front” between anti-racists and anti-imperialists, including white people, and a Caribbean popular movement challenging the British state.75 In this context, it is also important socialists retain political independence and are free to criticise Caribbean leaders, for instance when they adopt neoliberal economic policies, and other measures that increase the suffering of workers and the oppressed, or set back the struggle for reparations in their own region. A case in point is the Barbadian government buying 21 hectares of former plantation land from Richard Drax for housing, paying an estimated £3 million. As the Barbadian poet laurate Esther Phillips commented: “He should be giving us this land as reparations, not further enriching himself…at the expense of the Barbadians”.76

To achieve reparations, care should also be taken to avoid an overreliance on international law in general and specifically the United Nations. This approach tends to focus at the level of nation-states, with a limited role for grassroots and working-class organisations. Whatever successes are achieved at a legal level depend very much on the balance of forces beyond international institutions such as the UN.

Reparations and revolution

A final strand within the reparations movement sees reparative justice as a revolutionary project, harking back to the approaches of the Black Panthers or James Forman. In Freedom Dreams, Robin D G Kelley comments that the financial reparations approach in the US has never been “entirely, or even primarily, about money. The demand for reparations was about ‘social justice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of black America, and eliminating institutional racism”.77 However, Kelley’s highly personal and idiosyncratic conception of a “revolution of the mind”, drawing on surrealism to “take us to places where Marxism, anarchism, and other ‘isms’ in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture”, offers little practical guidance on how reparations and revolution can be linked today.78

Moreover, Kelley draws on elements of Marxism but also associates the theory with a crude class reductionist stance.79 While sections of the left are certainly guilty of this charge, there is a far richer Marxist tradition that has sought to integrate and take up issues of oppression while insisting on the necessity of working-class revolution to ultimately overthrow capitalism.80 In the absence of this kind of approach, revolutionary forms of black nationalism can easily encounter the kind of impasse identified earlier as the fate of previous radical movements.

A similar vagueness is also exemplified by the Third World nationalist approach of Olufemi O Taiwo in Reconsidering Reparations, which draws on Kelley’s work. The book begins with an under-theorised concept of a “global racial empire” in which, he claims, slavery, colonialism and modern-day racism are rooted.81 Taiwo makes many good points, such as recognising the global interconnectedness of economics and politics, striving for a “worldmaking” (internationalist) politics and linking the issue of climate justice with reparations. However, his analysis is weakened by not linking the various issues he identifies to the concept of a capitalist ruling class and the drive for capitalist accumulation.82

Of course, there are arguments over this approach within the US radical left. In 2019, Dissent magazine hosted a debate on reparations between the black revolutionary socialist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adolph Reed Jr, a black self-proclaimed Marxist critical of those some see as over-emphasising race. Reed’s apparently radical position leads to relatively conservative conclusions. He argues that the demand should be dropped in favour of “universal programmes” benefitting all workers because otherwise he does not consider it credible to gain majority support.

Taylor quite rightly replies that building a multiracial class struggle over universalist demands is not credible without addressing the specific demands of black people and other oppressed groups. She adds:

What I’m arguing for with reparations is really about not just the financial redress, but how do we deal with the long-term political aftermath of racism in our society? How do we educate the public about the centrality of slavery and the racism that made it possible?83

In that sense, struggles over these demands play an important role in developing the political understanding of workers over issues of racism and convincing oppressed people that their liberation can be linked to class struggle.

Conclusion

As these points suggest, the reparations debate offers anti-racist campaigners a focus for agitation, aiming their fire at local institutions, such as universities and corporations, or taking up other issues, such as the naming of roads and the display of statues. Students and trade unionists can and should demand that institutions with a historical stake in slavery make adequate reparative payments. This should be seen as part of the ongoing struggle against racism and the political right.

The basis for a collective struggle exists because of the shared interests of black and white workers not just in challenging their shared exploitation but also of weakening the racism that continues to divide our class. This is reinforced if we reject the notions of slavery borne as a result of white supremacy and “collective guilt” in favour of an emphasis on capitalism and the real beneficiaries of the historic slave trade and their successors.

Activists can also make realistic propaganda to illuminate the horrific role of the British ruling class in developing, perpetuating and defending the transatlantic slave trade. Political connections should be made, explaining, for instance, how historic slavery and imperial plunder in the Caribbean led to poverty there today—and indeed how that poverty led to the Windrush generation arriving in Britain. Our rulers fear the ideological impact of the reparative justice demand, not just the claim on the public finances made by Caribbean nations.

A Marxist case can also emphasise our analysis of the pivotal role of the slave trade and plantation slavery, as a form of primitive accumulation aiding the development of British industrial capitalism. It therefore defends the Williams thesis, highlighting the key role slavery played in this development. Marxists should be central to challenging the ruling class’s dismissive approach, which argues that we forget the role of slavery and focus on less divisive, more “current” concerns. The British state should also formally apologise.

The impact of transatlantic slavery has been profound: racism, social inequalities, underdevelopment, and more. Reparation packages can only be short-lived solutions in the face of a barbaric capitalist and imperialist world that slavery helped to create, a world that will continue to throw up new injustices and horrors. Ultimately, the struggle for reparations should be seen as one element in a wider struggle to put an end to that system.


Steve Philip is a Media Studies teacher in a secondary school and is active in the NEU. He is a member of the SWP and active in Walthamstow.


Notes

1 Coates, 2014.

2 On the history of BLM, see Sayed, 2022.

3 Sherwood, 2024.

4 Trevelyan, 2023.

5 Smith and Lashmar, 2023.

6 Ringrose, 2021.

7 Marx, 1976, p915.

8 French, 2021, p150.

9 Harman, 1999, p255.

10 Williams would go on to become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. On Eric Williams, see Hogsbjerg, 2023a.

11 Solow and Engerman, 1987, p1. For Williams’s own version of this thesis see Williams, 1944, p7. William’s “decline” thesis, that the slave trade experienced a decline in profitability and that this was a significant factor in precipitating abolition, has since been challenged. Profit rates for the Caribbean, beyond Jamaica, continued to rise during the late 1700s and early 1800s.

12 Williams, 1944, p52.

13 Among the “Sugar Islands” were Barbados, Cuba, Grenada, Jamaica, Martinique, Saint Croix, Saint Domingue and the Leeward Islands.

14 Williams, 1944, pp51-84. See also Heblich, Redding, and Voth, 2023, which considers the impact of British-based slave owners and their investments on regional economic development.

15 Williams, 1944, pp105-106.

16 Richardson, 1987

17 Engerman, 1972.

18 Blackburn, 1997, p542.

19 Berg and Hudson, 2023, p52.

20 Berg and Hudson, 2023, p7.

21 Available at: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

22 Blackburn, 1997, p515.

23 Beckels, 2013, p18.

24 Beckles, 2013.

25 Williams, 1944, pp19-20.

26 Fryer, 1984, chapter 7.

27 Fryer, 1984, pp129-132.

28 Berg and Hudson, 2023, chapter 8.

29 Blackburn, 1997, pp246-250; Hill, 1974, pp140-143.

30 Marx, 1976, pp925-926.

31 The Lesser Antilles includes present day Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

32 Beckles, 2013, pp24-25.

33 The “Middle Passage” refers to the crossing the Atlantic, following the “first passage”, the forced march of the enslaved to African ports, and the “final passage” that followed disembarkation for those who survived.

34 Beckles, 2013, p50.

35 Walvin, 1992, p31.

36 French, 2021, p267.

37 Rodney, 2018.

38 Thompson, 2009, p576. Another estimate gives a 6 percent annual mortality rate as the norm across the island. The same work details the tasks and punishments inflicted on enslaved people typical of a plantation at this time.

39 Blackburn, 1997, pp328-329.

40 Engels, 2009.

42 Fowler, 2020.

43 Anson and Bennett, 2022.

44 On the Haitian Revolution, see James, 2001.

45 Blackburn, 2007; Hogsbjerg, 2023b.

46 Hochschild, 2005, p344.

47 Blackburn, 2007.

48 Blackburn, 1997, pp256-258.

49 Hochschild, 2005, pp120-121.

50 Hochschild, 2005, pp120-121, 137, 192-196.

51 Press Association, 2013.

52 Cugoano, 1999, p52.

53 Heyrick, 1826, p219.

54 On the development and ultimate overthrow of this “second slavery”, see Blackburn, 2024.

55 Araujo, 2017, pp49-51.

56 Araujo, 2017, p92.

57 Araujo, 2017, p93.

58 Araujo, 2017, p98.

59 Araujo, 2017, p121. For a brief discussion of Garveyism, see Olende, 2022.

60 Kelley, 2002, p120.

61 Kelley, 2002, pp120-121.

62 Kelley, 2002, pp112-123.

63 For a discussion of these processes, see Harman, pp75-80, 181-191. See also Shawki, 1990.

64 Coates, 2014.

65 Capehart, 2019.

66 The report states: “Brattle’s team quantified certain elements of reparations to be $100-131 trillion. These reparations are for harms separated into two categories of damages: harm during the period when chattel slavery was carried out ($77-108 trillion) and continuing harm post-enslavement ($23 trillion). According to Brattle’s estimates, the harms during the period of enslavement were inflicted on 19 million people over four centuries, including Africans kidnapped and transported to the Americas and Caribbean and those born into slavery”—Bazelon and others, 2023.

68 Rashawn and Perry, 2020.

69 West, 2017.

70 Johnson, 2016.

71 Blazina and Cox, 2022.

72 Cushion, 2018, pp22-23.

73 Brophy, 2006, pp71-72.

74 For further elaboration of each of these ten points, see: https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/

75 This is very much in the spirit of the united front as envisaged by Leon Trotsky: an agreement for common struggle, involving revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries, in which the former retained their independence and ability to propose militant tactics and advocate for a wider revolutionary challenge to capitalism—see, for instance, Trotsky, 1971.

76 Smith and Lashmar, 2024.

77 Kelley, 2002, p114.

78 Kelley, 2002, pp191-192.

79 Kelley, 2002, pp4, 11, 36-38.

80 For a recent restatement of this approach, see Callinicos, 2018.

81 Taiwo, 2022.

82 Controversially, he also drops the notion of “responsibility”, replacing it with the weaker concept of “liability” for these crimes against humanity.

83 Taylor and Reed, 2019.


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