[A version of this article first appeared on the website of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association and has been shared by the author with the Round Table website.]

One of the most contentious issues in international relations, especially for the Commonwealth, was dissected in detail at the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association annual lecture on the topic of Reparations for Slavery.

The 24 November lecture, at the Palace of Westminster in London, was delivered by Dr Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. It looked in detail at the ongoing question of British reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery.

The issue has been given fresh impetus by the last Commonwealth Heads of Government  Meeting (CHOGM), where leaders agreed that the time had come to address the legacy of the horrors of slavery, and King Charles publicly recognised the “painful” history of Britain’s role.

The lecture took place as a Caribbean delegation had just visited the UK to outline their case for slavery reparations and the venue of the next CHOGM in 2026 on the Caribbean island of Antigua also looms over the Commonwealth discussions on slavery.

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Inequality the same after emancipation

Historians estimate that more than 12 million Africans were enslaved in the course of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with more than three million of them being carried in British ships, making huge profits for merchants in Bristol, Liverpool, London and other parts of the UK.

When Britain abolished its role in the trade in 1833, campaigners believe that economic activities connected with plantation slavery made up 11% of the country’s overall wealth.

Reparations were paid then, not to the slaves or their home countries, but to former slave owners – a figure equivalent to 40% of Britain’s annual Treasury revenue at the time.

“Formerly enslaved people in the Caribbean meanwhile, remained unable to accumulate any substantial amounts of wealth with which to buy land since their wages were generally so low and, unlike their owners, they received no capital injection upon emancipation. Unable to pass on wealth to their descendants, there was ‘no decrease in inequality’ after emancipation,” said Dr Lester.

“Britain did indeed lead the way in coercing other countries to abolish their trans-Atlantic slave trades. However, that did not amount to an abandonment of white Britons’ coercion of Black people’s labour. Any ‘discount’ has to bear this in mind too,” he said.

Dr Lester continued: “The British anti-slavery lobby was a genuine and occasionally powerful force but it resulted in imperial interventions only where it converged with other objectives. Indeed, much of the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century was driven by the need to reconcile anti-slavery rhetoric with the exploitation of the resources and labour of new colonies and British geostrategic advantage.

Does the credit for acting justly in suppressing the trans-Atlantic slave trade relieve or reduce Britain’s reparative debt or was there an additional moral requirement to make reparation to former victims?”

Anti-reparations lobby

Dr Lester pointed out that, as the call for reparations and reparatory justice mount, so too do the responses of the anti-reparations lobby.

“Since they are unable to extricate slavery from Britain’s economic prosperity, anti-reparations commentators often try to get the nation off the hook by emphasising its leading role first in the abolition of slavery and then in the development of the Caribbean. Surely these must mean that any British moral and economic dues have already been paid off?

“Britain did indeed lead the way in coercing other countries to abolish their trans-Atlantic slave trades. However, that did not amount to an abandonment of white Britons’ coercion of Black people’s labour. Any ‘discount’ has to bear this in mind too.”

He added: “The British anti-slavery lobby was a genuine and occasionally powerful force but it resulted in imperial interventions only where it converged with other objectives. Indeed, much of the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century was driven by the need to reconcile anti-slavery rhetoric with the exploitation of the resources and labour of new colonies and British geostrategic advantage.

“Engaging seriously with this lobby’s anti-reparations arguments helps us to understand the historical and the moral dimensions of reparative claims, and the refusal to take them seriously, and to appreciate how the debate reflects broader contestation between progressive and conservative political agendas.”

Not just trans-Atlantic

Appearing with Dr Lester was the journalist and academic Martin Plaut, who argued that the question of reparations for slavery was much more complicated than the case usually presented.

“African enslavement was so much more extensive than the trade across the Atlantic,” he said.

“Why has the discussion about reparations been exclusively about the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

“The slave trade to Arab nations was at least as large as that undertaken by Europeans or Americans. It began very much earlier and continued into the 1960s and 1970s, which was when the Omanis finally abolished it. Should the Arab nations not be approached for reparations if this debate is to encompass the whole gamut of enslavement?

“And why should we ignore all those who were taken from east Africa, and only concentrate on the Caribbean? Indigenous slavery by Africans raises extraordinary complex problems. The earliest evidence of slavery is etched on the rocks of the Nile, then what responsibility does Egypt have to the people of Sudan and Ethiopia?

“Equally, should the Oromo or the southern Ethiopians look to the highland kingdoms of Ethiopia for recompense for their enslavement?”

“For 100 years the Fulani held the Hausa and other people enslaved, and in 1860, at the time of the American civil war, there were approximately the same number of slaves in the Sokoto caliphate as there were in the whole of the American south. But when do we hear about this? “

Mr Plaut also cited the Sokoto caliphate in west Africa, calling it one of the most grotesque examples of slavery, and further north the role of the Ashanti who he said enslaved vast numbers of people and sold them off to European slave traders

“Our priority right now should be to concentrate on people who are enslaved now, to this day,” said Mr Plaut.

The question was, he said, whose reparatory justice, for whom, by whom, and where?

Martin Lumb is a member of the executive of the Commonwealth Journalist’s Association UK branch.