Achi news desk-
Caribbean countries are to formally demand slavery reparations from the British Royal Family, according to media reports. And in California there is a plan to pay compensation to any citizen who can prove slave lineage. It is notable that the target of the claim is the Royal Family and the interesting Church of England which has already set aside a fund of £100 million from the assets of the Church Commissioners for ‘compensation’.
It can be argued that the monarchy did indeed preside over British interests in relation to the slave trade and its use for several centuries. In particular, the Stuarts liked the revenue that flowed from trade as it did not have to go through Parliament. Recently, the Baptist scholar Michael Taylor published a book ‘The Interest’ in which he discusses how the British Establishment resisted the abolition of slavery how the campaign to end slavery divided Britain and was almost blocked by some of the most powerful and famous figures of the time. . In 1807, Parliament banned the slave trade in the British Empire. Much research is being done on this historically pervasive and harmful practice.
Ironically, it was Christianity that gradually eroded slavery in the Roman Empire, although the effects of the feudal system imposed by the Normans were close to slavery.
Caribbean governments are also asking the Church of England for reparations as their upper echelons benefit from the trade. The fact that there are African kingdoms that happily enslaved and even sacrificed large numbers of members of other tribes, and even collaborated with European and Arab slaves, counters the charge that enslaving your ancestors is wrong and harmful to themselves and their successors. The charge must be faced reasonably and fairly.
The big book on the issue of the slave trade in Britain has recently been republished, under the title Capitalism and Slavery by the black historian from Oxford, Eric Williams. In an analysis of this large volume by the Daily Telegraph’s world economics reporter, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, he discusses the issue of whether the slave trade ended the industrial revolution and prosperity in Britain. Pritchard concludes from this and another work (Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson) that the slave economy was an “underappreciated catalyst for the industrial revolution”.
But it remains if only the authors, Berg and Hudson, had rested their case there. Instead they go further and suggest that the financial structure and wealth of Britain today is a direct function of slavery two centuries ago, and that colonialism has left Britain with particularly virulent forms of racism and inequality. Pritchard says in refutation of the second claim that nations always reinvent themselves and according to much research the UK has excellent race relations.
He draws attention to Eric William’s argument: “A racial twist has therefore been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the result of slavery.” Unfree labor in the New World was multiracial as well as Catholic, Protestant and pagan.
The first thirty years of the sugar plantation system were built on white labour, frequently bought and sold, and with extensive use of the whipping post. “White servitude” was the historical foundation upon which black slavery was constructed, he argued.
It is clear that a much more scholarly and informed discussion of the compensation claim is needed, with the dangers of racializing an economic debate and undoing centuries of reconciling and respecting our racial differences. We recommend these two books to our royal family for careful study – presenting two different but valuable perspectives on an important debate.
