Abstract
As its title declares, Michael Banner’s book is a work of advocacy, not dispassionate analysis. 1 There is no shame in that, of course. But there are strong cases and there are weak ones, and Banner’s is weak.
The bare bones of his argument are these. Britain has profited ‘immeasurably’ from the extraordinarily inhumane crimes of slave trading and slavery between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, whereas slaveowners were compensated for their loss of property upon slavery’s abolition in 1834, the slaves themselves were given no compensation for their unremunerated labour. Moreover, the abolition of enslavement and subsequent colonial government did nothing at all to improve the economic condition of the freed slaves and their descendants. As a result, Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean continue to languish in chronic poverty. There are, then, direct causal connections between, on the one hand, British slavery in the past, and on the other, British wealth and Caribbean poverty in the present. So, both to rectify the injustice done to Caribbean peoples by Britons’ ancestors, and to repent of the racism that first justified enslavement and then generated subsequent neglect, Britain needs to make reparations worth up to £250 billion.
Throughout his book, Banner invokes the authority of Hilary Beckles. The main text is prefaced by a quotation of Beckles, which confidently asserts that, in respect of ‘the multiple crimes against humanity they committed in the region’, ‘the evidentiary basis of the case [for reparations by Britain and other colonising nations] has long been established’. 2 In the main text Banner cites Beckles repeatedly and wholeheartedly, writing at one point that, ‘to use Beckles’ most resonant terms, Europeans converted the Caribbean into a “criminal ecosystem” designed to accumulate wealth without cultural or ethical constraints’. 3 However, judging by the overblown rhetoric, the historical inaccuracy, and the lack of intellectual rigour that characterises Beckles’ 2013 work, Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide, Banner relies on an unreliable authority. 4
His book is typical of Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racism in its wilfully blinkered focus on the enslavement of black people by whites. The desired result is to make European-driven slavery seem extraordinary, standing out from all the other, manifold forms of injustice frequently suffered by peoples in the past, and therefore uniquely deserving of present-day repentance and reparation. However, up until the early nineteenth century, slavery was a universal institution, practised by people of every skin colour on every continent. One estimate has it that Arab raiders from Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli alone enslaved between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century.
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Another estimate reckons that the Arab slave trade as a whole, which lasted from the seventh century
The most egregious oversight is African complicity. Banner reports vaguely that the slaves bought by British merchants ‘had been captured in war or simply kidnapped’ 7 without letting on that the raiding and kidnapping was actually carried out by fellow Africans. Contrary to Beckles’ claim that African chiefs generally opposed the slave trade, the Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, has written that ‘[w]hen the slave trade was abolished [by the British], Africans were against abolition. King Kosoko of Lagos was against abolition at the time … Of those who were sold and had offspring … [s]ome returned home … [and] became, in turn, slaveholders and bought slaves for their correspondents who remained in Brazil. Africans resumed this trade after abolition.’ 8
While slavery in the sugar plantations of the West Indies was often among the most cruelly oppressive, the use of slaves on a massive scale for hard labour on plantations was neither invented by Europeans in the Caribbean nor confined to it. As Mohammed Bashir Salau asserts, ‘plantations were not peculiar to the Americas’. 9 In the nineteenth century they were established by Omani Arabs on the coast of East Africa, 10 and by the Fulani in the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. Indeed, the Caliphate became ‘one of the largest slave societies in modern history’, 11 equalling the United States in the number of its enslaved (four million). 12
Nonetheless, can it be claimed that the suffering of slaves on ships crossing the Atlantic or cutting cane in the British West Indies was unique in its brutality? 13 Not obviously. Of the plight of a white European slave of an Arab master on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, Henri-David de Grammont has written: as chattel of whomsoever chose to buy him, he would be utterly without rights or a will of his own, his very life forfeit to the whim of his new owner, who ‘could resell him, overload him with work, imprison him, beat him, mutilate him, kill him, without anyone interfering’. 14 The experience of Miguel de Cervantes, who was captured and enslaved in 1575, bears this out. According to a first-hand witness, Cervantes ‘was on the verge of losing it [his life] on four different occasions when he was nearly impaled or hooked or burned alive because he had sought to liberate many others … In the end, the gardener was hung by a foot and died by drowning in his own blood.’ 15
Once the politically determined myopic focus of BLM anti-racism has been loosened, and Caribbean slavery is allowed to sit in its global and historical context, the question naturally arises: Given that world history is littered with instances of equally inhumane slavery, given the widespread complicity of Africans themselves in the transatlantic slave trade, and given that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slavery two centuries ago, why single out the British today to make historic redress?
In addition to historical myopia, an important element of Banner’s case for reparations is that Britain’s current wealth owes a lot to the historic exploitation of the unremunerated labour of Caribbean slaves. Initially, he is cautious, acknowledging that the extent of the contribution of the slave trade and slavery to British industrial prosperity is contested and endorsing Kenneth Morgan’s ‘balanced’ assessment that it would be wrong to claim that the profits from the trade were ‘a major stimulus for industrialization in Britain’ and that they played only ‘a significant, though not decisive part’ in its evolution. 16 This is, indeed, where consensus among economic historians settles. But toward the end of the book as his advocacy reaches its climax, Banner abandons caution, telling the reader that Britain’s social, institutional, and cultural capital ‘was immeasurably enhanced by the wealth generated by colonial slavery’. 17 The choice of word is clever. In one, etymological sense, the claim that the beneficial effects of slavery are ‘beyond measurement’ is incontrovertible, since the available data are limited and many of the effects indirect and subtle. But that is neither the usual meaning nor its meaning here: here, ‘immeasurable’ connotes ‘immeasurably huge’—as in ‘immense’. By Banner’s own initial witness, that is misleading.
Vital to his argument for the continuity between the past and the present is his downplaying of the significance of the British abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Again invoking Beckles, he claims that the age of abolition was ‘a continuation of what went before’. 18 ‘What we [British] celebrate as the ending of years of gross and flagrant injustice and unfreedom’, he writes, ‘was followed by years of gross and flagrant injustice and freedom.’ 19 What he refers to here are three distinct things: first, the fixed period of the post-emancipation ‘apprenticeship’ of freed slaves from 1834–38; second, the conditions of Caribbean labour thereafter; and third, the economic record of colonial governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Of ‘apprenticeship’ Banner complains that it was ‘a form of tied labour’. 20 That is true. Upon formal emancipation on 1 August 1834, all slaves over the age of six were required to become apprenticed labourers, paid for overtime, but bound to perform unpaid work for their former masters for between forty and forty-five hours a week for a transitional period. The rationale was to give the plantations time to adjust and survive economically. This was in the interest, not only of the owners, but also of those freed slaves who would not be able to find land of their own on which to subsist and who therefore would depend on the plantations for employment. The planters had claimed that they faced ruin without compensation. But even after compensation had been conceded as a necessary political compromise to secure the parliamentary passage of the Act for the Abolition of Slavery in 1833, many planters sold up within twenty years of emancipation, which suggests that their business model was indeed precarious.
After the apprenticeship scheme was terminated in 1838, it is true that free blacks were often subjected to unfair contracts and constraints on free wage-bargaining. 21 Consequently, many opted to emigrate, especially in the economic depression of the 1880s. Yet, according to B. W. Higman, in post-emancipation Jamaica there occurred a rapid creation of a ‘new class of black smallholders’, who were largely independent of wage-labour. 22 As for unfair contracts, constraints on wage-bargaining, and emigration—those would all have been perfectly familiar to white rural and industrial workers in Victorian Britain. The condition of workers in the West Indies after emancipation was, by our privileged, twenty-first-century Western standards, very poor indeed. But so it was for most people worldwide. The past is a foreign country; they did things very differently there.
What about the character of colonial government? ‘The central continuity’ between the periods of slavery and emancipation, writes Banner, ‘is that colonial power continued to be exercised in the interests of the metropole, white elites, and British capital, and with little regard to the interests of the colonies and their people … Britain conceived no future for the Caribbean except as a source of cheap raw materials, and as a market for British products.’ 23 Banner, following Beckles, labels this ‘extractive colonialism’. 24 However, the neo-Marxist theory of colonial economics that Beckles and Banner adopt tends to come off worse when confronted with the data. 25 Rudolf von Albertini, whose work was based ‘on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940’ (according to the eminent imperial economic historian, David Fieldhouse) judged ‘that colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation’. 26
It is true that, for most of their history, colonial governments did not usually direct the economic development of their colonies. That is because, like most governments until the third decade of the twentieth century, the public goods they served were mainly the maintenance of internal law and order and external defence. Up until 1914, British government spending during peacetime was only about 8 per cent of GDP; US government spending, about 3 per cent. 27 It was the experience of beneficial state control of the economy during the two world wars and Great Depression in between that ushered in the era of much bigger, more interventionist government. (By 2022, the figures for the UK and the US had risen, respectively, to 44 per cent and 36 per cent. 28 ) Nonetheless, by establishing the rule of law and sufficiently stable government, even small colonial government indirectly encouraged private investment. The leading exporter of capital from the mid-nineteenth century to at least 1929, Britain invested over a third of its overseas capital in the Empire between 1865 and 1914. 29 While 70 per cent of that went to the white-settled colonies or dominions, a not-insubstantial 19.29 per cent was directed to India and a further 10.48 per cent to ‘dependent colonies’ such as those in the West Indies. 30
In addition, the imperial government did start to shoulder responsibility for direct development, starting with the Colonial Development Act 1929. 31 Eleven years later, the Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1940 authorised expenditure of up to £5 million per annum on colonial development and welfare for a ten-year period and £500,000 for colonial research annually without term. Unfortunately, wartime exigences prevented implementation. 32 At the war’s end, when Britain was bankrupt, a much more generous Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1945 increased the funding available to £120 million (worth about £6.5 billion today) over a ten-year period. 33
Given all this, it is not true to say that British colonial governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did nothing toward the economic development of the West Indies. They did play a role in development, initially indirect, latterly direct. But did they underdevelop? To answer that question, we first need to know what measure is being applied—what the correct level of development is supposed to have been and how ‘correctness’ is being determined. Neither Beckles nor Banner tells us.
Beckles claims, and Banner echoes him, that colonial governments did the Caribbean no economic good at all and left the West Indian colonies completely unprepared to stand on their own economic feet after formal independence in the 1960s. But Tirthankar Roy, the Bengali-born Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and author of The Economic History of Colonialism, strongly disagrees:
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The claim that Caribbean states were not able to ‘find their feet’ at independence around 1962 is total rubbish. Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados had the highest average income and literacy rates in the region, incomes per head were three to four times that in the long-independent Dominican Republic and Haiti, literacy rates were around 15 [per cent] in Haiti and 75–80 [per cent] in Jamaica. Almost certainly, public health was also similarly advanced.
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As for the causes of the present economic woes of Britain’s former colonies in the West Indies, Roy has this to say: Jamaica after independence was particularly badly governed and saw a deep stagnation during 1972 and 1984, when standards of living actually fell. There are few countries in the world not engaged in civil war that had as bad a growth record as did post-independence Jamaica. Average income recovered only so much that its real average income is now what it had been around 1975. Overall, the West Indies region saw rather little economic growth in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, when many Asian countries (colonial or not) forged ahead. The reason was bad and corrupt government, not the burden of colonialism.
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Between decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s and the present, many causal factors other than the legacy of colonial government have come into play. Those include the agency of the members of independent Caribbean governments. It is reasonable to presume that this helps to explain the fact that different post-colonial states have performed differently. As Banner himself acknowledges, there are ‘considerable differences between Jamaica, with GDP per capita in 2019 of $5,500, and Barbados, with GDP per capita of $18,000 (which is an average for the world)’. 37 Indeed, not only has Barbados achieved the world average in GDP per capita, but, according to World Bank data, in 2020 life expectancy in post-slavery Barbados was 24 years higher than in post-slave-trading Nigeria, 38 literacy (in Barbados in 2014) was almost 40 per cent higher (than in Nigeria in 2018), 39 and Gross National Income per capita in international dollars 482 per cent higher. 40 The story that Michael Banner tells of a basic continuity in equal misery from the era of slavery, via negligent colonial government, to present-day economic woes in the Caribbean does not do justice to the facts.
Another vital step in manufacturing the story of basic continuity is the belittling of Britain’s use of its dominant imperial power to suppress slave trading and slavery worldwide throughout the second half of the British Empire’s life. Thus, Banner asserts that Britain’s ‘wider antislavery campaign in the next generation seems not so much a break with the past but its continuation by other means’. 41 What he means by this seems to be that Britain’s vaunted humanitarian motive for suppressing slavery was nothing but an excuse for imperial expansion. Colonialism was simply slavery by other means: ‘the country which practised and abolished slavery … then went on to engage in worldwide colonialism’. 42
It would be fair to say that Michael Banner’s own view of British colonialism suffers from more than a whiff of moralism—if by that we mean a propensity to issue sweeping moral judgements from an ill-informed height. Although there are undoubtedly some, usually younger, historians who share his prejudices, there are many others who do not. Had he read with open eyes my Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, he would have discovered this and found his simplistic narrative at least challenged, perhaps complicated. 43 However, since I am not a professional historian, perhaps he thought my historiography could not be relied upon. In which case he could have read with profit Niall Ferguson’s 2003 Empire, or, if unable to stomach something written by an author on the ‘right’, he could have been educated from the left by Bernard Porter’s 2015 British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t. 44 But, judging by the bibliography of his book, he consulted none of these.
Let us return to the story of the British Empire anti-slavery endeavours, which Michael Banner chooses not to tell. The strength of abolitionist feeling in Britain in the early 1800s was so great that it did not relax after Parliament had been persuaded to abolish the slave trade and slavery within the British Empire; it went on to persuade the imperial government to adopt a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide. One sign of the Empire’s enduring commitment was the emergence in the Foreign Office of a separate Slave Trade Department from 1819, which was in fact the Office’s largest department in the 1820s and 1830s. 45 The British government’s persistence was such that in 1842 the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, saw fit to describe anti-slavery diplomacy as a ‘new and vast branch of international relations’. 46
In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. The Royal Navy deployed up to 13 per cent of its total manpower in the West Africa Station, in order to stop slave trading with the Americas. 47 From 1839 naval patrols extended south of the Equator, and in 1845 the Slave Trade Act authorised the Navy to treat as pirates Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, to arrest those responsible and to have them tried in British admiralty courts. In 1850 Navy ships began trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships, sometimes even entering its harbours and on one occasion exchanging fire with a fort. In September of that year Brazil yielded to the pressure, enacted legislation comprehensively outlawing the slave trade and began to enforce it rigorously. Shortly before his death in 1865, Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’. 48
The task of estimating the cost of all the Empire’s various efforts to abolish the slave trade and slavery at sea and on land, worldwide, over the course of a century and a half, would present—at the very least—a major challenge both in scale and in complexity. No one, to my knowledge, has tried it. Some, however, have developed an estimate of the expense of transatlantic suppression alone. David Eltis reckoned that this cost British taxpayers a minimum of £250,000 per annum—which equates to £1.367–1.74 billion, or 9.1–11.5 per cent of the UK’s expenditure on development aid, in 2019—for half a century. 49 Moreover in absolute terms the British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade in the forty-seven years, 1816–62, as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits. 50
Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape took a broader view. In addition to the costs of naval suppression, they considered the loss of business caused by abolition to British manufacturers, shippers, merchants and bankers who dealt with the West Indies. They also factored in the higher prices paid by British consumers for sugar, since duties were imposed to protect free-grown British sugar from competition by foreign producers who continued to benefit from unpaid slave labour. Overall, they ‘estimate the economic cost to British metropolitan society of the anti-slave trade effort at roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over sixty years from 1808 to 1867’. 51 Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: in 2021 the UK spent 0.5 per cent of GDP on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807–67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’. 52
Banner’s case for the justice of slavery reparations is not driven by a circumspect reading of the relevant history, but rather by anti-racist assumptions. The preface to Britain’s Slavery Debt makes clear the author’s conviction that the British are systemically racist and that this racism stems directly from colonialism and its epitome, slavery. Reparations, therefore, are not only about doing justice to the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean; they are also about the British repenting of continuing racism. That explains why, of all peoples, he singles out his own. Banner takes this view mainly because of his own experience. ‘My personal failing reflects a national failing’, he confesses. 53 In the forty years prior to 2007, in the heart of which the young Michael was growing up, ‘everyday racism’ was ‘very much the norm’, he tells us, and ‘ubiquitous’. 54 Enoch Powell—he of the infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech against mass immigration—‘was the most popular politician of his day and was spoken of not as a pariah but as a voice in the wilderness’. 55 Concern about Rhodesia and South Africa was focused ‘definitely not [upon] the plights of their majorities but of their minorities in staving off majority rule’. And an Iranian friend at a leading public school reported that he was routinely addressed as a ‘w*g’. 56
I cannot speak for Michael Banner and the circles in which he grew up—slightly later than I. And I do not deny that racial prejudice was present in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. But anti-racism was also vigorously present. Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech was immediately and highly controversial and it ended his political career. He was regarded, of course, as both a voice in the wilderness and a pariah by different people. Yes, there was natural concern about what would become of whites in democratised, black majority southern Africa. But at the same time the anti-Apartheid movement in Britain enjoyed considerable public support. And I, too, had an Anglo-Iranian friend at my public school, whose name and features marked him out and who had a Persian text in Arabic script pinned up ostentatiously above his desk. I never once witnessed him suffer, or heard him complain of, racial abuse and I am confident that, had he ever been subjected to it, his peers would have protested vigorously.
But whatever the truth about the 1960s and 1970s, a lot has happened since then. The question of whether Britain today is generally or systemically racist is an empirical one and there are strong empirical reasons for doubting it. To begin with, there is the visible fact that in the last government of Boris Johnson in 2019–22, most of those in charge of the major departments of the British state were headed by Britons of Middle Eastern, Asian, or African heritage: Rishi Sunak, Chancellor; Priti Patel, Home Secretary; Sajid Javid, Health Secretary; Nadhim Zahawi, Education Secretary; and Kwasi Kwarteng, Business Secretary. Kemi Badenoch was then Minister of State for Equalities. If Britain really were systemically racist, that would not have happened—and especially, it would not have happened under a Conservative government. White supremacist countries just do not fill the highest offices of state with members of ethnic minorities.
Further, the March 2021 ‘Sewell’ report of the UK Government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities—most of whose commissioners were members of ethnic minorities—argued that contemporary Britain is not in fact systemically racist, even if it contains instances of structural racism. 57 Further still, the 2018 report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Being Black in the EU, found that the prevalence of racist harassment as perceived by people of African descent was lower in the UK than in any EU country except Malta, and the prevalence of overall racial discrimination was the lowest in the UK bar none. It also found that race relations were worst in Austria, Finland, and Ireland—countries with no history of overseas colonisation. 58
In a nutshell, Michael Banner’s argument does not add up for the following reasons. First, the humiliation and cruelty of British slave trading and slavery was unique neither in kind nor degree. Many other peoples did similarly lamentable things, not least Africans and Arabs. The myopic fingering of the British is unfair.
Second, if Britain’s industrial prosperity owes something modest to slave trading and slavery, it owes a lot more to a wide range of other factors.
Third, the British were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish both.
Fourth, they went on to do penance for slavery by spending resources of money, ships, and lives in suppressing slavery worldwide for a century-and-a-half.
Fifth, the British government’s decision to pay compensation to slave-owners for their loss of property upon emancipation was made in part as a necessary political compromise to enable the passing of emancipatory legislation, and in part to prevent the economic collapse of plantations, upon which many free blacks would continue to depend for wage-earning employment.
Sixth, history is replete with ancestors—both black and white—whose labour was more or less stolen. Why should the descendants of the black slaves of the British receive uniquely privileged attention?
Seventh, it is not true that British emancipation made no beneficial difference at all to the lives of any of the former slaves. Nor is it true that British colonial government did nothing to facilitate economic development and education in the West Indies.
And, eighth, the current economic woes of some Caribbean states owe much to post-colonial mismanagement.
Of course, the principle that those who have benefited from an injustice should either repair the damage or compensate its victim is moral common sense. The passage of time, however, muddies the waters. As the moral philosopher Onora O’Neill has written: claims to compensation have to show that continuing loss or harm resulted from past injury. This is all too often impossible where harms have been caused by ancient or distant wrongs … Is everybody who descends (in part) from those who were once enslaved or colonised still being harmed by those now ancient and distant misdeeds? Can we offer a clear enough account of the causation of current harms to tell where compensation is owed? Can we show who ought to do the compensating?
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The riotous jungle of history overgrows and obscures the causal pathways.
In the case of British slavery, the victims themselves are, of course, all long dead and—short of God, an afterlife, and a Final Judgement—lie forever beyond the reach of corrective justice and compensation. As for their twenty-first-century descendants, their present condition, while owing something to the enslavement of their ancestors, also owes much to events and choices in the almost two hundred years since emancipation. Were not some of their enslaved ancestors themselves slave-raiders whose luck had turned bad? Are there not some descendants of slaves who now prosper rather more than some descendants of slave-owners? Have not some of the latter used their tainted inheritance for charitable purposes, perhaps even anti-slavery endeavours? In the face of these intractable complications, O’Neill concludes that our focus should lie on addressing present injustices rather than trying to untangle historic injustices: Compensation is required for present harm caused by past wrongdoing, not simply for current disadvantage however caused. Unless we can trace the causal pathways, we cannot tell who has gained from ancestral wrongdoing, and should now shoulder the costs of compensating those whose present disadvantage was caused by past wrongdoing. It may therefore make more sense … to argue for a distributive—or redistributive—account of aspects of justice, which seeks action to redress present disadvantage, whatever its origins.
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So, by all means, let Britain direct some of its substantial international development aid toward its former colonies in the Caribbean. Aid: Yes! Reparations: No!