Abstract
This article replies systematically to Nigel Biggar's critique of Michael Banner's Britain's Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!
My recent book Britain's Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 2 argues that there is a compelling case for Britain making reparations, including financial, to the nations of the Caribbean who suffered for some three hundred years under regimes of enslavement and colonialism.
In an essay published online earlier this year by Policy Exchange, Nigel Biggar took exception to my argument. Since such a publication has a certain self-selecting audience, I would not have thought to publish a reply. But now that essentially the same argument (with some of the rhetoric pared back) has appeared on the pages of Studies in Christian Ethics 3 where it might be read by innocent bystanders, so to speak, it seems advisable to respond.
To give credit where it is due, Biggar is thorough in his enumeration of my sins. It is important to point out, however, that according to Biggar I am not just wrong but wrong-headed. My case does not add up, he says; but there is not adding up and not adding up. As Biggar sees it, the failure of my case for reparations is not a matter of my missing the mark slightly—I have not gone wrong because I have merely overlooked certain elements of the situation or mistaken their moral significance in some degree. The case for reparations is so perverse, so far from being a matter where reasonable people may reasonably disagree, that my error must have a deeper cause. The diagnosis to hand is that I am guilty of ‘Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racism’, 4 an affliction so severe that it prevents me and others so afflicted from seeing that the case for reparations does not add up at all.
The rational critic will obviously only reach for a deeper explanation of gross error once that gross error has been established, so there is nothing for it but to look at the catalogue of errors Biggar compiles and to find out whether my contentions on behalf of reparations really are so very wide of the mark.
The Charge Sheet
Biggar helpfully groups a number of his complaints in one long question: 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?
1. Why is Britain Being Singled out?
It is not. The claim for reparations which is the focus of my discussion has been made by Caricom, the representative body of the nations of the Caribbean, and is addressed to all the slaving nations, which is to say chiefly to Portugal, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands and France. My book discusses the merits of the claim as it pertains to Britain. There surely are serious cases to be answered by other nations. The fact that I do not examine these other claims, however, has nothing to say to the legitimacy of the claim against Britain, just to the scope of the discussion. Britain is not being singled out; rather I have simply not taken it upon myself to address all these other, quite likely, equally pressing but different cases.
2. The Universality of Slavery and 3. The Complicity of Africans in the Slave Trade
My book apparently ‘is typical of Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racism in its relentlessly blinkered focus on the enslavement of black people by whites. The desired result is to make the evil of 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.’ 5 What we need to know, says Biggar, is that slavery was practically a universal institution and that the British practice of it was not ‘uniquely brutal’. 6
That the practice of enslavement has been widespread is a matter, I would say, of common knowledge. After all, it is the basis of the regular cry raised against any case for reparations, ‘what about the Vikings?’, or ‘Barbary Pirates?’, etc. Equally, African complicity in the slave trade is well known, though Biggar mentions, as it if it is a most portentous matter, that certain African chiefs opposed the abolition of the slave trade.
It is not, then, that I or others need to be schooled in this basic history. Rather, what is at issue is the moral significance which attaches to these perfectly well-known facts of the case.
So let us imagine that I am appearing in the criminal court charged with trafficking modern-day slaves. Let us suppose 100 overseas workers have been brought to the UK under duress, with the assistance of local agents on the other side of the world, and are held here in virtual bondage by means of confiscation of their passports and other coercive measures. Were Nigel Biggar acting on my behalf, we may expect him to advance the two-pronged defence that trafficking and enslavement are practically universal, and furthermore that compatriots of the enslaved were complicit with their initial entrapment.
The contention that I should be excused my wrongdoing because it is so very common and was perpetrated with the assistance of the victims’ fellow countrymen, is, however, novel both in law and morals, and one without any obvious force.
But let me make a further and different point. The fact that African complicity in the slave trade is so frequently offered as a startling revelation—whatever moral significance, or as I would suggest, insignificance, it possesses—speaks chiefly to what is assumed to be an astonishing ignorance about the magnitude of the slave trade. Transatlantic slavery was a business conducted on an industrial scale: 12.5 million people were carried across the Atlantic in the space of some 300 years. What I would call the Ladybird History of Britain view of the slave trade, furnishes an image of a few British mariners on a beach trading beads, manillas, or rifles with a few chieftains in exchange for half a dozen abject Africans. In the ‘Afro-orientalist’ imagination of the scene, if we can coin such a term, the enslaved will be naked, the chieftains exotically clad, and the British dressed in smart jackets, with crisp white breeches and dashing Nelson-style headgear. But such a quaint way of doing business would never have got you to a total of 12.5 million. It is as if you had supposed a museum's butterfly collection was assembled by way of the odd Sunday afternoon jaunt across local fields, even though that collection runs into millions of specimens. That the enslaving powers co-opted local agents to their service, and many of them, should no more surprise us than it excuses the enslavers.
I have not yet attended to Biggar's repeated insistence that
And what of the old chestnut that
It is unclear to me whether the claim ‘Britain was among the first to abolish slavery’ is true or false: Britain was some 30 years behind Haiti in 1804, and yet only some 15 years and 30 years ahead of the laggards Denmark (abolition in 1848), the Netherlands (1863) and the USA as a whole in 1865. We can be relieved, I suppose, that we did not come in very late with Spain (which abolished slavery in 1873 in Puerto Rica and in 1886 in Cuba), and Brazil (where slavery was ended only in 1888).
But even allowing for the sake of argument that Britain can be said to have been in the abolitionist vanguard, it is hard to see what moral weight attaches to that status. There is merit in desisting from wrongdoing. But can perpetrators of a grave wrong plead relatively early desistance from their pursuit of that wrong as excusing them from making amends to the victims? ‘I stopped kidnapping people earlier than some other kidnappers’ does not seem to me the most winning of appeals (leaving aside the question of whether abolition really did amount to desisting from wrongdoing, i.e., whether, in short, abolition really was abolition. We will come back to this).
But let me also suggest that this very way of thinking about abolition is mistaken and the presence of Haiti in the list should tell us why. Listing countries in some sort of league table of abolition and awarding the early movers accolades, overlooks the fact, apart from anything else, that abolition was never the act of enslavers alone. The British Caribbean experienced major revolts in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831–2, and the successful slave revolt in Haiti put, if not the fear of God, the fear of significant financial loss into enslaving nations. Abolition within the British empire, as elsewhere, was more conceded than simply and purely granted. But the ‘apart from anything else’ is important too: successes and failures of abolitionism, and counter movements, resulted from complex interactions between numerous different factions and factors. A quick read of Seymour Drescher's Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery 8 should discourage those who approach the history with an intention of awarding prizes.
The question to which Biggar now turns was posed in the earlier version of his essay as
That very modest statement of the point seems quite enough to me. The profits from enslavement played a significant part in Britain's emergence in the nineteenth century as the world's leading industrial power. That wealth contributed significantly to the country’s economic growth, with accompanying accrual of social, political and institutional capital, which has created the society we know today. And although vis-à-vis other powers the UK may feel diminished in the early twenty-first century, it is still, by world standards, remarkably wealthy—all off ‘the back of slaves’, to use Biggar's own phrase.
Biggar finds occasion here to call me clever, though unfortunately in the sense of tricky rather than wise. I said in the book that Britain's social, institutional and cultural capital ‘was immeasurably enhanced by the wealth generated by colonial slavery’, and Biggar thinks this use of the word ‘immeasurably’ is less than scrupulous. Literally it means ‘not capable of measurement’, he points out, whereas the unsuspecting reader is more likely to hear the word as meaning ‘immensely’. And that, says Biggar, is misleading.
I am perfectly content to accept Biggar's encouragement to verbal rectitude. The case remains just as it was, however, with or without the ‘immeasurably’: Britain benefited significantly from wealth derived by the plantations and that is more than enough to establish this element in the case for reparations.
Morgan's modest claim is, however, actually too modest. In their recent Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson argue that ‘the role of slavery in the process of industrialisation and economic transformation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been generally underestimated by historians’, so that ‘it is time for a rounded examination in the light of accumulated research’.
10
They are sceptical of attempts to attribute a particular percentage of Britain's ‘economic growth, GDP or capital formation’ in the eighteenth century to the contribution of slavery, but for the very reason that the impacts of the slave trade were so wide ranging as to defy ready quantification: The slave and plantation trades were the hub around which many other dynamic and innovatory sectors of the economy pivoted. 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 organization and intensification of work, record keeping and the application of scientific and useful knowledge. Slavery certainly was formative in the timing and nature of Britain's industrial transition.
11
Again, Biggar takes indignant exception to this telling of the history. In the earlier version of his essay he poses the question,
Of course, no one said that abolition made no difference to anything at all, just that whatever difference it did make, did not amount to the promised transformation of slavery into freedom. And in citing the two facts he does, Biggar neglects to mention something of the wider context needed to interpret them fairly. As to landholding, Jamaica was an exception amongst the islands (for quite specific reasons), since in the generality of cases plantation owners across the region were able to continue to bind the formerly enslaved to the land as bonded labourers just as tightly as they were ever bound under enslavement, and to prevent them acquiring land. In Barbados this led to the invention of the so-called ‘chattel house’, a light and highly portable wooden dwelling which could readily be moved when circumstances demanded, since even owning a pocket of land on which to build a house was generally out of the question for the formerly enslaved. And in the second place, emigration became a popular option in the mid- to late nineteenth century precisely because conditions in the Caribbean were so unfavourable: men left to take up jobs even working on the construction of the Panama Canal in conditions that were known to be brutal and dangerous. So, this piece of evidence for the difference emancipation made is in fact evidence in the other direction: emigration was the despairing response of despairing people to the maintenance of a virtual status quo even after emancipation, including their general exclusion from land holding.
The tortured history of the Caribbean in the hundred years after abolition, for all that one can find some differences, was ‘marked by racism, violence and exploitation’ say Berg and Hudson. 14 The transition was from slavery to servitude. As Michael Craton has it: ‘the ex-slaves of the English Caribbean and their descendants were faced by a rapidly declining economy, an increasingly indifferent imperial government and a local ruling class able to sustain their hegemony through the control of land and commerce … [F]ormal slavery's black legatees’ were heirs to ‘a century or more of a different and scarcely preferable form of involuntary servitude’. 15
Continuing his review of the post-emancipation history, Biggar asks
Biggar relies here on personal correspondence with Tirthankar Roy, an authority on the economic history of India. From Roy, Biggar cites the following robust judgment: 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.
17
Let's pause for a moment on the central contention that Jamaica et al. could not be considered badly off at independence because Haiti and the Dominican Republic were somewhat worse off. If you know anything about the history of Haiti or the Dominican Republic, this comparison will pull you up short. The Haitian Revolution was a slave revolt, beginning in 1791, which established the first sovereign state in the Caribbean in 1804. France—itself busy with a revolution—toyed with supporting abolition, but Napoleon sent an army to suppress the revolt and reimpose slavery. Britain sent an army in support of the white colonisers: estimates differ, but at very considerable expense of funds and men, something more than 25,000 British soldiers may have died fighting to reimpose slavery on a nation that had cast it off. France finally recognised the independence of Haiti in 1826, in return for an agreement by Haiti to pay vast and punitive reparations to former enslavers. Haiti borrowed from Western banks at very high interest rates to repay this crushing debt, so that by 1900, 80 per cent of Haiti's government spending was debt repayment. The country did not finish paying the debt until 1947. The legacy of this is that Haiti was then and remains today one of the very poorest countries in the world. 18
The history of the Dominican Republic was just about as tortured down to 1961, with the ending of a long lasting and very brutal dictatorship.
So, is it really ‘rubbish’ to suggest that Jamaica was poor at independence because it was arguably better off than one of the very poorest countries in the world, Haiti, and another, the Dominican Republic, which had suffered for 30 years under an infamously oppressive dictatorship?
But what about the claim about literacy rates and public health? This is not the place to rehearse the history of education in the Caribbean, but the claim about public health really cannot be left unexamined. Instead of relying on an optimistic prediction about the status of public health, Biggar might have favoured data. To take just one, but telling, statistic: child mortality in the UK in 1960 (meaning failure to survive until first birthday) was 24 per thousand, 62 per thousand in Jamaica (258% higher) and 69.5 per thousand in Barbados (289% higher). It took Jamaica another 30 years, until 1992, to achieve the British death rate, by which stage the British rate was down to 8 per thousand (leaving Jamaica then still nearly 300% higher). 19 That Haiti's infant mortality rate in 1962 was 189, ranking it 182nd out of 201 countries, does not really suggest that Jamaica and Barbados were doing rather well.
To speak more generally, let me cite a recent study by E.D. Cassells and others on ‘The Colonial Legacy and the Jamaican Healthcare System’: ‘When it was time for independence from British rule in 1962, Jamaican decision-makers were faced with the challenges of puzzling together a policy response to generations of systematic neglect of the social needs of the people.’ 20 It was only with the passing of the British Colonial Development Act in 1929 that some funding had been provided for public health measures in British colonies, of which another scholar writes that Colonial Development Fund investments in health in British colonies ‘were likely far too small to result in substantial welfare gains for local and indigenous populations’. 21 That sounds like a prediction, to be sure, but one actually confirmed by the infant death rates.
Biggar is very keen to identify ‘post-colonial mismanagement’ as contributing to the economic woes of some Caribbean states. There is no need to deny that this may have been a factor: hands at cards can be played well or badly, and different Caribbean nations were more or less successful in confronting the challenges of independence. But none of that takes away from the fact that the newly independent nations had been dealt a bad hand at independence regarding education, health, infrastructure, debt and so on—to say nothing of a colonial power's failure to have fostered and cultivated a culture of widespread political participation, representation, and responsibility during the colony period, which may very plainly have contributed to the trials of post-colonial states.
So much for the history between Britain and the Caribbean itself. Biggar also wants to bring to the bar some other history, and in particular ‘the story of the British Empire's anti-slavery endeavours, which Michael Banner chooses not to tell’.
22
In the earlier longer review he refers to this as ‘
I am certainly content with Nigel Biggar's description of my omission here as chosen. In my book I allude to Britain's anti-slavery endeavours without discussing them and that because any just appraisal of these efforts would surely accord them very little weight. So just what is in this credit column, and more importantly, how does this supposed credit offset or debunk any case for reparations?
Biggar is very taken with the activities of the so-called West Africa Squadron, a squadron of the Royal Navy tasked in 1808—that is, immediately after the abolition of the slave trade within the British empire—with the wider suppression of the Atlantic trade, principally by patrolling the coast of Africa. This mission lasted for 50 years or so and consumed significant money and manpower. As many as 1,600 sailors are said to have died in course of the Squadron's lifetime, and the commitment of material was considerable. 24
It is, however, rather important to say three things by way of context, relating to the reasons for the Squadron's creation, its effectiveness, and Britain's wider links with enslavement.
The motives for the creation of the West Africa Squadron were not entirely pure. This is unsurprising: abolitionism typically advanced when its case aligned with self-interest, and once Britain had abolished its own trade, the suppression of the slave trade of other nations was a matter of ensuring that others did not gain an advantage on account of Britain's abstinence. 25 Equally the projection of power through an exertion of naval supremacy in the policing of commercial slave trading served Britain's wider strategic and commercial interests in West Africa.
As to the Squadron's effectiveness, it is often claimed simply that it liberated perhaps 150,000 enslaved people. It is worth noting that for many this experience may not have felt much like liberation: as many as 35,000 of the same ended up in the Caribbean as indentured labourers, for example. But even if we take the 150,000 at face value, it represents something like 6 per cent of the total traffic in enslaved people in the relevant period. Yet in the merely 15 years or so prior to the abolition of the trade, Britain had transported some 650,000 enslaved people to the Caribbean, out of a total of more than 2.3 million over the entire 250 years in the business. So, if saving 150,000 persons from slavery is in some sense penance, to use Biggar's phrase, it may seem to fall a little way short of the crime.
In the third place, Britain in general was still doing very well out of enslavement even while the Squadron was going about its work. Slavery was still extant in the Caribbean for nearly 30 years after the establishment of the Squadron, and even after slavery was itself abolished in the British empire, the cotton plantations of the southern United States were largely funded by British banks, and their produce was the basis of the prosperity of Manchester, at the very centre of the industrial revolution, into the 1860s. 26 It is not unusual for nations to do with one hand what they are undoing with another. But it does make the ‘penance’ look less than wholehearted.
All this said, there is no reason to be cynical about British abolitionism in general, nor this particular aspect of it. What would be odd, however, would be to see these efforts—ambivalent in their motivation and modest in their effects—as somehow effacing the wrongs of enslavement and so negating a case for reparations. It is hard to see why Britain has no present responsibility for the harms it caused to the Caribbean over three centuries, and from which the Caribbean still suffers, just because it invested some energy at a later time in another direction. It is, on this logic, as if an oil company would have no responsibility for the effects of climate change because it had latterly also sponsored a wind farm.
As we come towards the end of the charge sheet, it is good to hear Nigel Biggar allow that ‘the principle that those who have benefited from an injustice should either repair the damage or compensate its victims is moral common sense’; but, we are solemnly warned, ‘The passage of time … muddies the waters’.
27
Biggar cites here Onora O’Neill: 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?
29
Biggar says of the twenty-first-century descendants of the enslaved: ‘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’. And he asks: ‘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?’ 30
The answer is surely ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ to all of these questions. But these individual matters of happenstance are just that, individual occurrences that are not strictly relevant to a case about generalities, one that is not simply negated by other ‘events and choices’.
Take an analogy: country A seeks damages or reparations from country B for the diverse and deleterious environmental effects of mining carried out by country B during the colonial period. Counsel for country B points out that some people in country A have, as it turns out, done well out of this mining and its long-term consequence: land values have gone up as more and more contaminated farmland has to be taken out of production. And in any case, some of the inhabitants of country A actually worked as managers for the mining company and were well rewarded. Furthermore, some of the beneficiaries in country B have subsequently set up environmental charities, some of whose funds go to land remediation projects in country A. And in any case, environmental degradation has also been affected by other ‘events and choices ‘, not just those that are the responsibility of country A.
All well and good. But the claim from country A to country B, like the claim for reparations, is not about particular individuals, but about generalities, and these particular instances of good and bad fortune do not vitiate a general claim. They may suggest that in settling such a claim there may be a case for ensuring mechanisms to deal with what appear to be injustices for individuals, and for attending to any wider factors that have contributed to the harm complained of. The fact of the matter is, however, in the case we are attending to—individual instances of good or bad fortune aside—Britain is still the nation that did very well out of its possession of much of the Caribbean for three hundred years or so, and until quite recently, and the nations of the Caribbean are still home to the direct descendants of the populations who experienced the depredations of those profitable plantations. History may be a jungle, but time does not obliterate all continuities, and it has not obliterated the continuities that mark Britain's relationship with the Caribbean.
At the end of this wearying catalogue we are left with Biggar's solution to what turns out to be a non-existent problem. The case for reparations is so wholly unreasonable in Biggar's view that there must be an ulterior motive for making the case. Now, since I have shown, so I believe, that the supposed difficulties of the case are in fact far from being overwhelming, I might leave Biggar to announce his cunning solution to a counterfactual. But since the ulterior motive which explains my folly is said to be ‘anti-racist assumptions’, and since what Biggar has to say here is really quite extraordinary, we must continue the conversation.
While not entirely sure what the ‘Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racism’ of which my book is said to be ‘typical’ may be, I do believe racism was the doctrine that emerged from and then subtended the practice of trans-Atlantic slavery and later colonialism, and that racism has survived and flourished even as the practices it supported have, in a certain sense (but only in a certain sense) disappeared.
Biggar addresses something of this by asking the question whether Britain is now ‘generally or systemically racist’. This, he says, is an empirical question and he thinks there are ‘strong empirical reasons for doubting it’. 31 It turns out, however, that ‘the available empirical data’ Biggar marshals, is a mix of anecdote, misrepresentation of weighty reports, and reliance upon less than weighty reports, which eschews proper engagement with the vast amount of countervailing data.
In the category of anecdote, we can put the ‘visible fact’ that in Boris Johnson's government many major departments were headed by those with other than white British heritage: Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, etc. Presumably we may safely infer, on such grounds, that the United States is not racist because Barack Obama was President for not one, but two terms.
As to the misrepresentation of weighty reports, Biggar cites certain statistics from Being Black in the EU, first published in 2018 and updated in 2023. 32 This is indeed an authoritative report: it is the work of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, an independent body established by the European Union in 2007. And Biggar has found instances in this report where the UK appears at the bottom of certain tables measuring indicators of discrimination across European countries. There are other tables where the UK does not appear at the bottom of the table, but—impressionistically, for what it is worth—I think if you tried to produce an average of all the tables, Britain would indeed be in the lower rankings. So far so good.
But remember this is a comparative study: being bottom of the table does not indicate that you are doing well, so much as that you are doing somewhat less badly than someone else. And rather crucially in this instance, all the nations being compared are regarded in both editions of the Report as exhibiting high levels of racism. Biggar's reliance on these rankings belies the summary foreword to the original Report which begins ‘It is a reality both shameful and infuriating: racism based on the colour of a person's skin remains a pervasive scourge throughout the European Union’; as the large-scale survey ‘makes clear: almost twenty years after adoption of EU laws forbidding discrimination, people of African descent face widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion’.
33
And again in its second edition of 2023 we read: FRA's first Being Black in the EU report exposed widespread and entrenched racism against people of African descent in Europe. Now updated with new data, this report revisits the situation revealing persistent racial discrimination, harassment and violence. Overall, experiences of racial discrimination increased in the EU countries since 2016, reaching as high as 77%. The lack of progress is alarming despite binding anti-discrimination law in the EU since 2000 and significant EU policy developments since then.
34
As to reliance on less than weighty documents, Biggar cites with approval the Sewell Report which found ‘no evidence of systemic or institutional racism in the UK’.
36
Many regard this report as itself a mix of anecdote and misrepresentation.
37
But leave that to one side. Even were it not, that report could not stand alone against the overwhelming evidence for racism established in countless empirical studies. Here I can do no more than refer the reader to Keon West's recent summation of some of this evidence covering reports from both the UK and the US, which for all the differences and nuances, point in the same direction.
38
The summary is very long, but that is exactly the point: A wealth of scientific research has consistently shown that, even when they are otherwise identical or equivalent to ethnic minorities, White people are interpreted as more professional, legitimate and likeable (Bavishi et al. 2010), judged as more competent and hireable (Eaton et al. 2020), more likely to receive calls to interview or offers of employment (Heath and Di Stasio 2019; Quillian et al. 2017), more likely to receive support and positive expectations during their studies (Milkman et al. 2015), more likely to be taught well by their instructors (Jacoby-Senghor et al. 2016), more likely to be perceived as friendly, nice and approachable, even among children (Perszyk et al. 2019; Rutland et al. 2005), more likely to be perceived as desirable romantic partners (Mendelsohn et al. 2014; West 2019a) and more likely to see themselves represented positively across a wide range of media (Choi and Reddy-Best 2018; T. L. Dixon 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2017; Franklyn and West 2022; Gilmore and Jordan 2012; Milkie 1999). White people are also treated more politely and more helpfully in stores (Bourabain and Verhaeghe 2018; Schreer et al. 2009) and in medical establishments (Wisniewski and Walker 2020), more likely to receive high prices for things they sell (Ayres and Banaji 2011) and more likely to be offered life-saving treatments (Green et al. 2007). They are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt when accused of wrongdoing (Hodson et al. 2005; West, Lowe et al. 2017), or even found guilty of wrongdoing (West and Lloyd 2017) or exonerated of prior perceived wrongdoing (Howard 2019). Conversely, even when they are otherwise identical or equivalent to ethnic minorities, White people are also less likely to be suspected of being troublesome or challenging in the classroom (Gilliam 2016), less likely to be stopped and searched by the police (Bowling and Phillips 2007) or stopped when driving (Pierson et al. 2020), less likely to have their criminal record count against them (Pager 2003), less likely to be shot when unarmed (Correll et al. 2002, 2007) or when interacting with the police more generally (Edwards et al. 2019; Schwartz and Jahn 2020; Statista 2021) and less likely to have to endure the many indignities of constant microaggressions (West 2019b). None of this even mentions all the institutional and systemic racism that works in White people's favour: dress codes, hair discrimination, voting laws, redlining, and the skills-based British immigration system (Banks and Hicks 2016; Wilson and Brewer 2013).
Conclusion
'Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, ‘tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it’—so writes John Locke in the opening sentence of Book 1, Chapter 1 of his Two Treatises of Government of 1690. Before anyone gets carried away and puts Locke down as Oxford's answer to Cambridge's Wilberforce and Clarkson, we should recall that the slavery Locke was denouncing was the metaphorical slavery of any Englishman subject to an authority that exceeded its lawful powers, especially where such tyranny infringed on the rights of property. Of the slavery of the plantations Locke, himself an investor in the Royal African Company, was not so judgmental.
Of course, Biggar does not plead for slavery—and in any case he is not one of Locke's Englishmen—but the nature of his double denial of the case for reparations and of the contemporary existence of racism, amounts, in effect, to a plea for us to stop talking about this subject. Of course, these two issues are strictly separable: that is, one could think that there is a compelling case for reparations and that racism is not a force in the modern world, or vice versa, that the case for reparations is unpersuasive, while racism is still alive and kicking. In either case, we are likely to want to talk about the history of enslavement and its legacy. And one could even believe what Biggar claims to believe, that the case for reparations does not add up and that we live in a non-racist society, and still think that we need some other sort of reckoning with the vast and grievous wrong of transatlantic slavery. But his bald denial of any merit in a concern for reparations is based on a curious moral calculus which declares that the transatlantic slave trade really was not as bad as all that: there is nothing much to see here, the moral reckoning has been done, and the balance sheet is in our favour; and since furthermore there is no real racism of the sort that might be deemed a legacy of slavery, it really is time to move on and leave this bit of the past in the past.
I want to close with four brief remarks touching on how we discuss these matters, and why it is important that we should - important for the discipline of Christian ethics and thus for this Journal, for Christianity itself, and for the wider society and world in whose service Christian ethicists are engaged.
First, in general, an academic must be grateful for any academic attention given to one of their books. Books flood off the presses at a phenomenal rate these days; performance targets mean that the average academic publishes many more books on average, and many more average books, than would have been the case, say, 40 years ago. Under the circumstances one should be grateful to be noticed, whether or not the notice is generous and sympathetic, or not so much.
The principle I just enunciated, however, holds specifically that an academic should be grateful for any academic attention to their work. If you write on the subject of reparations, a lot of the notice you receive—indeed most of the notice you receive—will not be academic. For this topic takes us into disputed territory in the so-called culture wars, where the principles and practice of academic argument are, by some combatants, more honoured in the breach.
Occasionally a commentator who is fighting on this front confesses to the rules (or lack of rules) by which they are governed: for example, someone writing in the Spectator or Telegraph had the decency to mention that he had not read my book before offering his critique. One might see in that acknowledgment a dash of residual propriety. Not all such warriors will be as frank, and some may do no more than seem to honour the practices of rational argument. Such critiques will feature appeals to evidence, claims and counter claims, quotations, footnotes, references, i.e., the usual apparatus and paraphernalia of rational debate. But upon examination these critiques are not meant as contributions to genuine debate, but are more like the papers tobacco companies sponsored denying a link between smoking or cancer, or those paid for by energy companies disproving anthropogenic climate change: their point is to sow doubt and create confusion by querying everything, quibbling with details, misstating points and then knocking them down, consciously ignoring contrary evidence and the like. The goal is not victory in argument but the disabling of argument altogether, thereby leaving the field clear for power, interest or prejudice to settle matters. To engage culture warriors of this sort blow by blow may even be to fall into a certain sort of trap, since those who enjoy reading them are probably not looking to engage in real dialectic.
Second, I have, however, recently been struck by another and lesser fault in how the issue of reparations can be discussed. I have wondered how to capture and express the issue and the best I have come up with is to say that very often the argument is conducted in the wrong register or key.
Let me get at it like this: imagine you are the sole beneficiary of your mother's will, but with one interesting further element to the story. On the day she died she had been on her way to her solicitor's office to sign an amended version of that will. This new will would have split her fortune in three ways. She had, until quite recently, been estranged from her daughter, your sister. But very recently they had had a heartfelt reconciliation, and in the new will your sister is set to receive a third of the estate, as are you. The third intended beneficiary is rather different. He is, let us imagine, a devious clergyman, who makes a practice of befriending lonely and elderly parishioners and manipulating himself into their affections, and more to the point, into their wills.
Now, do not worry about the details of the story and legal facts of the matter but instead ask yourself what you—currently the sole beneficiary—are to do in these circumstances. Suppose our devious clergyman threatens action with a solicitor's letter. I suggest that we would think none the worse of you if you ‘lawyered up’, as they say, and prepared to meet him on legal ground. But if your sister gently asks about your intentions in the light of the new will, and you reply, ‘See you in court’, I think we would think that a less than admirable response.
As I listen to people of good will engaging in discussion about reparations I am sometimes struck by a wrongness of tone and attitude that is brought to the matter, as if a claim for reparations addressed by the Caribbean to Britain is the claim of some manifestly undeserving stranger, which could be met on cold hard legal grounds, and those narrowly and harshly construed. But the claim for reparations from the Caribbean is, I suggest, more like a claim made within a family and needs to addressed in that spirit. This ought to be brought home to us by reflection on the Windrush saga, another and later story of Caribbean emigration and exile.
The piece of this whole woeful episode to which I want to attend here is the motivation of those who came to Britain as part of the Windrush generation. At the end of the Second World War residents of the Caribbean came to Britain to work, typically in low paid but vital jobs in construction, transportation and health care which local populations were not inclined to take on. They came in large numbers, in part because of the poverty and lack of opportunity at home, but in part because of their loyalty to what was still referred to as the ‘mother country’. In the Second World War, the islanders of the Caribbean had raised funds to build eleven RAF bombers and enrolled some 5,500 men into its ranks, just to take two examples of how this feeling for the mother country was expressed. 39
The Windrush generation experienced racism and discrimination throughout their time in the UK, and in the ten years prior to 2018, the creation of a so-called ‘hostile environment’ by a Conservative Home Secretary was designed to pressure individuals into leaving—even those who had a perfect right to stay—but who, because of administrative incompetence (or worse) on the part of the British government, would find it hard to prove their status.
The pain of all this is that Britain then and now wishes to treat as strangers those it had construed as kin in its imperial imaginary and who had actually responded as kin to that construal. The irony in the labelling of movements such as ‘History Reclaimed’ lies in the fact that the opponents of reparations seek to disown a history which is a history between intimates not strangers, between kin not adversaries. When we discuss the matter of reparations we should discuss it in that key.
I have said two things about how we discuss this question, but I also want to make concluding points about the importance of these discussions, for our subject, for Christianity and for wider society and the world.
Third: I have previously confessed in this journal that I am ashamed that in my long career working on Christian ethics, it is only in the last few years that I have begun to address the history of enslavement and racism. To speak more generally, it was probably true until quite recently that a student in many British universities might have taken a number of papers in ethics as part of a degree in Religious Studies or Theology without ever being asked to notice, let alone grapple with, the historic and contemporary facts of racial oppression. It is hugely important for the integrity of our subject that we maintain our newly found attention to these matters.
For Christianity itself, there is an even more fundamental question of integrity. Reckoning with Christianity's entanglement with the vast crime of transporting something like 12.5 million persons from Africa to what were the slave labour death camps of the Caribbean is, to my mind, a matter of existential significance for the faith and for the church. I can explain very briefly what I mean by that by saying that a particular text from Romans, whatever other challenges it poses, demands a conscientious accounting for the horrors with which Christianity was complicit: ‘As it is written, “God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you”’ (Rom. 2:24).
Fourth and finally, if attempts to end any discussion of enslavement within our discipline are misconceived, even more so is the bid to cut off wider attention to racism. There are different interpretations of our contemporary world, to be sure, but I do not observe the waning of racism. Rather, it is a striking fact that racialised fear has become a dominating motive in modern political life and sensibilities. Racism, as I have suggested, was both born of and the enabling doctrine of the practice of enslavement and colonialism. But it has outlived the particular form of oppression which drove its expression and found new ways to configure our political life. It is specifically, I would argue, the curse of modern political existence in the United States and Europe, creating a divisive and dysfunctional politics of misplaced resentment, which in turn promotes cruel policies relating to poverty, migration, and prisons, for example, and provides cover for the perpetuation of the injustices and inequalities of the past into a dystopian future.
Nigel Biggar opens his review of my book by saying that, as ‘its title declares … [it] is a work of advocacy, not dispassionate analysis’. In fact, the book is a work of advocacy founded upon and compelled by dispassionate analysis. And I hope that this analysis in turn creates more, and passionate, advocates for justice and reconciliation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
