How Best To Confront Them

The transatlantic slave trade is so fundamental to capitalism that at least five of the seven men whose faces appear on United States banknotes were slaveholders. There are two arguments against reparations, one execrable and the other unanswerable.

The execrable one is that Britain was barely in the slave trade, made little or nothing out of it, retains no benefit of it, pretty much took it up in order to stamp it out, was successful in doing so, and therefore should not even apologise for it, not least because the slaves were better off than they would have been if they had been kept in Africa.

But the unanswerable one is that the slave trade funded enclosure, so that there has always been One Struggle both before and after that period, with most white British people descended from slaves’ contemporaries who were themselves little more than slaves even in law, and less so again in practice. Thus, Kenan Malik writes:

‘Reparations is conceived as a way to redress historic wrongs, promoting peace and achieving reconciliation.” So suggests the Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice produced by Caricom, a Caribbean intergovernmental organisation, to address the legacy of slavery and colonialism. The issue is likely to surface at this week’s Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, which the King will attend.

Caricom’s demands range from “official apologies on behalf of all Africans from former enslaving nations” to “monetary compensation”. Successive British governments – including, now, the current one – have refused to countenance reparations, but it has become an intense political debate in this country.

Conservative commentators reject the demand for Britain to provide recompense, arguing both that slavery has existed throughout human history and that Britain was at the forefront of overthrowing it. “They ought to pay us for ending slavery”, in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s view.

Slavery is certainly ancient and embedded in most cultures. The transatlantic trade was, though, fundamentally different. The industrial scale of plantation slavery was unprecedented. Whereas enslaved people had previously laboured within the societies that regulated their treatment, New World slavers were far less restrained by any sense of morality and custom. And slavery in the Americas was racialised in a way unseen before, turning black people into chattel.

Unfounded, too, is the claim that Britain was largely responsible for ending slavery. Conservatives make much of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, established in 1808 after parliament had banned the slave trade. Charged with suppressing the trade, it captured in total about 1,600 ships and freed around 150,000 Africans. That amounted to fewer than one in 10 slave ships, and one in 20 of the 3 million Africans transported in that time. A large proportion of the supposedly “liberated Africans” were forcibly relocated to British colonies to work as unpaid “apprentices” or conscripted into the army – unfree labour by another name.

What is missing in the conservative story are the struggles of the enslaved themselves, and Britain’s brutal response to them. The most significant slave revolt was in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue. The 12-year Haitian Revolution began in 1791, forced revolutionary France to abolish slavery in 1794 (though Napoleon subsequently reinstated it) and established the new nation of Haiti in 1804.

Britain intervened in 1793, not to support the fight for freedom but to reimpose slavery and prevent contagion to its own slave colonies. It was defeated by the slave army, finally abandoning its mission in 1798. Contagion there certainly was, with rebellions in British slave colonies too. Among the most important was the Christmas uprising in Jamaica in 1831. Pitilessly suppressed, it was nevertheless seminal in helping accelerate formal emancipation, which finally came with the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

Abolition cost the British government £20m (worth at least £2bn today), compensation not for enslaved people but for slave owners for loss of “property”. Bereft of resources, desperation drove former slaves back to the plantations to work in conditions of almost forced labour. This led to many post-emancipation uprisings, all bloodily repressed. Britain’s role in abolition was far more complicated than in the conservative fairytale.

If conservative attempts to rewrite history are risible, liberal arguments for reparations are questionable too. Though largely forgotten today, there is a long tradition of leftwing opposition to reparations, the arguments of which are distinct from those of the right.

“I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparations for the domestication of my ancestors… Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave ships of the seventeenth century?” Not a conservative voice but that of the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon recognised that rooting problems faced by black people in intergenerational trauma deriving from enslavement serves largely to racialise political identity, fostering a reactionary romanticism expressed by the Caricom report’s view that “Africa symbolises… liberation” and its demand that Britain facilitates the “repatriation and resettlement in Africa” of descendants of enslaved people. It was such binding of black people to their past that Fanon rejected. “I am not the Slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors,” he insisted.

Black people don’t form a single community. The needs, experiences and histories of African Americans are distinct from the peoples of Caribbean islands, those of black Britons unlike those from diverse African nations.

The interests of working-class black people, from whichever community, are also distinct from those of the middle class. That distinction becomes erased in the homogenising of the “black family” as one defined by slavery. “People who have political interests in sustaining… a one-size-fits-all way of talking about Black politics”, observes the scholar and activist Adolph Reed, “also have an interest in wanting to make slavery the uniformly shared Black condition”.

What really shapes the lives of black people today, whether in Africa, America or Europe, are more recent developments, from the way the postwar liberal order enchained much of the Global South to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s; from the austerity following the 2008 financial crash to the re-emergence of white identitarian movements; from the demise of working-class organisations to the growing hostility to migrants and Muslims.

Challenging these issues requires the building of cross-racial working-class solidarity, not the racialisation of social and economic problems. The question is not whether transatlantic slavery was an abomination, or whether Britain or other major western nations benefited – it was and they did. It is rather about the issues facing black people today, and how best to confront them.