Britain's Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!

by Michael Banner

A concise, reasoned, practical case for why Britain should pay reparations for historic wrongs to present Caribbean inhabitants.Britain owes reparations to the Caribbean. The exploitation of generations of those trafficked from Africa, or born into enslavement, to work the immensely profitable sugars plantations, enriched both British individuals and the British nation. Colonialism, even after emancipation, perpetuated the exploitation. The Caribbean still suffers, and Britain still benefits, from these historic wrongs.There are some fairly standard objections to reparations -- 'slavery ended a long time ago'; 'Britain should be celebrating its role in abolishing slavery'; 'slavery was legal back then and we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present'; 'you shouldn't visit the sins of the fathers on the sons'; and so on. And there is a sense that the practical problems of who should pay what to whom are immensely difficult.Michael Banner carefully considers and answers these objections. He argues that reparations are not about punishment, but about the restoration of wrongful gains. In Reparations Now! he makes a specific and practical proposal regarding reparations, picking up on the programme suggested by Caribbean countries (through CARICOM), and taking as a starting point the nearly ?20 million paid as compensation by the British government at abolition, not to those who had suffered slavery, but to those who lost enslaved labourers.Reparations Now! discusses what can be done, here and now, by individuals and institutions, to advance the case for reparations between national governments.

194 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2024

Reviews

[gul · Rating 2 out of 5]

i’m at a loss as to why there was zero mention of the british monarchy and the monopoly it initially held over the slave trade, or of its total involvement over hundreds of years. there was also no mention of all the financial institutions that were complicit, and how these are continuous with the financial organisations that exist today in the city of london, where much of the payouts to “the interest” ended up being concentrated. these are the entities that should be paying the most…
the absurdity of the calculations in chapter 5 shows that something other than reparations is in fact required - a total restructuring of the global economic order

[Ben Gough-Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally good, but always disappointing when an author oversteps their area of expertise, in this case having a theologian give his view on economics.