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Caribbean360: The case for compensating the Caribbean

The case for compensating the Caribbean
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Chris Hoyos on 12/04/2013 11:58:00

Sir Ronald Sanders
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Friday April 12, 2013 - In 1838, British slave owners in
the English-Speaking Caribbean received £11.6 (US$17.8) billion in today’s
value as compensation for the emancipation of their “property” – 655,780
human beings of African descent that they had enslaved, brutalised and
exploited. The freed slaves, by comparison, received nothing in recompense for
their dehumanisation, their cruel treatment, the abuse of their labour and the
plain injustice of their enslavement.
The monies paid to slaves owners have been studied and assembled by a team of
Academics from University College London, including Dr Nick Draper, who spent
three years pulling together 46,000 records which they have now launched as an
internet database. The website is: ucl.ac.uk/lbs.
The benefits of those monies still exist in Britain today. For example, they are
the foundations of Barclays Bank, Lloyds Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
But they are also the basis of wealth for many leading British and Scottish
families among them the Hogg family – two of whom became Lord Chancellors in
British governments.
Dr Draper is reported as saying of the Hogg family: “To have two Lord
Chancellors in Britain in the 20th century bearing the name of a slave-owner
from British Guiana (now Guyana), who went penniless to British Guiana, came
back a very wealthy man and contributed to the formation of this political
dynasty, which incorporated his name into their children in recognition – it
seems to me to be an illuminating story and a potent example."
The Hogg family were not unique. The wealth and political good fortune of 19th
Century British Prime Minister William Gladstone had its origins in the £83
(US$127.6) million, at today’s value, of “compensation” given to his
father, John Gladstone, for slaves he owned in British Guiana and Jamaica.
But it was not individual families alone that helped to create African slavery
and that benefitted from it; it was the British state as whole – its
successive governments that provided subsidies for the trade; that adopted
legislation that facilitated it; and that were complicit with the governments of
their colonies in adopting laws that designated African slaves as “real
estate” – people stripped of human identity, including life, and,
therefore, to be treated like land, houses and buildings.
Remarkably, it was also the British State, including the British people, who
paid “compensation” to the slave owners while completely disregarding any
obligation whatsoever to 655,780 people, who were enslaved and cruelly
exploited. To do so, the British government borrowed £20 million which is
£76 (US$117) billion, at today’s value, from the Rothschild Banking Empire.
The sum amounted to about 40 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product
at the time. As Caribbean Economic Historian, Sir Hilary Beckles points out:
“They all recognised that British citizens were socially empowered by the
white supremacy culture so effectively institutionalized on a global scale by
slave owners”.
British exploitation of people in the Caribbean did not start, or end, with the
enslavement of Africans. In a new book entitled, ‘Britain’s Black Debt:
Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide’, Beckles, records the
systematic “elimination” of the Kalinagos – the original people of the
Eastern Caribbean islands. It was the first act of genocide in the Western
Hemisphere, and it was executed with the full knowledge and approval of the
British authorities.
African slavery was followed in some Caribbean countries – Guyana, Trinidad
and Tobago and Suriname in particular - by indentured servitude of people from
India bonded to an estate and its owners, deprived of normal liberties,
subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment. It was what the respected British
historian, Hugh Tinker, described as “another kind of slavery”.
Each of these episodes of subjugation, exploitation and brutalisation of human
beings was justified on the racial supremacy of the white race. And while
Britain was the principal beneficiary, other European nations – France, Spain
and Portugal especially – shared in the spoils of human degradation.
Except for the blindest and unrelenting apologists for the acts of genocide and
enslavement, it is impossible to discard Beckles’ assertion that these were
“crimes against humanity”. As he says: “The wealth of the (British)
Empire required the abandonment of all known laws, conventions, moral
parameters, political practices and legal frameworks and the creation of a new
and unprecedented labour system”.
When the vast majority of the original people of the Caribbean were extinguished
forcing the brutalised handful who remained into submission; when slavery was
abolished with no recompense to the Africans for the deprivation of their
liberty, the people of the Caribbean were left destitute, deprived and
disadvantaged. In Beckles’ words:“They got nothing by way of cash
reparations to carry them into freedom. No land grants were provided. No
promissory notes were posted”.
That today the people of the Caribbean have built modern societies despite the
conditions they were handed at slavery’s abolition, is a tribute to the
resilience, capabilities and high quality of human beings that European states
considered ‘chattel and real estate’. That they have produced Nobel Prize
winners, great athletes and fine intellectual thinkers who have commanded high
positions in the international community in business, medicine, the law, and
technology is testimony to the wrongness of the “white” supremacist
doctrine.
Their achievement re-enforces the position that their enslavement, their
servitude and the infamous acts of violence against them were wrong, and it
cannot be right that those who were the principal perpetrators of those wrongs
benefitted while they were left as nothing more than a human catastrophe.
The Caribbean would today have been much further along the road of social and
economic development if even half of the “compensation” given to slave
owners had been given to slavery’s victims 175 years ago.
There is a compelling case for reparations to the nations of the Caribbean on
behalf of the people who were the victims of slavery. Nick Draper and the team
and University College London, and Hilary Beckles in his new book have provided
the basis for, at the very least, a reparations dialogue. Click here to receive
free news bulletins via email from Caribbean360. (View sample)
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sir Ronald
Sanders. Sir Ronald Sanders is a Consultant and former Caribbean diplomat.