LONDON – A debate about reparations for Britain’s role in the slave trade overshadowed a summit in Samoa of the Commonwealth, many of whose member nations were once British colonies.
Britain insists it will not pay to make amends for the historic wrong, but both King Charles III and Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed the issue indirectly at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
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“None of us can change the past but we can commit with all our hearts to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right the inequalities that endure,” Charles said.
The legacy of slavery is interwoven in some of Britain’s richest and most revered institutions — from the Church of England to the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London to the monarchy itself.
“Britain benefited from transatlantic enslavement,” said Olivette Otele, professor of the legacies and memory of slavery at the School of African and Oriental Studies at University of London. “The money and the money trail is there to prove it. So we need to have these conversations much more openly.”
It's a discussion that has been going on for a long time.
Charles, when he was Prince of Wales, spoke of the “appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history” during a visit to Barbados in 2021. At the Commonwealth summit two years ago in Rwanda, he spoke of his sorrow over slavery and its legacy for Indigenous communities and said it was a ”conversation whose time has come.”
Here's a look at why the issue is getting attention now.
What was Britain's role in the slave trade?
Britain got involved in the slave trade in the mid-1500s, following Portugal and Spain.
John Hawkins, one of the most notable sailors and naval commanders of the 16th century, is considered one of the pioneers of the English slave trade triangle.
Goods were traded in West Africa for captured slaves who were shipped across the Atlantic to work in British sugar and tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Goods produced in the so-called New World were transported back to England.
In 1672, the Royal African Company, established under King Charles II and run by his brother, Prince James (the future King James II), was given a monopoly on the slave trade.
The company trafficked 80,000 African men, women and children to slavery in the Americas and about 20,000 died on the journey before the monopoly ended in 1698 when any Englishman could trade slaves.
At its height, Britain was the world's biggest slave-trading nation and transported more than 3 million Africans across the Atlantic.
When was it abolished?
An abolitionist movement arose in England in the late 1700s, supported by Quakers, a few politicians and some former slaves.
The slave trade was not outlawed until 1807. Even then Parliament did not emancipate slaves in its territories until 1833.
“But it didn’t go as planned,” Otele said. “Plantation owners, some of them absentee plantation owners because they lived in Britain, were extremely wealthy. Their ancestors had been trading for centuries so they resisted and put pressure on Parliament ... to pay them for the so-called loss of their property..”
The 1837 Compensation Act led to 20 million pounds, 40% of the national budget at the time, being paid to plantation owners for the loss of their slaves. It took until 2015 for the Bank of England to pay off the debt from those payouts.
What is the current debate about?
The movement demanding reparations goes back decades.
The U.K. has never formally apologized for its role in the trade. Studies estimate Britain would owe between hundreds of millions and trillions of dollars in compensation to descendants of slaves.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed deep sorrow in 2006 for Britain’s role in the trade but stopped short of offering an apology or compensation for descendants of slaves. Activists said Blair's careful word choice reflected the government’s fear of paying out huge reparations.
In 2013, the Caribbean trade bloc known as Caricom made a list of requests including that European governments formally apologize and create a repatriation program for those who wish to return to their homeland, which has not happened.
On Thursday, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said he wanted a “frank” discussion with Starmer about the matter and would seek mention of reparations in the leaders’ final statement at the Samoa event. All three candidates to be the next Commonwealth Secretary-General — from Gambia, Ghana and Lesotho — have endorsed policies of reparatory justice for slavery.
Other European nations, including the Netherlands, and some British institutions have started to own up to their role in the trade.
The Church of England last year announced a 100-million-pound ($130 million) fund last year for projects “focused on improving opportunities for communities adversely impacted by historic slavery,” though a church advisory panel said it should increase it to $1 billion.
Some of the descendants of slave traders have made their own amends.
A descendant of Scottish 19th-century sugar and coffee plantation owner John Gladstone — father of 19th-century British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone — apologized last year to Guyana for his great-great-great grandfather's role as an absentee slave owner in what was then British Guiana. He received 100,000 pounds in compensation for hundreds of slaves.
After earlier insisting that the Samoa summit should avoid becoming mired in the past and “very, very long endless discussions about reparations,” Starmer acknowledged "calls to face up to the harms and injustices of the past through reparatory justice.”
Starmer said the “most effective way to maintain a spirit of respect and dignity is by working together to make sure the future is not in the shadow of the past, but is illuminated by it."
Jacqueline McKenzie — a partner at London law firm Leigh Day — working on the issue of reparations, said the issue of how to reckon with the legacy of the slave trade is “complex.”
“Reparations is not straightforward,” she said. “At the moment it’s a discussion among the elites, and the people, the descendants of the enslaved … aren’t really part of the discussion.”
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Associated Press writer Jill Lawless contributed.