The Case for Reparations in the Caribbean
And who should pay.
APRIL 25, 2023
Many years ago, I chose to submit as a Ph.D. proposal the issues surrounding the economics of the rise of chattel slavery. I was 21 years old at the time and did not know what I was getting into.
But I understood even then from reading the literature that there had been several competing options available to Western colonial adventurers entering a new world, and those options had had relative merits. The Western European complex expanded across the Atlantic into the Americas in search of labor to carry out major projects in agriculture and mining and other forms of economic development and resource extraction. These labor options included transporting the European working class across the Atlantic in the form of indentured labor, as well as mobilizing, by various forms of coercion, the use of Indigenous Native American labor, and accessing West Africa in order to extract or press coerced labor into production.
My task as a doctoral student was to account for the ultimate choice after a hundred years of experimentation by various European countries — initially Spain in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, then Portugal in Brazil, followed by England, the Netherlands, France and the Nordic nations— to impose chattel slavery to sustain their colonial Caribbean plantations. But prior to that there were mixed and commingled forms of labor. These forms of labor were at once consistent with their own national systems of labor and were innovations, initiating new systems of legal labor relations within their colonies that departed from systems of labor indigenous to their own European context.
When the Protestant nations, the English, Dutch, French and Danish primarily, entered the new world — the Caribbean especially — they began with an experiment around the use of domestic labor from Europe transported across the Atlantic in the form of indentured servitude. My own dissertation dealt with the extensive use of white indentured labor from Britain in the Caribbean and the Americas in the formative years of colonization, in Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, Virginia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and New York. I explored the economics of that choice: It was cheaper and more productive and sustainable to import working-class labor to initiate production on the plantations, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of workers from Britain were transported to work on the sugar plantations under contracts of indenture.
A typical contract of indenture specified that the investor in your labor would pay for your transportation across the Atlantic and provide housing for you on the plantation, while you would provide between seven and 10 years of labor on that plantation; at the end of your contract of indenture, you were given a small sum of money to launch you into your freedom or a piece of land to launch you as an independent person. That was a model that was chosen to lay the foundation for colonies, because Protestant nations did not possess the economic resources to make a massive investment in the African transatlantic slave trade. That was how you got a trade in white labor — convicts, political prisoners and the dependent-upon-the-state working-class poor. Local cities were given authority to round them up and ship them out to work on the plantations.
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But that system proved to be unsustainable given the enormity of the project, which was the rise of Plantation America, whether in the form of sugar production in the Caribbean, cotton production in the U.S. South or the production of rice and other agricultural products. The magnitude of plantation expansion as the basis for sustaining and growing wealth in Europe required a pool of labor that would be sustainable over hundreds of years. That is when Western Europe looked at the future of the enterprise of colonization and determined that it must generate an economic return of great magnitude in order for it to be worth doing. Europe was not going to undertake this project unless it was going to be profitable and unless the profitability was going to be sustainable — meaning it would lead to an enormous increase in wealth, economic growth and economic development in Europe itself. Thus, the macroeconomics of this project were determined, and it was agreed upon that the only way this was going to work was to have access to another pool of labor from Africa.
This was an enormously significant decision, and it first took place in the Caribbean in a highly organized way. This approach had emerged in Brazil and spread across the northeast part of that colony. But where it reached its full maturation as an economic model and system was in the Caribbean, specifically in Barbados, because Barbados was the center of the British Empire in the Americas in the early part of the 17th century. Barbados was an empty island, a place where England could begin with no Indigenous resistance.
In 1636, just nine years after colonization, the Barbados Assembly passed a proclamation that stated for the first time, anywhere in the Americas, from that day and henceforth, any person of Africa or African descent who arrived in the colony would be deemed a slave forever and their ownership would be defined as the ownership of property, and that property right would be passed on from generation to generation. And there would be no constraints or restraints with respect to the use of that person, who was now defined as property. That was seismic because the English in Barbados were making massive investments in sugar plantations and the technology of plantation production. A harvest plantation of 500 acres, for example, required at least 300 enslaved Africans to make it work efficiently. At that time the average price of an enslaved African, male or female, was 30 to 40 pounds. The value of enslaved labor was more than the value of the land. Therefore, investors and entrepreneurs wanted to ensure that their investment in African labor was associated with property, real estate, and they demanded that assurance from the government. The government delivered: Enslaved people were defined as property — chattel — as security for their entrepreneurial effort in massive capital investment and profitability.
Twenty-five years later, the Barbados legislature set this all out in “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.” In this act, which was the first of its kind, the English enslavers in Barbados made it clear that they were framing a piece of legislation not just for domestic management but for the region, and it worked. It began with the usual preamble, indicating that Africans were seen as a barbarous and inhumane people, a brutish people not fit to be governed under the laws of Christians, etc. The preamble to the act made it clear that Africans were not human, at best subhuman. Because Africans could not be governed under the same laws as Christians, who were deemed white, they were subhuman and nonhuman and required special forms of laws.
The so-called “slave laws” were about the management of chattel, and thus Africans were managed with all the expected rights of property. What were property rights? You could buy property. You could sell it. You could mortgage it. You could use it as currency. You could use it as collateral. You could pass it on in wills. You could use it to pay taxes, and you were taxed for owning it. That is the meaning of chattelization: One could be bought, sold, mortgaged, bequeathed, all those functions of property — and of course, one had no human identity.
The Barbados model was then exported across the Caribbean by the British, and those laws were eventually taken to South Carolina, the first American colony to implement the Caribbean model. This is why South Carolina became the first colony in English-speaking America with a Black majority, and why South Carolina is seen as the heart of slavery in the U.S. South.
During the process of chattelization, it was necessary to remove other forms of competing labor, and to that end, a very important development took place in the British Parliament. Two white indentured servants were able to spirit a letter of petition out of Barbados into England that was taken before the House of Commons, which was under Cromwellian rule. They asked for justice regarding their white enslavement in the Caribbean, and the English House of Commons met to hear this petition. The legislators determined that what they had heard about white people being treated like slaves in Barbados and in the Caribbean was unacceptable. Thus began the parliamentary process of uprooting any evidence of white slavery, and the prohibition of it in the future. White indentured servitude was eradicated in the Caribbean and replaced completely by African chattel slavery. We have the evidence in the English Parliament of a direct political instruction to eradicate white servitude and replace it with Black chattel slavery as the model for the modern world, and to this end, the legislators succeeded.
Chattel slavery, wherein Africans could be bought and sold on the market, became the standard model of colonization. However, at the time of the implementation of chattel slavery, its regionalization and its application across the Americas and the wider world, there was a strong civil society movement fighting against the phenomenon. This movement argued that the chattelization of the African people was criminal, sinful, immoral and un-Christian. It is interesting that when the Slavery Abolition Act was finally passed in Britain in 1833, 200 years later, the same arguments — that chattel slavery must end because it is criminal, sinful, immoral, un-Christian — were used. Why were these arguments not effective at the beginning, and why were they effective at the end?
Every generation of enslaved people revolted. The Caribbean became a military theater. Rebellion after rebellion of Black revolutionary movement against slavery — each one is proof that there was no acceptance of it. We want reparations and are told to be silent.
They were not effective at the beginning because the British state determined that chattel slavery was in the national interest and that the people who opposed it were opposed to the national interest of England seeking to become the richest nation in Europe, raising its capital, raising its funds to build an army, to build a powerful state so that it could compete with France and the Netherlands and other countries. The only way England was going to transcend other European countries militarily was if it had access to a form of wealth that would give it that capacity. The only way England could get that wealth was through chattel slavery and plantation development.
Even when William Wilberforce, the 18th-century British politician and leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade, sought to challenge chattel slavery using those arguments, King William IV threatened him — a veiled threat to anyone who stood up against chattel slavery on the grounds that it was criminal, sinful, immoral, un-Christian.
At the end of this process was the Slavery Abolition Act, which embraced all of those arguments. Yes, it was sinful. It was criminal. It was immoral. Therefore, the Act declared, we have to end it and end it now, primarily because the nation no longer needs it. Colonial slavery had served its purpose. It made England into the wealthiest country in Europe, if not in the world. England became the first industrial country because it had the inflow of investments coming from the colonies, and slavery to build the factories, cities and towns. The process had reached a terminal moment. England had won and emerged as the most powerful country in Europe.
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When the Slavery Abolition Act was being passed, formerly enslaved people did ask for reparations. They said, “How about us? Our labor was stolen from us for centuries. We should receive compensation. We want reparations.” The British government told them to be silent, saying, “You have no voice, and you should be grateful that we are freeing you. Whatever reparations you think you should have, you are getting them in the form of the freedom we are giving you.” The formerly enslaved then responded, “You took our labor by military conquest. You enslaved us against our will. We will fight against you to demonstrate that we have not accepted your imposition.” Every generation of enslaved people revolted. The Caribbean became a military theater. Rebellion after rebellion of Black revolutionary movement against slavery — each one is proof that there was no acceptance of it. We want reparations and are told to be silent.
The movement is now here again. Between the emancipation legislation of the 1830s and today, there have been at least six or seven major movements to demand reparations. The enslaved demanded it. The first generation of free Africans demanded reparations. From then until today, every generation has been asking for reparations. Reparations is one of the oldest political movements in the Caribbean; it began during slavery, continued after emancipation and is now back on the agenda once again, 200 years later.
It may be difficult for the human mind to wrap itself around allocating quantitative measurements to the enormity of the crime of slavery and its consequences. But there is also, in addition to the question of methodology, the issue of who should pay.
Those of us in the reparations movement have heard in recent years that there is no need to discuss if reparations should be paid. It is no longer a question of “if.” The question now is: How do we find a consensus about “how”? The concept of quantifying the reparations discourse is, indeed, complex, with multiple theories of reparatory justice and a range of ideas about how to move from the preliminary step of apology and atonement to that which requires quantitative financial interventions to repair the harm.
It may be difficult for the human mind to wrap itself around allocating quantitative measurements to the enormity of the crime of slavery and its consequences. But there is also, in addition to the question of methodology, the issue of who should pay. This question, too, may overwhelm, since all the elements of governments — the executive, the judiciary, the legislature — were participants in enabling the origin and reproduction of the system of slavery, and the corporations, families and institutions of civil society, including the church and the universities, all participated in this criminal enrichment as well.
There have been two approaches to the demand for reparations. There are those calculations that are based upon wealth extraction from enforced labor. For example, in the case of Britain, which is a case I know well, the British enslaved 6 million Africans, both imported and those who were born on their plantations. What if you take each adult and pay them the wage that you would have paid the lowest-paid worker in Britain? How much back pay would you have to deal with? If you had to do a calculation, what would it come to? The figure was staggering when the calculation was done by a group of economists in London. It was somewhere in the area of 7.5 trillion pounds, just as an indicator of how much value the country had extracted from enslaving 6 million people against their will for 200 years without paying them a wage.
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Another viewpoint is that that period of enslavement and wealth extraction and colonization left the people of the Caribbean who are the descendants of that process in the depths of poverty. This poverty has translated into mass illiteracy and extremely poor public health. When you look at chronic diseases the world over, Black people in the Caribbean, descendants of those who were enslaved, have the highest per capita expression of diabetes and hypertension. Today Barbados and Jamaica, the first two significant chattelization economies in the world, have the highest percentage of diabetic amputations per capita in the world.
When these countries became independent in the 1960s, 70 to 80 percent of the people of African descent could not read or write. The Europeans walked away. Britain walked away and said, “You want independence. Well, have it.” But these countries wanted independence because they wanted to get away from the brutalization of imperial exploitation. Grasping that freedom left them abandoned with circumstances of ill health, mass illiteracy and obstacles to pursuing economic development in an orderly fashion. But many of these nations have pursued it, and through their efforts, they were able to convert the crudity and barbarity of a colony into a democratic nation. They did it, but the question remains: What if they were paid reparations?
The legacy of chattelization is palpable today, and every person of African descent who has been a part of the rise of democracy, civil rights and human rights has been fighting against the headwind of the legacy of slavery.
Former colonies like Jamaica and Barbados would be further ahead in their economic growth and poverty eradication if they had been paid reparations. Instead, they were left to struggle on their own to build out the basic infrastructure for democracy. This is why the reparations movement necessitates looking not just at how much is required to compensate labor, but what is required to promote the development of democratic society and economy today out of the rubble of an abandoned colony.
The effects of this criminal chattel culture that became the basis of American colonization can be seen today in Black communities all over, whether in Alabama, Mississippi, Barbados, Jamaica or the Bahamas. Wherever Black people were chattelized, those societies and communities have remained impoverished, richly oppressed, dominated by white minorities and the economy. The legacy of chattelization is palpable today, and every person of African descent who has been a part of the rise of democracy, civil rights and human rights has been fighting against the headwind of the legacy of slavery.
My colleague William A. Darity Jr., American economist and co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020), has emerged with an individualized approach to reparations, wherein the descendants of every African person who was enslaved are entitled to monetary compensation for the brutality; therefore, every African American whose ancestors suffered slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid, should receive that compensation as the only way to pay reparations. It is an individualized approach.
Another model focuses on community development. Our communities, Black communities, they need churches. They need hospitals. They need universities. They need high schools. They need infrastructure to build community centers. They need facilities for libraries and places of learning. These Black communities have been stripped bare of the infrastructure that is part of white communities; therefore, the reparatory justice methodology should focus on community empowerment. Banks and insurance companies ought to be encouraged by legislation to bring appropriate facilities with appropriate products into these communities with a view to intergenerational uplifting; therefore the massive investment that the state is required to pay in reparations should be an investment in community development for large numbers of people.
The reparations movement is going to be the greatest political movement of the 21st century. There is nothing that can stop it because it is embedded in the search for justice, equality and democracy.
In the Caribbean, European nations have been asked to come to a summit in order to discuss an equivalent of the Marshall Plan for the Caribbean and a quantification of the wealth that was extracted from the region through slavery, slave trading, colonization by the state, the British and European states, their families, the institutions. It is a call for the return of a part of that extracted wealth, criminal enrichment, to the place of its extraction to facilitate economic and social development. Meanwhile, there are lawyers who are providing significant legal opinion on how to move such claims into International tribunals and international courts in order to have justice, and this has been the context.
The reparations movement is going to be the greatest political movement of the 21st century. There is nothing that can stop it because it is embedded in the search for justice, equality and democracy. It took our ancestors all of the 19th century to uproot chattel slavery, from the Haitians who first took that step all the way through to Brazil and Cuba. Between Haiti in 1804 and Brazil and Cuba in the 1880s, that was almost 100 years of efforts to end chattel slavery.
Then it took us all of the 20th century to convert those legal freedoms into social and political freedoms, human rights and civil rights. Every Black community in the world paid a very dear price for civil rights and human rights. But we are now in the 21st century, and the next stage is a reparatory justice rights movement. Generation after generation throughout the 21st century will fight for reparatory justice rights if we have to, much the same way we fought all of the 20th century for the right to vote, civil rights and human rights. This is endemic to our journey to justice, and it is not going to end until that justice is attained through reparations.
This essay is an edited version of two speeches given at the 2021 Reparations under International Law conference held by the American Society of International Law.