Originally published 2021-07-15.
In July 2021 Jamaica's government announced that it would ask Britain for reparations for slavery and the slave trade. Culture minister Olivia Grange told Reuters that the claim would seek reparatory justice for the Africans who were shipped to the island and forced to work its plantations. The petition was built on a proposal by Jamaican MP Mike Henry, who put the figure at about £7.6 billion: roughly what Britain paid slave owners in compensation when slavery was abolished, expressed in today's money.
Below is what Jamaica asked for, why that figure was chosen, the history behind it, and where the wider Caribbean reparations movement stands.
What Jamaica announced
Grange, then Minister of Sports, Youth and Culture, said the claim was about repairing damage done to the ancestors of most Jamaicans. Africans, she said, had been forcibly removed from their homes and made to labour for the benefit of the British Empire, adding: "Redress is well overdue."
She declined to name a sum. That figure came from Mike Henry, a long-serving MP for the governing Jamaica Labour Party, whose private motion in parliament formed the basis of the petition. "I am asking for the same amount of money to be paid to the slaves that was paid to the slave owners," he told Reuters.
The process set out in 2021 had several steps. The petition first needed the approval of Jamaica's National Council on Reparations and advice from the attorney general and three legal teams. The attorney general would then send it to the British monarch, at that time Queen Elizabeth II, who was also Jamaica's head of state.
Jamaica and the slave trade
Spain first brought enslaved Africans to Jamaica, but the trade grew enormously after England seized the island in 1655. Over the following century and a half Jamaica became one of the most valuable colonies in the British Empire, producing sugar on plantations worked by enslaved people. The National Library of Jamaica estimates that about 600,000 Africans were shipped to the island. Conditions were brutal: high death rates on the plantations meant the colony relied on constant new arrivals from Africa. The descendants of those who survived make up the great majority of Jamaica's roughly three million people today.
Across the Americas, the United Nations estimates that more than 15 million men, women and children were victims of the transatlantic slave trade over some 400 years. Our short animation of the Atlantic slave voyages shows how heavily the ships flowed to the Caribbean.
The £20 million paid to slave owners
Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, but slavery itself continued in its colonies until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which came into force on 1 August 1834. Even then, freedom was not immediate. Most formerly enslaved people were forced into an "apprenticeship" of unpaid labour for their former owners, which in Jamaica ended in 1838.
The act also set aside £20 million to compensate slave owners for the loss of what the law treated as their property. Nothing was paid to the enslaved. The sum equalled about 40% of the Treasury's annual income at the time, or around 5% of Britain's economy. Much of it was raised through a £15 million loan arranged in 1835 with the bankers Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore.
A widely repeated claim says British taxpayers were still paying off this loan until 2015. That is only partly accurate. Some of the debt was later folded into undated government bonds, and those bonds were finally redeemed in 2015, so the last link to the 1835 borrowing ended then. Historians note this is something of a technicality, but it helps explain why the compensation still feels recent to many in the Caribbean.
Henry's £7.6 billion figure (some reports rounded it to £7.5 billion) was his estimate of the £20 million in modern terms. Estimates vary widely depending on the method used: adjusting for prices gives a smaller number, while comparing the payment with the size of the economy at the time produces far larger ones.
Part of a wider Caribbean movement
Jamaica's claim did not come out of nowhere. In 2012 the government revived a national reparations commission, and in 2013 the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) set up its own Reparations Commission, encouraged by the historian Sir Hilary Beckles. In 2014 fifteen Caribbean nations published the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. Notably, it is not just about money. Its demands include:
- a full formal apology, not just expressions of regret;
- support for people who wish to resettle in Africa;
- programmes to teach and share African history and culture;
- help with the public health crisis and illiteracy that the Commission links to slavery and colonialism;
- debt relief and technology transfer for Caribbean states.
British leaders have expressed regret without accepting a duty to pay. In 2006 Tony Blair called the trade profoundly shameful and expressed deep sorrow, but successive governments have rejected reparations claims.
Arguments for and against
Supporters argue that the wealth built on Caribbean plantations helped finance British banks, ports and industry, while the islands were left with poverty, under-investment and health problems that still affect them. They also point out that if compensation was owed in 1834, it was owed to the people who had been enslaved, not to those who held them.
Opponents argue that no one alive today was a slave owner or enslaved, that it is hard to decide who should pay and who should receive, and that development aid and trade are better tools. Supporters respond that states, unlike individuals, continue over time and regularly honour old debts and treaties, and that Britain's own payment in 1834 shows the harm could be priced.
What has happened since
Momentum has grown in some places. Several British institutions, including Lloyd's of London, the pub chain Greene King and the University of Glasgow, pledged contributions linked to their historic ties to slavery. In December 2022 the Netherlands formally apologised for its role and set aside €200 million to address the present-day legacy. In 2023 descendants of British slave owners formed the group Heirs of Slavery and called on the government and King Charles to apologise, and the African Union and CARICOM agreed to set up a Global Reparation Fund.
The debate in Jamaica has also become linked with plans to replace the British monarch as head of state. Whatever the outcome, the 2021 petition put a clear question to Britain: if slave owners were compensated for losing people they held as property, what is owed to the descendants of the people themselves?
Sources: Reuters, 12 July 2021, "Jamaica plans to seek reparations from Britain over slavery", as republished by Cyprus Mail; Wikipedia: Slavery Abolition Act 1833; Wikipedia: CARICOM Reparations Commission.
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