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The 14 countries of the Caribbean
Community (Caricom) have agreed to renew their demands for slavery reparations
from three former European colonial powers, and major beneficiaries of the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Britain, France and Netherlands.
AP reports that the Caricom nations
recently voted unanimously at a meeting in Trinidad to renew their decades-long
effort to bring the major beneficiaries and perpetrators of the Slave Trade
before the United Nations and the World Court in The Hague.
The countries have also agreed to
create a regional reparations commission under the supervision of Prime
Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and Grenadines; and to initiate a joint
effort that Gonsalves described as "honest, sober and robust
conversation" with Britain, France and the Netherlands to resolve the
longstanding issue of slavery reparations "amicably."
Some of the countries, including
Jamaica, already have national reparations commissions. Those that have not
established a commission have agreed to establish one and send representatives
to the regional body.
The leaders of the Caribbean
nations insist that the widespread poverty and underdevelopment in the region
are the legacy of the Slave Trade. According to Gonsalves, while a formal
apology from the European nations is desirable, it would not be sufficient. He
told AP on Wednesday: "The apology is
important but that is wholly insufficient. We have to have appropriate
recompense."
The countries are focusing
attention on Britain, France and Netherlands, and have retained the British law
firm of Leigh
Day & Co., which won the legal battle for compensation to
Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government during the Mau-Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s.
According to attorney Marty Day,
his firm plans to pursue a negotiated settlement with the governments of the
three European countries. AP reports
he said: "I think they would undoubtedly want to try and see if this can
be resolved amicably.
But I think the reason they have hired us is that they
want to show that they mean business."
The Caribbean leaders have given
no indication of how much they would be demanding in reparations, but according
to AP, Gonsalves and the chairwoman of the
national reparations commission in Jamaica, Verene Shepherd, have cited the sum
of 20 million pounds equivalent to 200 billion today, that Britain paid British
planters in the Caribbean at the emancipation.
Shepherd said: "Our
ancestors got nothing. They got their freedom and they were told 'Go develop
yourselves.'"
It is expected that the European
countries will resist in spite of having actively supported and justified
German reparations for Jewish slave and forced labor during the Holocaust.
According to AP, British High
Commissioner to Jamaica, David Fitton, commenting on the matter on Wednesday,
said that the Mau Mau case was not meant to be a precedent and that the British
government opposes reparations for slavery. He said: "We don't think the
issue of reparations is the right way to address these issues. It's not the
right way to address an historical problem."
Apart from former British Prime
Minister Tony Blair expressing regret for the "unbearable suffering"
of slavery during the 200th anniversary of the British prohibition on the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in 2007, the British government has never explained
what it considers the "right way" to address the issue nor have they
done anything about it even while championing similar reparations for Jewish
victims of the Holocaust against Germany.
When former President Nicolas
Sarkozy of France was asked about France paying reparations for slavery and
colonialism after the Haitian earthquake, he acknowledged the burden of
colonization and slavery on the country but sought to justify France by noting
that the country had canceled a 56 million euro debt and provided aid package
of 40 million euros to Haiti.
Slavery and the Industrial
Revolution in Europe
The Western powers who benefited
from the Slave Trade have sought to justify their refusal to consider paying
reparations to the victims of slavery by downplaying the significant
contributions of slavery to their economies. Sometimes they engage in blatant
denial of the fact that their present status as economic superpowers received a
powerful boost from the Slave Trade.
The denial sometimes takes the
form of blaming the victims by suggesting that since the slavery era the
victims of the Slave Trade have had enough time to develop themselves and that
if they haven't it is their fault. Similarly arguments are often tendered to
deny the pivotal role that the slavery economy played in the accumulation of
capital wealth in the US for instance.
A more recent form of the denial
shamelessly revisits the old racist ideologies of biological superiority of
certain races by correlating the "IQ" of nations with wealth.
These denials are peddled
blatantly in spite of a profusion of academic studies that show that the
so-called "Age of Capital" in Europe, which took off in the
mid-nineteenth century (Hobsbawm) was powered by
wealth acquired from the Slave Trade.
According to BBC History:
Slave-owning planters, and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce, were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain. Profits from these activities helped to... build a score of banks, including Barclays, and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first really efficient steam engine.
Liverpool merchant bankers,
heavily involved in the slave-based trades, extended vital credit to the early
cotton manufacturers of its Lancashire hinterland.
The BBC continues:
In his famous 1944 book 'Capitalism and Slavery', the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams argued that profits from slavery 'fertilized' many branches of the metropolitan economy and set the scene for England's industrial revolution'.
His thesis has focused decades of
debate and controversy. It correctly identified the very great intimacy in
18th-century Britain between making money from slavery on the one hand, and the
financing of British capitalist development, on the other... the fit between
slave plantation growth and industrial advance in Britain was to be impressive
and sustained. The plantation colonies supplied the mother country with a
growing stream of popular luxuries - dyestuffs, sugar, tobacco, then later coffee
and chocolate as well - and cotton, a crucial industrial input.
The availability of such treats
drew consumers into greater participation in market exchanges and greater
reliance on wages, salaries and fees. Baiting the hook of wage dependence, new
consumer goods helped to motivate what some historians call the 'industrious
revolution', the longer hours and tight labor control associated with
industrialism...
The BBC concludes:
Using the telling concept of 'ghost acreage', we can consider the fact that Britain had available to it the fruits of the labors of millions of enslaved people, working millions of acres of highly fertile (and conveniently located) soil in the New World, helping it over the difficult humps of early industrialization.
Enslaved people on the
plantations of the Americas made a large contribution to British prosperity.
It is estimated that the acreage
required to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New
World in 1830 would have been somewhere between 25 and 30 million acres - or
more than Britain's total arable and pasture land combined.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,
through the so-called Atlantic Triangular Trade in colonial cash crops produced by
slaves, boosted industrial growth in the US.
The website Measuring Worth, quotes research estimates of
the value of capital wealth stored in slaves in Southern US: Adjusted to
today's price levels the total wealth of the South in 1860 was estimated at
about $21 trillion. Of the total, $10 trillion (almost 50%) represented the
value of slaves.
In spite of the frequent boasts
that "whites did more to end slavery than other
races," scholars
such as Eric Hobsbawn, in his "The Age of Capital," have shown that
the slaving nations, especially the Anglo-Saxon powers, were not motivated
primarily by humane considerations to end slavery. It was the Industrial
Revolution that obsoleted the slavery economy, making it unsustainable in the
long run.
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