COMMENTARY: The Vulgarity of Asking the Enslaved to Pay

By Sir Ronald Sanders

Suella Braverman is a former Conservative Party British government minister who turned coat and is now a vocal member of the far‑right political party, Reform. She is the child of Indian parents from Mauritius and Kenya, yet, like many other ultra‑ambitious British politicians, she has consistently distinguished herself by remarks that are unhelpful to immigrants and to developing countries.

Her latest claim is that Britain’s former colonies should pay reparations to Britain. It is a claim that is historically illiterate, morally offensive and politically revealing.

It takes some nerve, in the year 2026, for a British politician to look at the Caribbean’s renewed call for reparations for slavery and conclude that the obligation runs in reverse. Yet Braverman has argued that, if the British government is seriously thinking about reparations, then former colonies should pay Britain back for the “investment, effort and contribution” that laid the foundations for “many flourishing democracies today”, and that expecting twenty‑first century Britons to pay for eighteenth‑century actions has no legal basis. It is a neat inversion that will flatter an audience which prefers imperial nostalgia to historical truth, but it collapses once we look honestly at the legacy of empire in the Caribbean.

As far back as 2013, in a debate with the late Lord Carrington, organised by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, I described that legacy as mixed – some aspects good, many bad, and one in particular ugly. There are indeed “good” legacies. English has become the language of international commerce, and the English‑speaking Caribbean has benefitted from that in global transactions. The institutional inheritance of legal and judicial systems, and of written constitutions based on the rule of law, has also had value, even though those institutions were originally designed to serve Britain’s interests rather than our own.

Education is another positive element. Missionary‑led basic education ensured early literacy in English, and in 1948 the University College of the West Indies was established in Jamaica, widening opportunities for Caribbean nationals to take over from British colonial civil servants and preparing them for the challenges of independence. That narrow but solid education has helped a region of some five million people to produce Nobel laureates and to send its citizens into senior roles in international organisations entirely out of proportion to its size. These are genuine gains, even if they arrived late and were not matched by comparable investment in industry and infrastructure.

Yet it is when we turn to the “bad” and “ugly” legacies that Braverman’s talk of British “investment” begins to sound like a grim joke. For three hundred years Britain organised Caribbean economies around one crop – sugar – and later bananas, for the benefit of British conglomerates. Production was based on low wages and poor conditions, and while British companies enjoyed preferences in the United Kingdom and later Europe, Caribbean workers remained trapped in poverty. In all that time, Britain did not bring development to the Caribbean; it brought wealth extraction.

Caribbean efforts after independence to diversify their economies have been hobbled by missing infrastructure and poor transportation links. There are still no direct links between the Caribbean and Africa, and few to neighbouring Latin America, because the colonial model routed everything through Britain, with added costs that made trade difficult and expensive. Today’s shortages of productive capital, structural unemployment, trade and balance‑of‑payments deficits, and high levels of debt across the region are not accidents of geography but products of a historical pattern of exploitation. To rebrand this record as “investment” is to confuse the plantation ledger with a development plan.

The abandonment of the West Indies Federation and the offer of independence to individual territories locked in place a fragmented Caribbean of small, vulnerable states, each struggling without economies of scale and with little bargaining capacity. That, too, is part of the “effort and contribution” which Braverman now wishes us to repay.

The truly ugly legacy lies in slavery and indentured labour. African slavery and East Indian indentured labour provided the cheap production that fed Britain’s growth for centuries. When slavery was abolished in the English‑speaking Caribbean in 1838, British slave owners were compensated lavishly for the emancipation of their “property” – some 655,780 human beings of African descent. In today’s terms, that compensation runs into billions of pounds. The freed slaves received nothing for their dehumanisation, their cruel treatment, their stolen labour and the plain injustice of their enslavement.

Those payments are woven into the foundations of major banks such as Barclays, Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland, and into the fortunes of prominent British families. This was not “investment” in Caribbean development. It was investment in British power and British wealth.

Most remarkably, the British state decided that slave owners deserved compensation while the enslaved deserved nothing. The government borrowed £20 million – about 40 per cent of national income at the time – to finance those payments, and the debt was only finally paid off in 2015. Generations of British taxpayers, including those of the twenty‑first century, have honoured the obligation to slave owners, yet Braverman insists that there is no legal basis for modern Britons to meet any obligation to the descendants of the enslaved. That is not a serious legal argument. It is a political choice to recognise one kind of historical claim and to deny another.

The ugliness did not begin or end with African slavery. Indentured servitude in places such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago bound Indian labourers to estates, deprived them of normal liberties and subjected them to treatment that Hugh Tinker described as “another kind of slavery”. When slavery ended, Africans received no land grants, no cash reparations, no promissory notes. They were left destitute, deprived and disadvantaged, while former owners drew down their compensation and Britain drew on the fruits of their labour.

If even half of the compensation paid to slave owners had been directed to slavery’s victims and their societies, the Caribbean would today be much further along the road of social and economic development. For a British politician to answer that the victims’ descendants ought instead to compensate the beneficiaries is to mock history and stand it on its head.

It is impossible to separate Braverman’s statement from her political trajectory. She championed a harsh anti‑immigration agenda, including a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Now, as a member of Reform UK, she aligns herself with a party that has promised to stop issuing visas to nationals of any country that seeks reparations for the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans.

Her intervention signals a project to re‑centre Britain as victim and benefactor in the story of empire, and to cast Caribbean demands for justice as impertinence. The Caribbean cannot accept that script. Reparations are not about “punishing” modern Britons; they are about acknowledging that history created structural disadvantages that persist and about designing measures to repair them. Until that truth is faced, talk of “investment, effort and contribution” is not history; it is evasion.

(The writer is Antigua and Barbuda’s Ambassador to the US and the OAS. He is also Chancellor of the University of Guyana.  The views expressed are his own)

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