Catherine Hall

Reparations for victims of slavery and their descendants have been regularly proposed in the US since the 18th century but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. 

Missionaries in Jamaica had campaigned for emancipation and were loathed by the planters, who blamed them for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this historical moment when abolitionists defeated pro-slavers? How did it relate to the long history of violence between the two islands?

The tacit questions were: who is black and why? And what does being black signify? Black, it was commonly understood, signified Africa and slavery. But the puzzle was also a religious matter, since the Bible was clear that God had made all men white. Why were black people different? The Bordeaux Academy had no difficulty asking these questions: it was entirely legitimate to scrutinise black bodies. It would never have occurred to them to ask why some people were white and what that signified. 

In the 1960s, when the children of the Windrush generation were arriving with their parents, there were no issues with their entry to the ‘mother country’: they were travelling internally within the empire. They were registered as ‘freely landed’: that was the wording on the landing cards destroyed by the Home Office in 2010.

While approximately 80 per cent of the enslaved children born to white fathers in 18th and early 19th-century Jamaica remained in slavery, thousands of elite ‘coloured’ or ‘brown’ boys and girls were sent to England or Scotland to be educated. Where might they face less discrimination?