Bread and Butter

He had money.
I had history.
His money stole my history.

‘Fatima’s Poem’

‘Fatima’s Poem’ was a contribution to Colonial Countryside, a child-led writing and history project (and now a book) commissioned by the National Trust working with a team of historians led by Corinne Fowler. Like many British institutions, the National Trust has in recent years begun to discuss and investigate its connections to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the Penrhyn slate quarry. After his death, the estate passed to his second cousin, George Hay Dawkins Pennant, a fierce opponent of abolition. After the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, Dawkins Pennant was awarded compensation of £14,683 for the 764 enslaved men and women that the law no longer recognised as his property. The freed men and women received nothing and were initially compelled to work as ‘apprentices’. Dawkins Pennant put some of this money into building Penrhyn Castle as a neo-Norman fantasia, but though a large sum at the time, it paled in comparison to the riches he and his forebears had accumulated during their decades of slave ownership. His fortune at his death in 1840 was an estimated £600,000. By the end of the 19th century, the Penrhyn quarry led the world in slate production, employing some three thousand people. It became the site of the longest industrial strike in British history, from 1900 to 1903. For hundreds of years, the Pennant family used advantages of race and class to grow and consolidate their wealth and power. There is still a Baron Penrhyn, but Penrhyn Castle was transferred to the National Trust in 1951 in lieu of death duties and now receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year. In 2011 the North Wales Jamaica Society was established to trace links such as these, to establish shared histories and offer modest material redress in the hope of repairing some of the harm done.

Colonial Countryside made use of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership (LBS) database, established between 2009 and 2016 and hosted by UCL, which records the slaveowners who received compensation after 1833. It includes biographical work on those with addresses in Britain, revealing something of the scale of the wealth that plantation slavery created for families such as the Pennants. By considering the different work undertaken by Colonial Countryside (education and engagement), the LBS project (research and collation) and the North Wales Jamaica Society (communication and reparation), we can begin to imagine what a reckoning with Britain’s legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation might look like.

Each of these initiatives, and there are many other examples, have connections to what might be thought of as the ‘reparations project’, the hope of making amends for a destructive history that continues to shape the present. Reparation has carried a variety of meanings over the centuries, but it has most often been understood as financial redress. Its dominant usage in the 19th and early 20th centuries related to state-to-state payments in the wake of victory and defeat (German reparations to the Allies after the First World War being the most famous example). A shift in meaning occurred in the decades after 1945. The criminal prosecutions of leading Nazis at the end of the Second World War raised the question, for Karl Jaspers among others, of the need for a wider recognition of German guilt. The complicity of the majority population must be acknowledged; monetary compensation from one state to another would not suffice. Hannah Arendt resisted the notion of collective guilt but recognised the political responsibility contingent on membership of a community: this was the price of living with others. ‘The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole,’ she writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, ‘not because damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation … It is the body politic itself that stands in need of being “repaired”.’ Repair required restitution where possible. In 1949, Arendt spent four months in Germany assessing Jewish cultural assets that could at least be restored to the Jewish community as a whole, if not to their owners.

In the decades since, ideas about compensation and reparation for victims of historical injustice have entered into law. In 1964 West Germany gave the British government £1 million to distribute to British victims of the Nazi regime. Holocaust survivors are still entitled to compensation from the German government, under an agreement reached in 2015. 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. The children of the Windrush wanted to know their history. Establishing it has not been easy, but mainstream accounts have now emerged of the systemic violence, exploitation and extraction that characterised Britain’s colonial ventures, challenging the chauvinism and self-congratulation that was for so long the dominant mode.

How should today’s multicultural British public respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated subject’, something more than ‘bystander’ and more complicated than ‘beneficiary’. No one alive now whose family received wealth from slavery can be considered guilty. But that doesn’t mean, in Arendt’s view of things, that the body politic is well. Cecil Rhodes was explicit in his view that ‘empire … was a bread-and-butter question.’ New lands were needed to improve the domestic standard of living, to provide labour, raw materials, consumers. More recently the benefits might not have been so obvious, but they continue in all the appurtenances, however dysfunctional some of them have become, of a rich modern society. As Michael Banner argues in Britain’s Slavery Debt: ‘We are the inheritors of these riches … present generations in the Caribbean are inheritors of relative poverty.’

Banner is dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, an institution favoured in previous centuries by some leading slave-owning families (it has recently launched an investigation into its historic connections to slavery). He takes inspiration from Hilary Beckles, the Barbadian historian and leading proponent of reparations to the Caribbean. As chairman of the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission, which represents fifteen countries, Beckles oversaw the development of a ten-point plan to establish appropriate financial and cultural redress from Britain, France, Denmark and Spain. Banner argues that the UK owes Caribbean nations £200 billion in reparations but his ‘starting point for negotiations’ is modest: £20 million, the amount paid in compensation to the slaveowners after 1833 (incurring debt that Britain finished repaying only in 2015). ‘Moral repair is owed,’ Banner writes, ‘and reparations are due.’ While his focus is at the state level, his experience of attempts at reparation made by Cambridge and the Church of England has convinced him that much can be done by institutions below national government. He answers the major objections to reparations – ‘it was all so long ago, it’s time to move on,’ ‘slavery was legal back then,’ ‘Africans engaged in slavery too’ – and looks ahead to negotiations between nations. Finding a fair way to pay is vital: the cost shouldn’t fall on the poor, and the question of who benefits isn’t straightforward.

The idea of making amends, of finding some form of moral repair for the system of chattel slavery, has a long genealogy in Britain. The first generation of white abolitionists understood slavery as an offence against God. For Granville Sharp, it was a sin of the enslavers, not simply a misfortune for the enslaved, and the ‘great share of this enormous guilt’ rested with Britain. ‘A toleration of slavery,’ he wrote in 1769, ‘is a toleration of inhumanity.’ If Britons wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they went: abolition, and later emancipation, would to some extent atone for wrongs and cleanse the metropole of its collective guilt. African writers and activists living in London were more radical in their thinking. Ottobah Cugoano had been kidnapped and sold into slavery but by the 1770s was working as a domestic servant for two artists. A member of the Sons of Africa, Britain’s first Black political organisation, he mobilised a language that combined revolutionary politics with religious millenarianism. He criticised the British government for ‘despotism, oppression and cruelty’ and campaigned against a scheme of sending the ‘Black poor’ on London’s streets to Sierra Leone. Robert Wedderburn, born in Jamaica, became a celebrated preacher and orator; his was an uncompromising Black voice. He linked political radicalism with abolitionism and threatened British slave owners with the fate suffered by French planters in the Haitian revolution.

It was soon understood, however, that neither abolition, emancipation nor the ending of apprenticeship in 1838 had delivered freedom or justice. Claims on Britain, expressed in a variety of ways, continued to be made. In the 1930s the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis argued that historic debt to the enslaved, accumulated over three centuries, should be acknowledged and settled to fund economic development. Such reparatory funding, however, was only minimally provided in the wake of the Moyne Commission of 1938-39, established in response to a wave of strikes and riots across the British Caribbean. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams showed that wealth extracted from the Caribbean flowed into Britain and facilitated numerous family fortunes alongside the development of a rich industrial society.* He claimed that Britain owed a debt incurred by theft rather than sin, one that could be redeemed only by the granting of independence and sovereignty, an end to colonial dependency and a financial reckoning. He was enraged by the inadequacy of the British response to the demand for significant capital investment, particularly in the context of the tense negotiations over the Federation of the West Indies. Britain was not prepared to pay for historic wrongs.

In the 1780s and 1820s large publics had been mobilised in Britain to demand an end to the slave trade and then emancipation for enslaved people. The Act of 1807 prohibited the trade throughout the British Empire, but it was not until 1833 that a reformed House of Commons concluded that, given the rebellions across the Caribbean and the strength of the abolitionist campaign ‘at home’, the entire system of chattel slavery must be abolished: ‘free labour’, the government reasoned, would anyhow be more profitable than enslaved labour. The public gradually lost interest in and enthusiasm for the ‘great experiment’ of emancipation. Then in 1865 Jamaica once again erupted into British consciousness as the details of Governor Eyre’s brutal response to a riot in Morant Bay became known. But the focus of the debate was the legality of Eyre’s invocation of martial law and what sort of imperial rule was appropriate for colonised peoples. The claims of the freed peasantry to judicial, economic and political change went unheard. It was not until the bicentenary of abolition in 2007 that anything resembling a national conversation about slavery started up again. For many critics, including Banner, 2007 was a missed opportunity: activities centred on celebrating Wilberforce and Tony Blair refused to offer a state apology. His government did, however, make a statement expressing ‘deep sorrow’ over the slave trade and recognised it as a crime against humanity. The Heritage Lottery Fund gave grants to 285 projects marking the bicentenary. In the wake of the New Cross Fire of 1981, the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the recognition of institutional racism in the police, attitudes had changed. In 2007, community groups, museums and galleries, the BBC, libraries and schools organised numerous theatre productions, exhibitions, events and pieces of research that engaged with the slave trade and its legacies. For many people, slavery once more felt urgent, as did the question of what it meant for Britain.

The word ‘reparation’ wasn’t common usage in Britain in 2007, though it was familiar to pan-Africanists. The last fifteen years have seen a proliferation of reparatory projects of different kinds, even if the language of reparations isn’t always used. Many of those involved in the lottery projects found that tensions over decision-making led to communities feeling disappointed and frustrated; more recent projects have emphasised co-production. A series of ongoing collaborations between descendants and researchers at Nottingham University, begun in 2007, focuses on issues ranging from the cotton industry and its relation to the slave trade to the legacies of rural enslavement. Public history has taken pride of place: the online LBS database, for instance, has been consulted at least three million times. In 2013, the Windrush Foundation (first established in 1996) received funding from the Lottery Fund to embark on Making Freedom, a mobile exhibition, education pack and website that engaged with schools around the UK. The University of Brighton has held conferences on reparative histories. Books have been published, films and TV programmes made, plays performed, artists exhibited, Black studies courses developed. The Windrush scandal was exposed. In 2018 the Royal Historical Society published a report into racial inequalities in UK university history departments, revealing a dearth of Black and Asian staff and students, widespread racial harassment and unrepresentative, ethnocentric curricula. The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was finally struck down after thirty years of campaigning.

The murder​ of George Floyd in 2020 and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement hastened the reckoning. Individual ‘heirs of slavery’ have apologised for the actions of their ancestors and offered financial redress. Institutions including Oxbridge colleges, museums and galleries, the Bank of England, the Church of England, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, even Lloyd’s of London, have been compelled to respond, establishing investigations into their slaving connections and offering some recompense, usually limited. But researching the slaveowners who donated to colleges or left bequests to galleries – even the discovery that the Bank of England acquired slaves as indemnity for failed mortgages – doesn’t result in structural change. One legacy of slavery was that forms of racialisation were locked into the mercantile capitalist system at every level. The ‘African’ was destined to labour for the white man. The reorganising of capital and labour that has taken place since abolition, from industrial to financial capitalism and today’s adaptations of neoliberalism, has led to reconfigurations of racialisation, but it remains central to Britain’s economy, culture and society. The problems are systemic: a long history of exploitation, extraction and accumulation demands major change. Improving figures on diversity and ensuring increased representation of Black and Brown people does nothing to tackle structural inequalities. Bringing people of colour into existing situations is not in itself transformative. White dominance persists. Academic researchers and curators have often been appointed on short-term contracts: their jobs disappear. Changes in curricula do little to improve the experience of students in the classroom and beyond. Big exhibitions, however powerful, do not quickly change cultures of acquisition and interpretation. Immediate investments made in the face of public pressure are soon terminated. Much is promised but not everything delivered. The successes have, furthermore, produced a backlash. Outrage about the National Trust’s commitment to making visible slaving and imperial histories, as well as fears for the statues of imperial men and memorials to slaveowners, have inspired hostile reactions. The culture warriors of the populist right, with their easy access to funding and the press, have their eyes fixed on the ‘woke’. The Tories’ cynical interventions in the appointment of trustees and in the workings of equality and diversity programmes may have ceased with their expulsion from power, but Nigel Farage still sets out to reclaim ‘our’ history.

Lisa Nandy, the new culture secretary, has promised an end to culture wars and a more inclusive vision of the nation. But what does ‘progressive patriotism’ mean? The Treasury is empty, the welfare state in deep trouble, universities heading for bankruptcy, galleries and museums closing or limiting activities. We will not see major financial state reparation any time soon, despite the moral debt. The work of repair will continue, however, and with it, one hopes, more talk, capable of recognising the complexity and the disavowals of the past and of considering the way racialised afterlives, both Black and white, are lived in the present. Repairing does not transform. But acknowledgment and recognition are necessary steps towards any major change. As the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe reminds us, we can aim for ‘the beginnings of a reparation through recognition, the first hint of the constitution of a beyond’.