Slavery: London compensated the owners, never the enslaved

According to Al Jazeera, which devotes a video to the question, Britain refuses to pay reparations for slavery. The outlet recalls a fact that British school textbooks are happy to treat lightly: at abolition, it was the state that compensated the slave owners, not the people who had been enslaved. Al Jazeera asks whether apologies without reparations can ever be enough. The report is thin: it gives no figures, no official positions and no arguments put forward by the government. We will not invent them.

What can be said, starting from that single established fact, is already telling. Public money circulated, and it circulated in a precise direction: towards those who owned human beings. So there were, in a sense, reparations. They were simply paid to the wrong party. When London now replies that the past cannot be reopened, the answer is strange: the past had been reopened, and settled, in the owners' favour.

Here our reading begins, and it commits only us. Marxists speak of primitive accumulation: capitalism was born of violence, the separation of people from their land, colonial plunder, slavery. Many see this as a continuing process, not a prehistory. From that angle, compensating the owners is not a bookkeeping anecdote but a mechanism of transfer: stolen labour produced capital, then abolition converted the "loss" of that capital into a claim on the community. Some kept the wealth; others inherited the moral debt and the poverty.

One can also turn to dependency theory. The economies of the former colonies were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and markets to the centre. Debt, unequal exchange and conditional loans have prolonged that position. An official apology, however sincere, touches none of these mechanisms. It costs a sentence; reparations would cost a redistribution. That is the whole difference, and probably the reason for the refusal.

The usual objection holds that today's taxpayers are not responsible for yesterday's crimes. But yesterday's beneficiaries passed on their property, and British institutions did pay, in 1830, what they considered due. You cannot both honour the continuity of the state when it comes to compensating owners and declare that continuity broken when it comes to the descendants of the enslaved.

What the report does not say is in what form reparations could be considered, and who would define their terms. Development funds, debt cancellation, restitution: the debate is open, and it would be healthy for the peoples concerned, rather than the chancelleries (foreign ministries), to set its agenda. One thing is certain: as long as Britain apologises without giving anything back, it will only have changed the tone of the bill, not who it is addressed to.