No Cheques, Just Words: London Settles Slavery With Language

According to Le Monde, the Commonwealth summit, which wrapped up on Wednesday in the Caribbean, saw the British government rule out any debate on reparations for the slave trade, despite demands from the countries concerned. The King, for his part, expressed his "horror" at slavery. The paper's headline suggests London should issue a formal apology while refusing to consider any payment. The details of these apologies, their form and their timing do not appear in the material available to us; we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The pattern is a classic, and an effective one: concede the moral past, lock down the material present. "Horror" costs the Treasury nothing. It even has an accounting advantage: it closes the conversation on the register of feelings, whereas the Caribbean countries reopen it on the register of the balance sheet. For a reparation is not an official sob, it is a ledger entry: who was enriched, who was impoverished, and who still holds the difference.

This is where theory earns its keep. Marxists call "primitive accumulation" the founding phase of capitalism in which violence separated human beings from their land, their freedom and their labour: enclosures, colonial plunder, slavery. Many see a process that never truly stops. If we follow that logic, the capital generated by the slave trade did not vanish with abolition; it was converted, invested, inherited. The apologies cover the act, while the refusal to pay protects the proceeds of the act.

The other side is that of dependency. For anticolonial thinkers, poor countries do not simply have "backwardness": their economies were shaped to supply the centre with raw materials, cheap labour and captive markets. Caribbean states demanding reparations are therefore not begging for alms; they are challenging the structure that, two centuries later, still determines who owes and who owns. Raising the question of debt in one direction only, that of today's indebted states, while omitting that of yesterday, amounts to a remarkably selective bookkeeping.

Consider the staging: a Commonwealth summit, an institution born of empire, becomes the platform where the empire is lamented without discussing its legacy. Neat exercise in management: contrition as a communications tool, budgetary silence as policy.

What we do not yet know: whether London is proposing alternatives, whether programmes, cooperation or something else, and how Caribbean governments will respond. But the signal is clear. Acknowledging the crime without touching the wealth it nourished is the method of former powers: settle history in words, and keep the assets.