Caribbean governments are moving from reparations advocacy towards possible legal action against Britain. Yet any doctrine of inherited responsibility must reckon with the whole history: Britain’s part in the Atlantic slave trade, African participation in supplying it, Britain’s subsequent international campaign to suppress it, and the millions who remain trapped in forms of slavery today.
Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade does not need to be minimised in order to question the reparations case now being assembled against it. British merchants bought and transported enslaved Africans; British ships carried them across the Atlantic; British plantations consumed their labour; British investors profited; and British law recognised human beings as property. Recent archival work has added thousands of names to an already extensive historical record.¹ There is nothing to be gained by denying any of this. But history ceases to be history when the account is permitted to stop wherever the case for the prosecution is strongest.
That question has become urgent because Caribbean reparations advocacy is moving beyond commemoration and political campaigning towards possible litigation. At the Third CARICOM Regional Conference on Reparations in Barbados, regional leaders discussed an action programme intended to turn demands for reparations into legal and diplomatic measures. Jamaica has already petitioned King Charles III, in his capacity as King of Jamaica, seeking referral to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of questions concerning slavery and Britain’s alleged continuing reparatory obligations, while possible proceedings engaging the International Court of Justice are now openly discussed.² The legal difficulty is considerable. Britain told the United Nations in March that the principles of intertemporal law and non-retroactivity cannot simply be displaced by relabelling historic acts as continuing wrongs, while reparations advocates argue that contemporary racial and economic consequences engage present international obligations even where the originating acts predate the treaties now relied upon.³
Beneath that legal dispute lies an older and more difficult question: how, and to whom, does historical liability descend? CARICOM’s reparations programme expressly directs its claims towards European governments and institutions. Its Ten-Point Plan identifies European states as owners, traders and beneficiaries of enslaved Africans, while the developing reparations strategy increasingly joins Caribbean governments with the African Union in a common campaign for redress.⁴ Europe therefore appears predominantly as debtor and Africa predominantly as claimant. The historical record, however, does not divide so neatly.
Europeans did not obtain millions of enslaved Africans by ranging freely through the African interior and personally capturing every person eventually carried across the Atlantic. For substantial periods and across major areas of West and West-Central Africa, European traders depended upon African rulers, merchants and intermediaries who captured, purchased, transported and sold other Africans into coastal markets. Herbert S. Klein’s account of the organisation of the trade emphasises European dependence upon African suppliers, while David Eltis likewise stresses the commercial agency of African sellers and political authorities operating within the Atlantic system.⁵ This does not reduce European guilt by a single degree; it merely restores to the history actors who are too frequently removed from it.
There was, of course, no single political entity called “Africa” responsible for the slave trade. Some African societies were devastated by slave raids; some rulers resisted the traffic; others fought wars in which captives became commodities; and some merchants accumulated substantial wealth by supplying human beings to European buyers. European demand, finance, shipping and plantation economies massively expanded the trade and gave the Atlantic system its scale and racialised character. Yet guilt does not change its moral nature according to the colour of the perpetrator. European traders who bought and transported human beings were guilty, and African rulers and merchants who captured and sold human beings were guilty. Their victims remained victims whoever stood on the other side of the transaction.
Benin has itself acknowledged this history. President Mathieu Kérékou convened a reconciliation conference in 1999 at which his country confronted the role played by African rulers and merchants in supplying the Atlantic trade and sought forgiveness from descendants of those carried away. Modern Benin has more recently offered citizenship to descendants of enslaved Africans while continuing publicly to recognise the role of kingdoms and trading centres situated within its present territory.⁶ Yet no comparable strand of the present CARICOM programme seeks reparations from modern African states on the ground that historic kingdoms, rulers or merchants situated within their present borders participated in the capture and sale of people who subsequently reached the Caribbean. Instead, the African Union stands alongside CARICOM in pressing claims against former European powers.
There are serious reasons why claims against modern African states would be difficult. Modern Benin is not simply the Kingdom of Dahomey continued under another flag; Nigeria is not the Oyo Empire; Ghana cannot be reduced to the Asante kingdom or to the various coastal states which occupied portions of its modern territory. Political communities disappeared, borders altered, populations moved and colonial states were constructed over earlier political orders. But once that argument is admitted, the corresponding question cannot be avoided elsewhere: what precisely makes a modern state inherit a centuries-old liability? Britain possesses forms of institutional continuity which many modern African states do not. The Crown, Parliament and central institutions of the British state continued across the period in question, and particular estates, corporations or institutions may possess more directly traceable continuities still. Such distinctions are relevant, but continuity cannot be invoked only when it establishes culpability.
The British state which participated in the Atlantic slave trade later became one of the most determined international enemies of that trade. Britain was not literally the first political jurisdiction anywhere to abolish slavery or slave trading: Denmark-Norway legislated earlier against its transatlantic trade, while Haiti abolished slavery upon independence. The importance of the British case lies elsewhere. After Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, Britain did not merely prohibit British merchants from continuing it. It deployed the power of the state against the international trade itself, using naval force, diplomacy, treaties, mixed commissions and substantial public expenditure to suppress a commerce from which British subjects had previously profited.
The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron patrolled thousands of miles of coastline, intercepted slave ships, captured vessels and liberated Africans already being transported into bondage. Between 1808 and 1869 the Squadron seized more than 1,600 slave vessels and freed approximately 150,000 Africans.⁷ British sailors died in that campaign. The exaggerated claim sometimes circulated online that tens of thousands of Royal Navy personnel died is unsupported by the surviving evidence, but the documented toll remains substantial: naval records show 1,587 deaths from all causes between 1830 and 1865, while the broader estimate for the suppression campaign is approximately 2,000. Most died from yellow fever, malaria and other diseases rather than in combat, but they died while serving in an operation whose purpose was to prevent other human beings being carried into slavery.⁸
Britain also spent money to suppress the international trade. Under the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817, Britain agreed to pay Spain £400,000, a sum which expressly included compensation for losses arising from the ending of the Spanish slave trade; Spain in return undertook to terminate that traffic.⁹ Britain’s arrangements with Portugal similarly involved £300,000 in settlement of claims arising from Portuguese slave vessels previously detained by British cruisers, alongside agreements restricting the trade and moving towards abolition.¹⁰ Britain therefore did more than prohibit a commerce from which its merchants had profited. It spent public money, negotiated treaties, pressured foreign governments, deployed warships, boarded foreign vessels and lost naval personnel in a sustained international campaign against the slave trade.
None of this erases British guilt. A nation cannot absolve itself for having enslaved one man merely because it liberated another decades later, and there is no moral ledger upon which later virtue cancels earlier sin. But neither can historical continuity operate in only one direction. If the United Kingdom of today is sufficiently continuous with eighteenth-century Britain to inherit responsibility for the slave trade, then the same historical identity necessarily includes the Britain which abolished that trade, spent treasure persuading other powers to abandon it, deployed the Royal Navy against foreign slavers and buried sailors who died enforcing suppression. A national biography cannot honestly be terminated at the page upon which the nation is guilty.
The same complexity surrounds the £20 million compensation settlement attached to the abolition of slavery in 1833. The money went to slave owners rather than to those whom they had enslaved, and that fact remains morally shocking. The legal order had treated human beings as property and then compensated those whose supposed property rights were extinguished. Yet the payment must also be described according to what it actually did within the legislation: it formed part of the political and legal mechanism by which Parliament destroyed an existing property regime and emancipated hundreds of thousands of enslaved people across most of the British Empire. The apprenticeship system which accompanied emancipation remained coercive and defective, and full emancipation followed in 1838, but the compensation settlement cannot honestly be described merely as a subsidy to slave owners while omitting that it formed part of the legislative act which abolished their legal ownership of human beings.¹¹
Nuntiatoria has previously argued that the Atlantic slave trade must be condemned without detaching it from the wider history of human slavery.¹² Slavery existed across civilisations, races, continents and religions long before European ships crossed the Atlantic. The Atlantic system acquired particular horrors through its scale, racialisation and hereditary chattel character, but it did not invent the human desire to dominate, traffic and possess other human beings. Selective history becomes especially dangerous when it is converted into inherited political or financial liability, because what begins as commemoration then requires a coherent rule explaining why one living population is debtor and another creditor.
Catholic moral theology supplies a distinction which modern political rhetoric frequently blurs. Restitution belongs to justice. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that what has been unjustly taken must, where possible, be restored because justice concerns something actually owed to another. Christianity does not, however, teach hereditary personal guilt transmitted through blood: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” declares the Prophet Ezechiel.¹³ This does not mean an institution may retain identifiable stolen property merely because the men who stole it are dead, nor that the consequences of injustice evaporate when a generation passes. It means that justice requires precision about who owes, to whom it is owed, what was taken, what survives, what institution possesses the continuing obligation and upon what principle that obligation is transmitted.
That same principle must be capable of answering the inconvenient cases as well as the politically convenient ones. If constitutional discontinuity and the disappearance of historic political communities make inherited liability doubtful in Africa, their relevance elsewhere must be addressed rather than assumed away. If Britain’s continuing state identity carries obligations forward, the whole identity travels with them: the slave-trading state, the abolitionist Parliament, the diplomatic campaign, the Royal Navy’s suppression of the traffic and the public expenditure devoted to ending it. This is not an argument for acquittal. It is an argument against constructing liability from a deliberately truncated history.
There is another reason why this matters. Slavery is not merely an historical crime over which descendants now argue; it remains a present reality. The most recent comprehensive Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, produced by the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, estimated that 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021. Approximately seven million were estimated to be in Africa, including more than 3.8 million subjected to forced labour and more than three million in forced marriage. Walk Free also records forms of descent-based slavery continuing in parts of the Sahel.¹⁴ Modern slavery is not identical in every respect to the racialised hereditary chattel slavery of the Atlantic plantation economy, but terminology should not be allowed to conceal the reality that human beings are still being coerced, trafficked and treated as property or instruments of labour.
United Nations investigators have documented allegations of enslavement, sexual slavery and forced marriage in the war in Sudan. In Libya, UN reporting continues to record trafficking, forced labour, detention and exploitation of migrants and refugees by criminal groups, armed actors and persons associated with state institutions.¹⁵ These victims are not historical abstractions but living people. Their existence does not answer the Caribbean case against Britain: a trafficked African in Libya today cannot absolve a Liverpool slave merchant of 1750, African participation in the historic trade does not exonerate European participation, and Britain’s later abolition campaign does not resurrect those who died aboard slave ships or on plantations. The point is precisely that none of these facts cancels another, and therefore none of them should be erased.
CARICOM is entitled to present its historical argument, Britain is entitled to answer it, and any court eventually seized of the matter would have to consider jurisdiction, causation, retroactivity, state responsibility and the meaning of continuing harm according to law. But if reparatory justice is to become more than a political demand, it must possess an intelligible theory of responsibility. It must explain how liability passes from a dead perpetrator to a living institution, how an obligation survives the disappearance of one political order but not another, why some successor states inherit responsibility for the acts of their predecessors while others do not, and how restitution is to be distinguished from hereditary collective guilt.
The whole history is uncomfortable because it refuses to arrange itself neatly according to modern racial or political categories. Britain trafficked slaves and later became the principal naval power suppressing the Atlantic trade. African rulers and merchants supplied captives while other African peoples were their victims. Caribbean societies suffered the consequences of plantation slavery. Britain later abolished its slave trade and slavery across most of its empire, spent money persuading other states to do likewise, freed some 150,000 Africans from captured slave vessels and lost approximately 2,000 naval personnel during the suppression campaign. Meanwhile, forms of slavery persist in the world today. Justice does not require any of these truths to be suppressed in order for another to survive.
That is the difference between history and indictment. An indictment selects the evidence necessary to prove its charge. History has to tell the whole truth.
¹ Monarchs, MPs and merchants: the register laying bare Britain’s slave-trading past — The Guardian, 14 September 2026
² Caribbean nations draft action plan to push UK to redress reparations over slavery — The Guardian, 19 September 2026; The King of Jamaica and the Judicial Committee — House of Commons Library, 16 September 2026
³ UK Explanation of Vote on the Declaration of the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest Crime Against Humanity — GOV.UK, 25 March 2026
⁴ The CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparations: A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment — CARICOM; CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice — CARICOM
⁵ The African Organization of the Slave Trade — Herbert S. Klein, Cambridge University Press; Africa, Africans, and the Slave Trade — David Eltis, Cambridge University Press
⁶ Noble Desire: A Time for Healing — PBS/WHRO; Benin grants citizenship to slave descendants as it faces its own role in the trade — Associated Press
⁷ Slavery: How did the Abolition Acts of 1807 and 1833 affect the slave trade? — The National Archives
⁸ Royal Navy sailors died while preventing the slave trade, but not tens of thousands — Full Fact, 15 October 2020
⁹ Treaty with Spain for Preventing the Slave Trade — Hansard, 28 January 1818
¹⁰ Convention and Treaty between Great Britain and Portugal respecting the Slave Trade — Hansard, 2 February 1816
¹¹ Ministerial Plan for the Abolition of Slavery — Hansard, 3 June 1833; Slavery — The National Archives
¹² Understanding Slavery: The Church, Truth, and Reparations — Nuntiatoria, 26 January 2026
¹³ Ezechiel 18 — Douay-Rheims Bible; Summa Theologiae II-II, q.62: Of Restitution — St Thomas Aquinas
¹⁴ Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage — International Labour Organization, Walk Free and IOM; Modern Slavery in Africa — Walk Free
¹⁵ UN Special Procedures: allegations concerning sexual slavery, trafficking and forced marriage in Sudan — OHCHR; Business as usual: human rights violations and abuses against migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees in Libya — OHCHR/UNSMIL, 2026
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