Is it of any financial benefit to them to do so though?

Now Zaha's got a bit of green grass ahead of him here... and finds Ambrose... not a bad effort!!!!

As I've said elsewhere, the taxpayer has already been involved by the paying abolition 'reparations' to those aristocratic families.

As I've said elsewhere, the records of who was paid what bonds is still held by the bank of England so shouldn't be a problem to know what the sums are. Add interest, of course.

Yup but it was a while ago. Oh for the record have you seen what’s happening in Africa. Niger and now Gabon being taken over by the military. Despotic regimes. That’s the way to go. What an amazing example of self rule. South Africa and Zimbabwe need a mention as well. Africa if f***ed.

The current Lod Harewood, David, the 8th Earl Of Harewood:

Harewood House was commissioned by his ancestor Edwin Lascelles in the mid-18th century.

The expensive project was funded by money Edwin's father Henry made in the West Indian sugar trade.

He owned 26 plantations and 3,000 slaves, who were forcibly shipped to the Caribbean to produce sugar, rum, cotton and tobacco for the European market.

Archived documents show the family had plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, Tobago and Grenada.

And they ranked among the top one percent of aristocratic slave-owning families of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, according to researchers at the University of York.
("experts" are academics who are funded by the taxpayer and have to justify their existence", so we're told)

Lascelles himself said he doesn't feel shame in a personal way but feels "accountable" in some way.

Confronting his past in a new Channel 5 series, he said: "I don’t feel that feeling guilty for something you have no involvement with is a helpful emotion.

"What I am responsible for is what I try to do about that legacy. To try in a small way to make that a force for good today."

Edited by Glazier#1 (30 Aug 2023 3.23pm)

Edited by Glazier#1 (30 Aug 2023 3.24pm)

The reparations idea can be a respectable, reasonable, and practical one. A few years ago when Greece was (as usual) in an economic mess, they had the cheek to invoice Germany for damages caused in WWII. It was cheeky not because that was then and this is now, or because you can't put a figure on such things, but because (as Germany pointed out) they had already paid the bill as part of the reparations after WWII.

Reparations by the defeated aggressor after a war are common, so why not for things like the slave trade and/or colonial expansion? I can see the case that people of our (and other) nations can be argued to have a better quality of life/stronger economy due, in part, to historic slave trading which, in turn, reduced the economic prospects of the nations who had parts of their populations stolen.

The problem as I see it, and leaving aside the (critical) issue of only seeing history and the world through one lense, is how on earth do you design a formula to establish the final settlement figure for reparations?

Can any equation or formula ever establish, weigh and include things like, for example:

1. The contesting of WWII by (not exclusively, but in the main) Western colonial nations at their great expense in every respect. Hitler was pretty close to winning and establishing a Nazi state across Europe and, notwithstanding his apparent disinterest in Africa at the time, it is hard to imagine the Third Reich maintaining that position once WWII was won. They would have needed resources to recover and continue to world domination which, though it sounds a bit James Bond Villian now, is what they were all about. Hard to imagine that being in the best interest of the average African.

One review tells me that whilst Nazis did not have any direct hatred for Black people (that was mostly reserved for the Jews and other groups closer to home, as we know) in Mein Kampf Hitler nevertheless portrays Africans as a kind of “semi-animal” that can be “useful if enslaved”. Jesus... Just think about that for a minute.

What weight does the reparations formula attach to the sacrifice made by Britain to prevent such a monstrous regime, against which either African states would have struggled to defend themselves militarily or, which African rulers would have chosen or been forced to comply with to the great detriment of their people, from rising to unassailable power? Do we get credit in the bank for that? If not, why not? If so, how much? Does Africa owe Europe money in that respect? Is it more than we owe them?

2. The sale of captured warriors to slave traders by African rulers. Apparently, in some cases the African kingdoms that captured and sold slaves still exist today as tribal networks, and so do the groups that were raided. Do the former owe the latter reparations? Are the former owed anything at all? Do we subtract what the former owes the latter from our bill? How do we ensure the worthy get the compensation and not the guilty if paying reparations to a wider state? What caused more damage to the economy of the overall African state (as is now) between the sale of slaves by Africans and the kidnap of African people by Europeans? Do we only owe Africa for the slaves that were stolen in raids, and not for those 'purchased' from a willing Africa? How do we split that bill?

3. The extent of interruption to development across affected African states. I can well imagine that the loss of a chunk of your population to the slave trade might (on top of the individual horrors involved) harm your nations economic and social development, but how do you tease out what level of development various African states would have achieved had they not lost those people?

We tend to think of nations and civilizations developing in a fairly linear manner over the centuries as that is generally what occurred in Europe, but linear development is not guaranteed. There were some ancient, developed civilizations across parts of Africa 1000 years ago that had simply vanished from the map by the time of the slave trade, whilst European states continued to develop and grow. That does not mean that African civilizations were doomed to fail whilst ours were not, but how do we know that the African states most subject to slave trading would have developed positively otherwise?

Many 'sold' slaves were captured warriors in tribal conflicts that we might now compare to a civil war. Perhaps the slave trade incentivised such conflict (in which case we add more to the bill), but perhaps many of those conflicts (often pre-existing or based on pre-existing disputes) would have occurred anyway. They have, in some cases, continued into the modern age. What weight do you add to the slave trade against the cost of civil war when teasing out what has beset African development?

What would have become of captured, defeated African warriors if they hadn't been sold to slave traders by African rulers? If they would have been executed instead, then how did the sale of those slaves make any difference to the development of that state, other than positively (in a strictly economic sense)? Do we calculate the benefits to African nations of the fees paid to their rulers for slaves, and subtract it from our bill?

If, were it not for the slave trade, captured African warriors would have been set to slave labour by victorious African rulers within Africa (common enough in the pre-slave trade era), then are we to pay for the loss of development in Africa caused by the absence of African slaves in those lands? 'You stole our people to use as slaves' is a powerful statement emotionally, but is 'You bought our slaves so we couldn't use them as slaves ourselves' a claim that leads to reparations?

4. Healing time. How long does it take to recover from the loss of population and/or trauma caused by the slave trade? European nations lost a lot of people and resources in horrific circumstances in WWI and WWII, but recovered to have prosperous societies within a generation or two. Japan was levelled to the ground in a fireball of unimaginable pain and anguish but had one of the world's strongest economies within thirty years. Germany did pay operations to the UK after WWII (in a way) but Japan received none, suggesting reparations are not a pre-requisite for growth and stability.

Slavery was abolished more than 200 years ago (though continued illegally for some fifty years or so afterwards to an extent). After what time should the wound have healed? Is it still having an effect in Africa now? How do you tell? Why is it affecting Africa when Japan and Germany have recovered so fully? Whose fault is the different rate of recovery? Is it anyone's?

And that's just off the top of my head.

It is important to note that some very bad arseholes (Russia in particular) use the 'Well, we did something bad but actually once you dig a bit it's more complicated than you think, so who can really say who is at fault here?' ploy to get off the hook when they should face the music, and to not do that ourselves. Just because these things are complicated doesn't mean they should be shut down, but neither does it mean they should be simplified.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (30 Aug 2023 3.31pm)