The government of the island of Jamaica is planning to ask the United Kingdom for compensation for the Atlantic slave trade in the former British colony, a senior government official has revealed.
The minister of sports, youth and culture, Olivia Grange said the Caribbean nation will file a petition that could seek billions of pounds in reparations, pending legal advice.
Daily Mail quoted her as saying that the country hoped for ‘reparatory justice in all forms’ to ‘repair the damages that our ancestors experienced’.
The former British colonies of the Caribbean were all involved in the slave trade but it is Jamaica alone that will be asking for compensation.
It comes a decade after The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, set out to ask for reparations from Britain, France and the Netherlands in 2013.
The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, set out to ask for reparations from Britain, France and the Netherlands in 2013 but no island has yet received any payment.
Here is a list of the islands affected by slavery:
The Bahamas
A population census of 1671 of the Bahamas colony counted 443 slaves.
Barbados
The birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonised by Britain. It ended in 1834. The country was made independent from Britain in 1966. Between 1627 and 1807, approximately 387,000 enslaved Africans were sent to Barbados.
Belize
Slaves were imported to help cut logwood on the island. In 1820 there were 2,563 slaves in Belize.
Bermuda
There were never more than 6,000 slaves in Bermuda. The largest Bermudian slaveholder in 1663 owned only seventeen slaves. They were often known as indentures rather than slaves and contracts would run up to 20 years.
British Leeward Islands
Saint Kitts and Nevis
The first census of Saint Kitts, in 1671, recorded 1,739 African slaves. Six years later this grew to 3,849. a year later 1,436 slaves were recorded in Nevis.
Anguilla
In 1819, there were 360 Europeans, 320 free Africans, and 2451 slaves.
Antigua and Barbuda
Most of the saves in Antigua and Barbuda disembarked from the Bight of Biafra (22,000 Africans) and the Gold Coast (16,000 Africans).
British Virgin Islands
Emancipation freed a total of 5,792 slaves in the Territory.
Montserrat
Number of slaves started out as 523 in 1672, and had risen to 10,000 in 1774.
British Windward Islands
Dominica
Became a British colony in 1763 at the Peace of Paris which ended the Seven Years War with France. At that time the island had a population of 1,718 Frenchmen and 5,872 slaves working on coffee, cocoa and spice production.
Grenada
By the 1750s, there were 12,000 enslaved people in Grenada.
Saint Lucia
The 1730 census showed 463 occupants, including just 125 whites, 37 Caribs, 175 slaves, and the rest free blacks or mixed race.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
St Vincent and the Grenadines gained its independence from Britain in 1979.
Cayman Islands
At the time of abolition in 1834, there were more than 950 slaves owned by 116 Caymanian families.
Guyana
By the 1660s, the enslaved population numbered about 2,500.
The British took over in 1796 and remained in possession, except for short intervals, until 1814, when they purchased Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo, which were united in 1831 as the colony of British Guiana.
Jamaica
The British Invasion of Jamaica took place in May 1655, during the 1654 to 1660 Anglo-Spanish War, when an English expeditionary force captured the Spanish colony.
Oliver Cromwell increased the island’s European population by sending indentured servants and prisoners. There were 300,000 slaves in Jamaica in 1831.
Trinidad and Tobago
When the island was surrendered to the British in 1797 the population had increased to 17,643: 2,086 whites, 4,466 free people of colour, 1,082 Amerindians, and 10,009 African slaves.
Turks and Caicos Islands
In 1822, the islands reported just more than 1,900 slaves.
It was noted at the time that Britain paid £20m to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of £200bn now, in reparations during emancipation in 1834. No compensation has ever been paid to the descendants of the victims of slavery.
Jamaica was a centre of the slave trade, with the Spanish, then the British, forcibly transporting Africans to work on plantations of sugar cane, bananas and other crops that created fortunes for many of their owners.
Britain was not the only European nation to take part in the transatlantic slave trade, with the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and the Danish all involved.
An estimated 600,000 Africans were shipped to toil in Jamaica, according to the National Library of Jamaica.
Ms Grange added: ‘Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labour to the benefit of the British Empire,’ she said, adding: ‘Redress is well overdue.’
Seized from Spain by the British in 1655, Jamaica was a British colony until it became independent in 1962. It is not clear whether Jamaica also intends to seek reparations from Spain.
The island was discovered as part of an expedition led by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492 and brought under Spanish control. Other West Indies islands were then used as outposts by English pirates and privateers involved in raiding Spanish treasure fleets.
Some 200 years later, in 1655, Jamaica was seized by the British and would go on to become integral in Britain’s supply of sugar – a highly sought after commodity in the eighteen century.
The Caribbean countries of Jamaica, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Barbados, which were under British control, connected Britain to Western Africa and the Americas and formed a key part of the triangular slave trade between the countries and Britain.
They grew in population from a few thousand in the mid-17th Century to 18,000 in the 1680s – with slaves making up more than half of the total.
The West Indian country of almost three million people is part of the Commonwealth and the British monarch remains head of state.
Britain prohibited trade in slaves in its empire in 1807 but did not formally abolish the practice of slavery until 1834.
To compensate slave owners, the British government took out a £20million loan – a very large sum at the time – and only finished paying off the ensuing interest payments in 2015.
The reparations petition is based on a private motion by Jamaican lawmaker Mike Henry, who said it was worth some £7.6 billion, a sum he estimated is roughly equivalent in today’s terms to what Britain paid to the slaveholders.
‘I am asking for the same amount of money to be paid to the slaves that was paid to the slave owners,’ said Henry, a member of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party.
‘I am doing this because I have fought against this all my life, against chattel slavery which has dehumanised human life.’
Grange herself declined to give a figure.
The petition, with approval from Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations, will be filed pending advice from the attorney general and three legal teams, Grange said.
The attorney general will then send it to Queen Elizabeth, she added.
The initiative follows growing acknowledgement in some quarters of the role played by slavery in generating wealth in Britain, with businesses and seats of learning pledging financial contributions in compensation.
They include insurance market Lloyd’s of London, pub owner Greene King and the University of Glasgow.
The petition also coincides with increasing efforts by some in Jamaica to sever formal ties with the United Kingdom.
Opposition lawmaker Mikael Phillips in December presented a motion to remove Queen Elizabeth as head of state.
More than 15 million people were shackled into the transatlantic slave trade, according to the United Nations.
The transatlantic slave trade was a triangular route from Europe to Africa, to the Americas and back to Europe.
Firstly, merchants exported goods to Africa in return for enslaved Africans, gold, ivory and spices. The ships then headed across to the American colonies where the slaves were sold for sugar, tobacco, cotton and other produce.
Once in the colonies the slaves worked on plantations and inside the homes of Europeans as cleaners, cooks or other household domestics.
The products were then brought back to Europe, benefiting British citizens and producing profit for businesses based in Britain.
Slaves were victim to an oppressive regime that exploited labour to make profit for wealthy landowners. They were bought and sold as property and often lived under horrendous conditions.
In 1672 the Royal Africa Company was formed and held the monopoly on the British slave trade. Jamaica became one of the busiest markets and African slaves soon outnumbered Europeans five to one.
The gold it supplied to the Royal Mint was named the guinea, after the West African country from which the gold was taken.
