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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
During the age of empire, European and American colonists perpetrated one of history’s most monstrous crimes: slavery. Millions of Africans were subjected to forced abduction, misery and death as part of the brutal Atlantic slave trade. However, since the perpetrators are long dead, should current generations make reparation for this historic injustice?
In this book, Janna Thompson uses three case studies – France’s treatment of Haiti, Britain’s role in the African slave trade, and the plight of African Americans ‒ to address these questions. She makes a nuanced case for the necessity of reparations, but argues that the exact form they take should vary from case to case, depending on factors both principled and practical.
This engaging book is a highly readable introduction to the issues for students and general readers grappling with the complexities of reparative justice and our responsibility for the darkest aspects of our past.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Preface
1 Slavery and Reparation
Challenging Slavery
Reparative Demands
What is Reparation?
Historical Injustices and Reparation
Notes
2 Should Current Generations Make Reparation for Slavery?
Argument from Inheritance
Argument from Unjust Enrichment
Argument from Continuing Harm
Responsibility for Reparation
Notes
3 What is Owed?
Reparation and Reconciliation
Apology as Reparation
Beyond Apology
Reparation to Haiti
Reparation to Africa
Reparation for Slavery in the United States
Conclusion: The Future of Reparation
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Political Theory Today
Janna Thompson, Should Current Generations Make Reparation for Slavery?
Should Current Generations Make Reparation for Slavery?
Janna Thompson
polity
Copyright © Janna Thompson 2018
The right of Janna Thompson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1645-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
The British Parliament banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in the British Empire in 1833. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848, and slavery in America officially ended in 1865. But its legacy remains. Slavery profoundly affected the modern world. It brought prosperity to European countries and the United States. It devastated many African communities and reduced others to dependency, sowing the seeds that later led to the European colonisation of Africa. It produced racially divided nations scarred by a history of prejudice, discrimination, distrust and fear. It fuels conflicts about history and national identity. Generation after generation of citizens have inherited the effects of slavery and its aftermath. ‘The past is never dead’, as William Faulkner once wrote. ‘It’s not even past.’
What should we do about the legacy of slavery? An answer gaining currency in recent years is that citizens of former slave-trading or slave-owning societies and beneficiaries of slavery should make reparation to the descendants of slaves and to communities that have been harmed by slavery and the slave trade. The World Conference Against Racism (2001) ruled that reparation to Africa for the slave trade and colonialism should at least be a topic for discussion. Heads of governments in the Caribbean established a commission in 2013 to mount a moral and legal case for reparation for slavery and other injustices of former colonial powers. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparation in America (N’COBRA) has been campaigning for reparation for slavery since 1987.
Demands for reparation are dismissed by most European and American leaders and rejected by many citizens. Why should present people take responsibility for a wrong that happened so long ago? How can descendants of slaves be entitled to reparation for slavery? And how do we determine how much (if anything) is owed?
Should current generations make reparation for slavery? The answer in this book is ‘yes they should’. But a case for reparation invites a critical response. Do you think that current generations owe reparation for slavery? Read this book and make your judgement.
1Slavery and Reparation
Slavery is morally wrong. Every moral theory of modern philosophy condemns it.1 To enslave people is to violate their basic human rights. Treating people as property that can be bought and sold and used as their owner pleases offends against what the eighteenth-century philosopher, Immanuel Kant, regarded as the bedrock of morality: that people should be treated as ends and not merely as means. Slavery denies people ownership over their own bodies, a natural right that Locke, the influential seventeenth-century political philosopher, took to be the foundation of a just society. Slavery, as it was commonly practised, broke up families and tore children away from their parents. It inflicted terror, misery and pain on millions of men and women who were abducted from their communities and shackled into slave ships. Those who survived the cramped and unhealthy conditions of the voyage were forced to work often under brutal conditions and were beaten, raped and sometimes worked to death by their owners.
Slavery is an ancient institution and it continues to exist in some places in the world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became a major source of wealth for Europeans who exploited and colonised the New World. Following the Arabs, who had been slave traders since medieval times, the Portuguese and Spanish enslaved Africans and used them to produce crops of coffee, tobacco and sugar for European markets. The Dutch, British and French soon joined them. In the American colonies slaves became an important source of labour, particularly in the South, where tobacco and later cotton growing became the major source of revenue. To supply an ever-increasing demand for slaves, a lucrative trade took Africans by the shipload from forts along the West African coast to colonies in the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean. Filled with the products of slave labour the ships sailed to ports in Europe and returned to Africa with cotton cloth from Manchester factories, linens from France and other products to sell to African chiefs in exchange for more slaves.
Great Britain soon became a dominant participant in this trade. In the ten years from 1721 to 1730 the British carried well over 100,000 slaves to Barbados, Jamaica and North America. The number increased in the following years and the prosperity of Liverpool, the major British slave port, and Manchester, the supplier of cotton goods, came to depend heavily on the slave trade. At the height of the slave trade in the 1780s more than 70,000 Africans were shipped to ports along the coastlines of North and South America and the Caribbean every year. Half of that number were carried by British ships. Trade depending on slaves was responsible for an estimated four fifths of the income that Britain extracted from its New World colonies.2
Britain prospered from slavery and the slave trade, and so did other European countries. The revenues from the coffee and sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) made France wealthy and powerful. Producing this wealth required a continual supply of slaves. An estimated 685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century alone. Life for a slave working in the coffee or cane fields of that island was brutal, nasty and often short. On average half of the slaves who arrived from Africa died within a few years.
In the United States before the Civil War – the conflict between North and South in 1861–5 that ended slavery – cotton grown by slaves produced over half of the nation’s export earnings and per capita income in the southern states was one of the highest in the world. Almost 4 million slaves were working on southern plantations by the advent of the War.
Challenging Slavery
Slavery not only benefited captains of slave ships and plantation owners, but also shareholders of businesses that depended on slavery, workers in trades that supported it and consumers of cheap cotton goods. They were not inclined to question its morality. Defenders claimed that slaves were better off labouring in Christian countries than living in the barbaric, heathen societies of Africa. But opposition to slavery, inspired by religion or ideas about rights, had existed in European culture since the Middle Ages. Quakers campaigned against slavery during the eighteenth century and gradually won over public opinion in northern America and Great Britain. Enlightenment philosophers, who thought that reason rather than religion or conventional opinion was the basis for morality, were discomforted by the incompatibility between the institution of slavery and their belief in the natural rights of all human beings.
Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution in 1789, slaves in Saint-Domingue rose up in 1791 and demanded the rights of man and citizen proclaimed by French revolutionaries. After defeating an army sent by the then ruler of France, Napoleon, in 1802, they created the independent nation of Haiti. As a price for recognising Haiti as an independent country France demanded 150 million gold francs as reparation to slave owners who had lost their property – ten times Haiti’s annual revenue at that time. To pay this crippling debt the new country had no choice but to borrow from French banks that charged exorbitant rates of interest. Haiti was still paying reparations to France until 1947.3
Through the last decades of the eighteenth century opposition to slavery grew. After a long struggle, abolitionists in Britain prevailed and Parliament banned the slave trade in 1807. Most other countries, including France in 1817 and the United States in 1808, supported the ban on the slave trade, but slave traders continued to operate and slave owners, especially in the American South, could rely on the natural increase of slaves to maintain their supply. Slavery did not come to an end in the United States until President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1865.
Reparative Demands
Shortly after the end of America’s Civil War, Thaddeus Stevens, a US Congressman who had been an opponent of slavery, proposed that reparation be made to former slaves in the form of land confiscated from former slave owners and supporters of slavery, along with payments to enable former slaves to establish themselves as independent farmers (Salzberger and Tuck 2004: 64–5). His bill was voted down and most of the land confiscated during the War was returned to its former owners. Most freed slaves had little choice but to return to their plantations or to accept positions as tenant farmers and subordination to white landlords.
Some Americans continued to call for reparation, but the unwillingness of the federal and state governments to consider grants or payments to former slaves and their descendants put it out of reach. The 1988 decision of the federal government to pay reparation to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II set a precedent that revived the movement for reparation for slavery (Henry 2003). The houses of the American Congress passed resolutions of apology for slavery in 2008 and 2009 but refused to pay reparation. No United States president has made an official apology. No reparation has ever been offered to descendants of slaves.
Elsewhere in the world acknowledgement of the wrong of slavery became a common way of addressing this historical injustice. Jacques Chirac, when president of France, instituted a national day of commemoration in 2006 to remember the stain of slavery in the country’s history. François Hollande, during a presidential visit to the Caribbean in 2015, acknowledged a debt to Haiti but insisted it was moral and not financial. Tony Blair, when British prime minister, expressed deep sorrow in 2006 for Britain’s role in the slave trade but offered no apology or financial reparations. David Cameron, during his 2015 visit to Jamaica as British prime minister, said that making an apology and paying reparation for slavery was not the right approach.
What is Reparation?
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle laid down the basics of reparative justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. If a wrong has been done, if someone unjustly takes something from another, then the wrongdoer is required to divest himself of his unjust gain so that it can be restored to the victim of the wrong.
His account embodies three principles of reparative justice. The first requires perpetrators to return what they have unjustly taken from their victims. If someone steals your bicycle then she should give it back. If she has lost it, then she owes you compensation equal to its value. The second principle prohibits anyone from benefiting from an injustice. Perpetrators must be forced to surrender the gains they have made from a wrong. And the third requires that victims should be compensated so that the harm caused by the injustice is removed. Together these principles express the guiding idea of reparation: that injustice creates an imbalance in the moral order that must be set right. Justice is accomplished when all those affected are returned to the situation they were in before the injustice took place – so far as this is possible.
The first principle focuses on restitution of stolen property, the second on the divestment of unjust gains that result from a wrong, and the third on the entitlement of the victim to compensation for harm. In Aristotle’s account, all three are satisfied when the perpetrator is forced to return what he has wrongfully taken to the person from whom it was taken. However, the principles can operate independently. The first principle requires the return of stolen property even when the victim was not harmed by its absence. The second principle can require a person to surrender unjust gains even when there is no longer a victim to whom a return can be made. Nor does the prohibition against benefiting from an injustice apply only to wrongdoers. A person who unwittingly acquires stolen goods as a gift or in a commercial exchange may be required to give them up because of what the law calls ‘unjust enrichment’.
