

































The Reality of Reparations: An Exploration of Neo-Colonialism, 
Morality and Control in the Caribbean

Amna Khan
King’s College London
Religion, Politics & Society BA

Reparations are widely understood as the 
process by which compensation is given or 
amends made for previous wrongdoing. In the 
context of the Caribbean, it may refer to 
official actions taken by former colonial 
powers to acknowledge and recompense states 
affected by colonialism and slavery. This paper 
seeks to analyse discussions of reparations in 
the region and consider how the lack of com-
pensation may be perceived as demonstrating 
that modern power relations are merely 
repackaged propagations of imperialism. 
Fundamentally, this paper argues that the 
notion that colonisation was left behind in the 
19th century with the abolition of slavery or 
mid-20th Century with the political indepen-
dence of Caribbean nation-states is a facade 
and uses reparations discourse as the foremost 
example of such. This is demonstrated through 
the following questions: Why do reparations 
need to be paid? Why are they not being paid? 
And What needs to change?

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Caribbean politics, 
reparations discourse, colonialism, 

neo-colonial economics, 
CARICOM

B I O

Amna Khan is a final year student studying Religion, Politics & Society at King’s 
College London. She completed this paper as part of her semester abroad with Universi-
ty of Toronto. Her focuses include the intersections of politics and its surrounding 
themes in current global discourses and the history of capitalism in modern cities.

© 2021 Amna Khan
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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l 

     Amy Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights and Caribbean Reparations Discourse,” Leiden Journal of International Law 
            30, no. 3 (2017): 633, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156517000073
     University College London (UCL), “Legacies of British Slave-ownership,” University College London Department 
            of History, accessed April 3, 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.
     David Olusoga. “The Treasury’s tweet shows slavery is still misunderstood,” The Guardian, February 12, 2018,
     Randall Robinson, The Debt, What America Owes To Blacks (New York: Plume Books, 2000), 216. 
        

 

 

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The historical events of colonial slavery 
were undeniably tragic; however, repara-
tions discourse also looks to ending the 
“continuing dispossession” of the 
oppressed communities colonial systems 
created.  The unfortunate reality is that 
when Caribbean states assumed their 
independence beginning in the 1960s, the 
institutional features of their colonial 
subjection did not immediately disappear. 
Instead, these same oppressive policies 
took new forms. Not only was this evident 
through Caribbean governments, some of 
whom are still recovering from lingering 
ideological rejections of democracy 
instilled by experiences of corrupt and 
unrepresentative leadership, but analyses 
of major American and British infrastruc-
tures and corporations reveals that they too 
were founded on the exploitation of 
slaves. This highlights the ways in which 
the continued existence of colonial 
systems and organizations is a preserva-
tion of those colonialist ideologies at the 
continued determent of the subaltern

British historian David Olusoga generated 
a database in collaboration with University 
College London (UCL) entitled ‘Legacies 
of British slave-ownership’ which offers 
an interface through which members of the 
public can observe the quantifiable 
foundation from which major British 
establishments were built on slavery. The 
commercial database involves over 1400 
individuals and information on broader 

cultural and political legacies. For exam-
ple, the Bank of England alone has 
relationships with twenty-nine individuals 
and investors who had slave-related 
legacies.  The Bank of England remains 
the central bank of the United Kingdom. 
Thus, it is a reminder of the ways in which 
the subject of reparations stays ever-pres-
ent in modern discourses where relation-
ships from slavery and colonization are 
widely identifiable. This is especially 
applicable when one considers that official 
monetary acknowledgements have never 
been in favour of the slaves. Part of the 
Abolition Act of 1833 Britain compensat-
ed 46,000 slave-owners with £20 million 
for their “loss of human property;” but 
neglected to provide any form of apology 
or recompensation for the real victims.

In ‘The Case for Reparations’ event held 
in summer 2020, Hilary Beckles men-
tioned how the events catalyzed by George 
Floyd’s death in March of that year 
reaffirmed how the disposal of black lives 
has been entrenched since colonial days. 
This is evidence of how the effects of 
slavery are not simply traceable to histori-
cal periods but rather its victims are 
produced ad infinitum, “long after the 
active stage of crime has ended”.  Further, 
its lasting destruction affects a multitude 
of experiences, from economic to ideolog-
ical and cultural. Strecker’s exploration of 
the ‘Ongoing Violations of Indigenous 
Rights’ across the Caribbean evidences 
how land rights for native communities are 

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     Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 637.
     Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 640.
     Alfred L. Brophy, “The Case for Reparations for Slavery in the Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 1 (2014): 
             165, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2013.847222.
     Brophy, “The Case for Reparations,” 168.         

 

 

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both lacking and not effectively imple-
mented.  For example, Strecker accuses 
the Surinamese government of repeatedly 
failing to protect its N’dujka, Kalina and 
Lokono communities from mining inter-
ventions of their lands.

In Belize, where there are some interna-
tional laws in place for Mayan land rights 
but these are not fully implemented. Only 
two of the thirty-eight villages in the 
Toledo district were actually protected.  
This reveals that even where acknowl-
edgements are beginning to be made for 
comparable subaltern communities, they 
are not always followed through by 
relevant authorities. Simultaneously, 
public apologies for the historic signifi-
cance and existing unacceptability of 
slavery have begun to be made, as seen by 
British Prime Minister Tony Blair early on 
in his tenure. Regardless, the expectation 
of reparations by the Caribbean nations 
remains strong. So, why are they not being 
paid? 

The awareness about the inhumanity of 
slavery has long existed but for as long as 
these have been present, pro-slavery 
voices have been giving arguments as for 
why the process was justified or ultimately 
a net positive. These are extremely prob-
lematic as firstly, they are rooted in 
dehumanizing economic and legalistic 
terms – that may be perceived as the result 
of the commodification of man by the 
capitalistic nature of the modern world - 
and secondly because these are 

perspectives consistently perpetuated by 
the dominating force of the oppressor-op-
pressed relationship. In my exploration of 
the reason reparations claims have been 
largely ignored by the modern western 
world, I go into detail on these economic 
and legal bases from which pro-slavery 
literature has been grounded.

The legality of slavery has been long 
contested with authorities of European 
colonial powers consistently denying its 
criminality on the grounds that “law is 
district from morals”.  Brophy considers 
this question in his review of Beckles’ 
magnum opus Britain's Black Debt, 
writing that Beckles adopts the perspective 
that what is legal should refer to some 
“seemingly universal moral standards… 
outside of the courts and outside of 
Parliament” and based on a “natural law 
conception rather than a positive law 
conception”.  However, I recognise that 
this could be considered an idealistic 
conceptualisation where philosophically 
speaking, what one perceives as moral, the 
other may not. Just because something 
seems like it should be absolute does not 
mean it necessarily is, thus this explora-
tion of the definition of ‘legal’ further 
obscures the already complex reparations 
discourse The question of law also applies 
to modern day treaties as Strecker notes 
there is a lack of recognised “continuity 
between colonial administrators and newly 
independent states” where such is neces-
sary for realistic acknowledgements of 

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     Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 635.
     Olusoga, “The Treasury.”
     Brophy, “The Case for Reparations,” 165.
     Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (
             Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1859).
     Deborah Cowen, "Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method,” 
             Urban Geography 41, no. 4 (2020): 469-486, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2019.1677990.
     Cowen, "Following the infrastructures,” 469-471.

        

 

 

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previous wrongdoings to be made.  
Instead, the projected removal of colonisa-
tion from present discourses means there 
need not be acceptance of past tragedies as 
these institutions no longer exist, techni-
cally speaking. However, the reality is 
nowhere near as clear cut as European 
history would like us to believe. In the 
same vein that Olusoga reported the actual 
end of slavery came thirty years after its 
focal abolition, reparations discourse is not 
merely a consideration of past events. 
It may be argued, for example, that 
historically, many of the legal allocations 
and justifications of slavery were based in 
the fact that its economic benefits were 
clearly observable, falling victim to 
Brophy’s prophecy that “morality is so 
often sacrificed for money”.   American 
abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson 
contained this perspective through his 
notion that “slavery and anti-slavery is the 
question of property and no property” 
demonstrating how the basis of the slave 
trade was the exploitative commodifica-
tion of man to labour the mass consump-
tion of the industrial revolution.  

This schema of capital accumulation 
dictating social philosophy and livelihood 
is conceptually defined by the Marxist 
base and superstructure cyclical frame-
work, within which society’s means of 
production have direct influence over its 
laws, media, culture, politics and so on.  

At the same time European colonial 
expansion was gaining tract, capitalism 
was becoming consolidated as the 
economic foundation of the modern world. 
With such, the characteristics of individual 
profiteering, private accumulation and 
disenfranchisement of the lesser classes 
became standard and projected across the 
colonies of the European empire, fulfilling 
Lenin’s framework of ‘imperialism as the 
latest stage of capitalism’. Here, I map 
how imperialist ideological and institu-
tional frameworks persist in the present 
world through frameworks established 
during this vacuum of industrialisation, 
capitalisation and colonialism of the 19th 
and 20th centuries. As evidence for these 
economic justifications of slavery, I look 
to Cowen’s analysis of how modern 
Canadian city infrastructures are revelato-
ry of historic ‘settler’ relations, such as the 
Canadian Pacific Railway being funded in 
part from transatlantic slave funds and 
simultaneously being the current major 
port access from Canada to North Ameri-
ca.  In other words, both the development 
of these infrastructures themselves and 
their financing reproduces “nationalistic… 
material relations” rooted in and thus 
preserving “violence… (and) colonial 
dispossession” to this day. 

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      Brophy, “The Case for Reparations,” 167.
      Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 632.
      “CARICOM Ten Point Plan For Reparatory Justice,” CARICOM Caribbean Community, accessed March 30, 2021, 
             https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/.
        

 

 

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19Cowen’s article demonstrates the high 
extent to which colonialist sentiments are 
present in modern urbanisation .The 
historic prioritisation of economic gain 
over humanistic value was introduced by 
the commodification of man by slavery 
and evidentially exists to this day, provid-
ing grounds for authorities within the 
capitalistic worldview to reject reparations 
discourses.

Considering these perspectives, the 
question of ‘what needs to change?’ in 
order to facilitate an understanding of 
slavery and repatriations in line with 
modern morality remains. The reality is 
that the Black racial experience is continu-
ally repressed through structures which are 
inherently imperialistic. The acknowledge-
ment and apology involved in reparations 
is necessary for many communities to 
come to terms with their histories and 
improve their present livelihoods. As 
highlighted through his criticism of the 
second half of Beckles’ book, where 
Beckles discusses how reparations should 
be paid to descendants of the exploited, 
Brophy asserts that the “victims of slavery 
are still alive and well” and thus their 
acknowledgement is just as pressing.  

The main avenue through which repara-
tions have been officially presented is 
CARICOM’s Reparations Commission 
(CRC), which was set up following the 
2001 World Conference against 

Racism held in Durban.  The CARICOM 
website states its output “outlines the path 
to reconciliation, truth, and justice” and 
this is achieved through their ‘10 Point 
Plan for Reparatory Justice’ published in 
March 2014 with British law firm Leigh 
Day.  Some of these include attention to 
repatriation (point two), illiteracy eradica-
tion (point six) and debt cancellation 
(point nine), which is demonstrative of 
their multi-faceted consideration. Whilst 
catalytic for specific acknowledgement 
policies, CARICOM’s establishment 
focuses on interstate claims where wider 
reparations discourses must be adopted by 
international powers in order to be most 
extensively effective.

Having just explored the economic 
spotlight of reparations discourses, a major 
development which needs to be made by 
the international authorities involved is 
reparatory justice goes beyond monetisa-
tion. As I have explored through this 
paper, whilst colonialism and slavery were 
destructive to native economies, they also 
impacted ideologies, cultural histories, 
land rights and so on. Not only this but 
their destruction was not one-dimensional, 
affecting the intersections of labour and 
capital which influence modern conceptu-
alisations of value and experiences of 
livelihood in the capitalistic worldview we 
exist in. 

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      Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 644.
      Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 645.
      CARICOM, “CARICOM Ten Point Plan.”
      Mark Brown, “Jamaica seeks return of artefacts from British Museum,” The Guardian, August 7, 2019, 
              https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/minister-seeks-return-of-priceless-artefacts-from-british-museum
      Strecker, “Indigenous Land Rights,” 645.
      Brophy, “The Case for Reparations,” 168.
      Ray & Perry, “Why we need reparations,” 4.
      
      

        

 

 

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19A central form of reparatory justice which 
I believe is consistently overlooked is that 
of cultural heritage, supported as Lixinski 
communicates such objects and histories 
have “essential symbolic importance… 
(in) cultural revival and importance”.  This 
is especially significant where indigenous 
people are consistently victim to cultural 
loss and erasure with the “traditional 
narrative of extinction” constantly pushed 
by modern capitalistic powers.  This is a 
consideration evident in point four of 
CARICOM’s plan about ‘Cultural Institu-
tions’ which states European museums and 
research centres have access to “facilities 
to reinforce the consciousness of citizens 
in history as rulers and change agents” that 
Caribbean educators don’t.  On the subject 
of the reparations for cultural heritage, this 
is directly observable through museum 
institutions which actively house artefacts 
stolen from the colonial period. For 
example, in 2019, together with the 
National Reparations Commission, 
Jamaica’s Culture Minister Olivia Grange 
requested artefacts made by the indige-
nous Taino people “including a 
500-year-old carved wooden figure of a 
rain god” to be returned by the British 
Museum. 

Essentially, for reparations discourses to 
become more effective in their contents 
and implementation, the redefinition of 
terms which centralise the human needs to 
take place in their evolution. In order to 

 make this realistic, this involves European 
acknowledgement of its colonial history 
involving reparatory justice beyond 
distancing itself from the past. This is 
purported through Strecker’s recommen-
dations for these international authorities 
to actively fulfil their “political and moral 
obligation” to improve accessibility to 
physical means of heritage in their 
position as ex-oppressor with current 
dominating power.  Also, reparations 
discourse involves affirmative action as 
much as it does historic acknowledgement 
in order to be fully effective.  This is 
evident via Ray & Perry’s executive 
summary published by a non-profit policy 
research organisation on ‘Why We Need 
Reparations for Black Americans’ citing 
“The Harriet Tubman Community Invest-
ment Act” as a good template for reparato-
ry considerations to be structured in its 
address of “education, homeownership, 
and business ownership barriers” in 
practice. 

My exploration of reparations and its 
surrounding discourse proves how it is a 
consideration which is undeniably histori-
cally entrenched and requires far more 
attention than has been given in the 
international arena. I observe that the 
general rejection of claims for reparatory 
justices made by Caribbean nations to 
European western powers is evidence for 
how their current global dominance is 
based in those previous colonial 

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      Hilary Beckles. Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide (Kingston: 
              University of West Indies Press, 2013), 23.
      
      

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conceptualisations of control and trade 
they so wish to remove themselves from, 
with the reality being that so many modern 
establishments and infrastructures 
preserve the very frameworks that repara-
tions seek to acknowledge. To conclude 
this research paper, I quote one of Hilary 
Beckles’ final remarks on the topic: “The 
darkness of slavery will hover overhead 
until the illumination of reparative 
discourse takes effect and allows justice to 
be achieved”. 28

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