I would like to draw your attention to the updated entry on “Black Reparations” in the Stanford Encyclopedia (SEP) by Bernard Boxill and J. Angelo Corlett.* Here is the introduction (and of course I urge you to read the entire piece):
“States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations of North America are demanding the return of their tribal lands from Europeans as reparations; Eastern Europeans dispossessed by socialist governments are demanding the return of their property as reparations; and U.S. blacks (black people whose genealogy traces back to slavery within the U.S.) are demanding reparations from the United States of America for the harmful wrongdoings to them caused by U.S. slavery and its aftermath. The last of these demands is our subject.”
* * *
In thinking about reparations to blacks we should recall, with our authors, indemnification for slaveowners with the abolition of slavery (‘abolition’ is not equivalent to ‘emancipation, the former being a necessary but not sufficient condition of the latter):
“Demands for compensation related to slavery frequently arose during the U.S. Civil War, but [did] not do so in the way present day U.S. citizens would expect. The demands were not to compensate the black slaves for the injuries of slavery, but to compensate the white slaveholders for the anticipated loss of their slaves. These demands were voiced in the South when they faced the prospect of having to free their slaves, but they were also voiced in the North, and from the highest sources. President Abraham Lincoln, for example, repeatedly urged compensated emancipation, which meant paying the slaveholders for the loss of their slaves who would then be deported from the U.S. Indeed, at one time he appeared to be ready to propose paying the South $400,000,000, for the loss of their slaves. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed dryly: ‘Lincoln was impressed by the loss of capital invested in slaves, but curiously never seemed seriously to consider the correlative loss of wage and opportunity of slave workers, the tangible results of whose exploitation had gone into the planters’ pockets for two centuries.’ (Du Bois 1992 [1935]: 150) And Lincoln did not even sugar coat his deportation proposal with the suggestion that the freedmen were a nation and therefore needed a separate territory on which to govern themselves.”
Here are two more vivid examples of indemnification of slaveowners outside the U.S., from England and France respectively, courtesy of Thomas Piketty:
The British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1832, but the actual elimination was gradual, not taking full effect until some 10 years later. Moreover, it involved the “complete indemnification of slaveowners,” while “[n]o funds were appropriated to compensate slaves for the damages they or their ancestors had suffered, whether serious physical harm or mere loss of wages for centuries of unpaid labor.” While no amount of tort damages could amount to full justice for the harms suffered, for the denial of human dignity and loss or diminution of fundamental liberties and corresponding loss of human welfare and well-being, significant reparations would have been a step in the right direction. In fact, racist discrimination and unequal treatment continued, as “former slaves, once emancipated, were obliged to sign relatively rigid and undercompensated long-term labor contracts, which left most of them in semi-forced labor for long periods after their official liberation. By contrast, in the British case slaveowners were entitled to full compensation for their loss of property.”** The quoted material is from Thomas Piketty in Part Two, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
And now France, with even more deleterious consequences:
“The Haitian case is emblematic, not only because it was the first abolition of the modern era following a victorious slave revolt and the first independence secured by a black population from a European power but also because the episode ended with a gigantic debt that did much to undermine the development of Haiti over the next two centuries. If France finally agreed to recognize Haitian independence in 1825 and to end its threat to invade the island with French troops, it was only because Charles X extracted from the Haitian government a promise to pay 150 million gold francs to compensate slaveowners for loss of their property [‘the figure was based on the profitability of the plantations and the value of slaves prior to the Haitian revolution’]. The government in Port-au-Prince really had no choice given France’s obvious military superiority, the embargo imposed by the French fleet pending a settlement, and the real risk of an occupation of the island. [....]
Recent research has shown that the sum of 150 million gold francs represented more than 300 percent of Haiti’s national income in 1825—in other words, three years of production. The treaty also provided that the entire amount should be paid within five years to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignation (a public banking institution created during the French Revolution and still in existence today), where it would be paid out to the despoiled slaveowners (which was done), while the Haitian government was required to refinance the loan from the Caisse with new loans from private French banks so as to spread the payments over time (which was also done). It is crucial to recognize the magnitude of the sums involved. With refinancing at an annual interest of 5 percent, typical for the time—not even counting the juicy commissions that the bankers did not fail to add on in the course of numerous partial defaults and renegotiations over the subsequent decades—this meant Haiti was obliged to repay the equivalent of 15 percent of its national product every year, indefinitely, simply to pay the interest of the debt without even beginning to pay down the principal. [….]
The 1825 debt was not definitively repaid and officially wiped from the books until the early 1950s. For more than a century, from 1825 to 1950 [!], the price that France insisted Haiti pay for its freedom had one main consequence: namely, that the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the question of the indemnity....” — Thomas Piketty, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” in Part II of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
* I was surprised to learn that Alfred L. Brophy’s book, Reparations: Pro & Con (Oxford University Press, 2006), was not included in the bibliography for this entry.
** The indemnity was roughly equal to the “market value” of the slaves.
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