Jamaica Set to Seek Billions from Britain for Unjust Enrichment Over Slave Trade

From [HERE] Jamaica is preparing to request compensation from Britain over its role in the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries — when at least 600,000 Africans were shipped to the Caribbean as enslaved people — Jamaican officials told Reuters. The country, a former British colony independent since 1962, is set to seek billions of pounds in reparations.

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 Britain's 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.

Jamaica long served as a key node in a slave trade network that spanned continents, driven by Spain and then Britain.

Olivia Grange, [in photo above] Jamaica’s minister of sports, youth and culture, told Reuters her government would seek “reparatory justice in all forms” to “repair the damages that our ancestors experienced.”

“Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labor to the benefit of the British Empire,” she said, but did not divulge the exact sum to be sought.

The petition, Reuters reported, is connected to a motion filed by Jamaican lawmaker Mike Henry to seek more than $10 billion, his estimate of how much enslavers received in compensation after Britain abolished slavery, freeing an estimated 800,000 enslaved Black people in 1834. Britain made those disbursements after taking out a mammoth loan, the interest on which it finished paying only in 2015.

Enslaved people transported to the Caribbean were forced to work in dire conditions on sugar and crop plantations, where deadly diseases were rife. As many as 20 million African men, women and children were enslaved during this period, according to estimates.

Many plantation owners resided in England, with established slave-based industries across the Caribbean, funneling wealth to the British Empire.

“I have fought against this all my life, against chattel slavery which has dehumanized human life,” Henry told Reuters.

Like many countries that were once part of the British Empire, Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth, an association of nations, which Elizabeth heads.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement that swept much of the world last summer, many countries have seen renewed impetus to confront their own dark and violent histories of racism and inequality.

In Britain, as in the United States, debates have unfolded about how the history of slavery is taught in schools.

In the English city of Bristol, which was once at the heart of mass sugar importations, a statue of British politician Edward Colston was toppled during protests that erupted following the death of George Floyd last year. Colston was responsible for enslaving tens of thousands of people.