Reparation reconsidered: Slavery legacy in the Church of England

Michael Banner’s Britian’s Slavery Debt: Reparations now! (Oxford University Press, 2024) makes a robust case for British financial reparations to the Caribbean. There is no question that the ruthless exploitation of generations of those trafficked from Africa or born into enslavement to work the immensely profitable sugar plantations enriched both British individuals and the British nation. Colonialism, even after emancipation, perpetuated the exploitation. The Caribbean still suffers, and Britain still benefits, from these historic wrongs.

There are standard objections to reparations: ‘It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t our fault – you can’t blame us for the past,’ would be one typical response. Others urge British people to celebrate their role in abolishing slavery rather than perpetrating it. Others may offer legalism, arguing that the past cannot be judged by the present. However, Banner argues that reparations are not about punishment but the restoration of wrongful gains. Banner discusses what individuals and institutions can do, here and now, to advance the case for reparations between national governments.

In movements such as Black Lives Matter, we are therefore concerned with the legacy of empire and church, and with the moral injury that has inflicted a long-standing and near-fatal soul-wound on large segments of humanity. Christianity and civilisation ought to be two forces for the benefit of all humanity. Banner’s work shows that the church and empire, while laying claim to that mantle, did the very opposite. Their combined legacy left communities and nations in tatters, peoples in despair and millions of souls in anguish, subjected to a torment that still finds no kind of recognition or rapprochement from the perpetrators.

Racism continues, with slavery treated as some unfortunate oversight in an otherwise distant past. Moreover, the present work of reform and redress has not reckoned with the pain of the past. Just as post-colonial Britain has collective amnesia about an age of empire, the Church of England likewise fails to reckon with its role in exporting its nascent cultural values and outlooks.

Niall Fergusson’s Empire: How Britain made the world (Penguin, 2004) remarks on the average Englishman’s utter incomprehension of Hindu and Islamic faith, which by necessity had to be chalked up as ‘heathen’. For many missionary societies, what began as chaplaincy to the colonial masters expanded into conversionist efforts launched upon indigenous populations. Slavery was baked into the funding of this missionary work and was often essential to its actual delivery. By the mid-18th century, evangelism had been cast as light to those languishing in darkness, truth to those perishing in ignorance, civilisation to those living in depravity and salvation to those who would otherwise perish as heathen. Commerce, civilisation and Christianity went together. Few churches or denominations were prepared to acknowledge a fourth ‘C’: conquest. To convert the heathen, they first had to be subdued.^[1]

For example, the Anglican Church in Hong Kong (Sheng Kung Hui) cannot be understood apart from the British interventions in China, specifically the trade-led Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). The superior military advantage of the British (and their allies) forced China to accept unjust ‘treaties’ involving damaging concessions on trade, reparation and territories. For China, this resulted in ‘the century of humiliation’. ‘Guns and gospel’ were united under English imperialism.^[2] Today, Hong Kong Anglicans continue to address the legacy of this history through significant investment in pioneering mission and ministry.^[3]

The legacy of English slave trading continues to this day. Queen Anne’s Bounty was a charitable foundation established in 1704 to augment the stipends of impoverished Church of England clergy. This charitable foundation also invested significant sums in transporting slaves to the Americas. In turn, the grants the foundation gave were not direct payments to the clergy but were spent on acquiring land for the petitioning parishes, which could then be turned into rental or agricultural income. Furthermore, for parishes to draw down such financial support from Queen Anne’s Bounty, it was often a requirement for the parish to find a wealthy patron or benefactor – a third party – who would provide match funding. ^[4]

There had been earlier iterations of such arrangements to support poorer clergy. In 1544, the Church Burgesses of Sheffield were granted around 150 acres of land and income to support the town and its churches’ development. Under a Charter issued by Mary I, the twelve burgesses drew the income from this endowment. However, as with Queen Anne’s Bounty 150 years later, the endowment provided by the monarch was closely related to the new plantations that Mary I had established in Ireland, confiscating lands to give to favoured English settlers. Then, as now, it was hard to find ‘clean’ money from complex investment portfolios.^[5]

In the early 18th century, newly monied slave and plantation owners were often called upon to provide civic support. Edward Colston, who endowed charitable and Christian causes in Bristol, is just one example.^[6] William Beckford inherited over a dozen plantations and 3,000 slaves in Jamaica in 1737. Beckford went on to be Lord Mayor of London twice, supported city and guild churches, and used his slave-based wealth to advance political causes and to champion candidates for political office. Robert Walpole was a beneficiary.

Beckford’s willingness to cultivate political friends and gain influence often led to profligate spending, and infamously one dinner to entertain peers and nobility, reportedly costing £10,000. Beckford was instrumental in suppressing the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1760. Over 400 slaves were killed, and the leader burned alive ‘as an example’.^[7]

Queen Anne’s Bounty and the wealth of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were merged in 1948 to create the Church Commissioners, whose current investment fund is around £11 billion. In January 2023, the Church Commissioners announced that they were setting up a fund of £100 million to be spent over the next nine years on addressing historic links with slavery. The figure of £100 million may seem considerable. However, it amounts to 1% of the Church Commissioners’ estimated funds, and there is still no indication of how this fund will be used for reparations.^[8]

Economic exploitation

The case of a former colony, British Guyana, illustrates the impact of human importation, where successive waves of enforced immigration from Africa and the Indian subcontinent continues to produce racial tension. The geophysical impact is arguably greater. For example, in Antigua – to take just one former colonial Caribbean island-state – the ripping up of the forests in the 18th and early 19th centuries to make way for sugar plantations has rendered the territory susceptible to climate incidents that it would previously probably have managed. In 1780, exploiting water resources in sugar refining reduced the island to drought, causing 4,000 to die.

The degradation of the soil and the loss of forest root structure has left the island defenceless against storms and hurricanes. The island’s ecosystem has not recovered to this day. Today developed nations chide Brazil for deforestation of the Amazon to create pasture for beef, but this is precisely what the British and other colonising nations were doing 250 years ago. The exploitation of distant (or also not-so-distant) natural resources, irrespective of the long-term ecological cost, is an ancient and established European legacy.^[9]

If the ecological consequences of slavery seem hard to fathom, the human cost could be even more significant. Widespread sexual exploitation of female slaves led to sexual disease, which, in turn, reduced fertility among female slaves. Fewer children meant less profit for slaveowners, and infant deaths due to congenital syphilis from venereal disease were commonplace. As Alex Renton notes, some plantation owners realised that the mistreatment of women was uneconomic. That marked a change, as ethnic interbreeding had been commonplace, in order to produce lighter-skinned slaves to serve in houses, whereas the darker-skinned were left toiling in the fields. To head off the campaigning pleading of the abolitionists, female slaves started to be educated, and their children baptised, from the late 18th century, with edicts forbidding the physical punishment of women. The churches bought into this as progress.^[10]

Many plantation owners, including upright Christian exemplars, regarded the low birth rate among slave women as indicative of their natural inbred immorality and their inherent heathen outlooks. Even in the second half of the 19th century, with slavery outlawed in British colonies, the authorities were trying to reintroduce whippings and the treadmill as punishment for petty crime. In 1865, children caught pilfering were required to work for free on plantations for up to five years, which in effect amounted to the reintroduction of slave labour for children.

The very making of the Third World is a colonial legacy. Mike Davis charts the decline of British agriculture against the backdrop of cheap imported consumable goods from across the Empire. The mechanisation of English agriculture in the course of the Industrial Revolution produced a significant bump or uplift in Church of England income for much of the 18th century through the tithe system.^[11] At the same time, the late 18th century and much of the 19th century posed challenges in financing the Church of England.

Those challenges were met mainly through many new income streams derived from exploiting the colonies, which, as Davis shows, led to regular periodic famines in Africa, India and Asia. Creating subservient client colonies leaves the people and the land at the mercy of economics, politics and weather. Davis cites numerous instances where entire populations were left to starve.^[12] As with slavery, the Church of England, like other wealthy English corporations, was a beneficiary of the politics and economics of investment risk and returns, and it gained from its early stake in internationalism.

Ecclesial consequences

Upon the accession of Charles III, the Grenada National Reparations Commission issued a direct appeal for compensation and a fulsome apology for the role of the monarchy in slavery. The request was cast in the language of reparative justice, not restorative justice. Grenada, in common with many other exploited Caribbean states, is not looking to reboot its relationship with Great Britain. It is signalling severance.

It wants to have its share of a divorce settlement. The theological case for reparation is considerable and deeply rooted in the Old Testament ethics of jubilee. Despite this, the Church of England has stopped well short of reparation since the church will not be compensating individuals.

Unsurprisingly, all twelve countries in the Caribbean Reparation Commission (CARICOM) have expressed their expectation to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the governments of all the former colonial powers and the relevant institutions of those countries, to the nations and people of the Caribbean community for the crimes against humanity of native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a racialised system of chattel slavery.

A 2022 tour to Jamaica by the Prince and Princess of Wales (William and Kate) included the staging of several events highly reminiscent of the visit of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip many decades previously. This backfired, however, with a notably chilly reception from the Jamaican Prime Minister at the state banquet and a chiding speech to the royal couple on the legacy of slavery and the socio-economic problems Britain had bequeathed Jamaica to this day.

When the members of the Church Reparation Action Forum (CRAF) in Jamaica met representatives of the Church of England to discuss how they should repair relations with the people of Jamaica and other countries whose people were enslaved, the rhetorical chasms between the parties surfaced. The Church of England expressed the hope that there could be ‘healing’ and greater understanding to rebuild relations. English church leaders still calling the shots.^[13]

The Jamaican churches observed that the funds set aside by the Church of England – £100 million – were ‘quite small in terms of the dislocation and damage’ that has been perpetrated. Jamaican churches stated that they would ‘not want to be too quick to accept the funds,’ thereby missing the more profound problems and more significant cause.^[14] Jamaican churches suggested that a fulsome apology from the Church of England might be a start. They are still waiting.

The history of slavery is a stream of oppression, cruelty, racism and exploitation. Jamaica is a particularly pivotal island for the history of slavery. The ‘Baptist War’ in Jamaica of 1831 convulsed the churches and the role Christians played in eventual abolition. Earlier slave rebellions in Jamaica, and their brutal, cruel suppression, destroyed the case for gradualist reform. Many in the churches had supported gradualism. It avoided paying substantial compensation for slaveowners and also evaded potential risks to trade, plantations and produce. Gradualism, it was held, improved the lives of slaves, but avoided potential political risks imagined in wholesale emancipation. Yet it was only extreme violence and atrocities that destroyed the preferred gradualist approach.

Despite the Church of England being an overt, frequent and multiple beneficiary of slave trading, there is no indication that the denomination can see itself as an agent in the construction of ‘Anglican Imperialism’. Indeed, as Rowan Strong points out,^[15] bishops were apt at condemning the transatlantic slave trade as ‘a commerce disgraceful to the human species’, but stopping short of condemning slave ownership, as there was no clear mandate in scripture for doing so.

In contrast, American Episcopalians went from being overt apologists for slave ownership to much more profound and more reflective self-criticism. As Jennifer C. Snow notes in her outstanding work,^[16] the development of the America was in tandem with the history and culture of the Episcopal denomination.

Slavery was also a different prospect on either side of the Atlantic. In England, slaves were a potential financial investment offering a good return. In America, slaves were an expendable resource, and a means to an end. Loans and insurance were available, but the value and legal identity of slaves were different.

English slave owners rarely saw or met slaves, and many who invested in the trade and ownership only did so through London-based brokers, insurers and financial agents. Slaves were commodities that produced an annual yield with a guaranteed return. Mortgages and loans were available for such investments, as one might purchase properties to rent out.

Americans, in contrast, were hardly remote from their purchases. Slaves worked their land and also functioned as servants in their houses. Financially, slaves fell under different legal and commercial categories reserved for chattels and stocks. Like agricultural produce or clothing, slaves could be bought and sold as goods. Indeed, runaway slaves in 18th-century small ads in American newspapers list slaves as lost property. Tellingly, slaves were not advertised under land or real estate, but under chattels.

Bluntly, Americans were forced to face up to the value that was placed on slaves and those oppressed because of the colour of their skin. The English journey is more ambiguous and, frankly, less honest. It lacks that self-critical retrospect that seems to drive post-imperial American history and ecclesiology. The English cannot see themselves as oppressors but rather only as investors and opportunists who brought benefits, albeit occasionally going too far or getting it slightly wrong.

Americans, in contrast, have had to face up to their racism and oppression. This has led to the kind of healthful self-criticism we encounter in Jennifer C. Snow’s work, which has yet to emerge from within the Church of England’s ecclesiology. Perhaps this can only change when the English are freed of the myths and legends baked into their identity.

Colonialism and Imperialism

The Church of England may well argue that it was not responsible for exploiting nations and peoples that came through the British Empire. Nonetheless, as a church, it is undoubtedly accountable, and the articulation of the global communion, and even inculcating anti-slavery appeals, only served to supply the British Empire with a moral sheen that justified further impositions of ‘civilisation’.^[17]

While some may blanch at this, it is hard to see how systemic and structural inequalities – especially racism – can ever be addressed without high degrees of audited accountability within institutions. Where this is denied, the response to ongoing injustice will always be, ‘But you can’t blame us for the present, as that is all in the past.’ After a lot of pressure, a weak apology might be added, but this is light years away from repentance and reparation.

In Sharon Welch’s remarkable essay on feminist ethics, she puts her finger on the framework of power that leads to the present situation where many cannot escape the past. At the same time, no one is prepared to take responsibility for it. She writes of the ‘fundamental immorality of Euro-American ethics,’ and of the three twists which lie ‘at the heart of Western concepts of virtue’. These are:

‘Too much power poisons virtue; the evil caused by whites refusing to see the consequences of their actions; and the passionate destruction by whites of anything that cannot be controlled.’^[18]

Welch discusses the African-American novels of Paule Marshall (1929–2019), particularly The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (Longman, 1969) and Praisesong for the Widow (Plume, 1983). While Marshall is a novelist, her works are rich in fragments of memory, testimony, history, and witness, brought together in compelling narratives that are more real than the reality they reflect. The chosen place which is the subject of Marshall’s novel is Bourneville, a remote and devastated part of some Caribbean island. The inhabitants are the timeless people: black, poor, and inextricably linked to their past enslavement.

The novel tells of a moment when time is disrupted by the arrival of an ambitious American research project team and the subsequent tense, ambivalent relationships that then evolve. The friction between natives and foreigners, black and white, the haves and have-nots, and the upper and lower classes highlight the vicissitudes and disparities of power.

Central to the novel is the premise that unless whites can identify and own their exploitation of black people here in previous generations, history is condemned to repeat itself. If there is no repentance, there is no conversion. For the most part, the white characters that Marshall introduces are caught up in a fog of their oblivion. One such character, Harriet, is depicted as the embodiment of a certain kind of white righteousness that refuses to comprehend how control, class and privilege even cause her virtuous efforts to be distorting and alienating.

In one telling passage, Harriet cannot help responding to the immediate hunger she sees in the faces of the black children she visits one day. Their parents, Stinger and Gwen, are away cutting sugar cane, back-breaking work that does nothing to alleviate poverty. Harriet, having called at the house, realises that the children have not eaten all day, and it is now past five o’clock. She sees half a dozen eggs and offers to make the children an omelette. The eldest child protests. Harriet has none of it and ignores the protest. She makes the omelette and then leaves. Despite the children expressing no gratitude for this, Harriet reasons that she has acted out of virtue and necessity, and the children’s ingratitude is ill-mannered.

Only later is Harriet faced with the consequences of her (doubtless well-intentioned) intervention. Stinger and Gwen needed to sell the eggs – one of their very few sources of income – to make ends meet and to buy other food. Harriet is mortified yet cannot face the arrogant, cavalier disregard her action represents. She is even more devastated when she learns that the children did not even eat the omelette, as it would be selfish. She argues that the eggs were better for the children than the ‘awful’ daily diet of rice and beans that sustains the family. She has no comprehension that the income from the eggs bought decent quantities of rice and beans.^[19]

Who gets to determine precisely how reparation is paid out? Surely not the unrepentant who cannot see the degeneracy of those responsible who have inflicted such loss and trauma upon others but refuse to account for it in the present and the future? It is still too easy for white Euro-American people to assume that they bear no responsibility for the past and yet somehow can presume to resolve the present and future for others.

Marshall’s character of Harriet serves as a kind of exemplar of virtue gone wrong with baked-in classism. As Sharon Welch notes, Harriet exhibits:

‘One of the most effective defence mechanisms of the upper class and of all those in power: the inability to tolerate the rage of those who they have oppressed and an inability to hear what is being expressed through that rage… the self-righteous rejection of rage as a legitimate form of expression is itself a perpetuation of the cause of the rage.’^[20]

The role of the Church of England in the Caribbean and its commerce was well known. Chaplains and missions were present throughout, invariably trying to steer a middle path between ensuring subjugation and compliance while also (occasionally) speaking up for fair treatment. Well into the later part of the 19th century, Britons knew that sugar, rum, tobacco, rice, cotton and mahogany were all products of plantations. Consequently, the gains from slavery, direct and indirect, left a lasting legacy in the Church of England:^[21]

‘The Church of England… was deeply enmeshed with slavery. Almost a hundred clergymen were registered as slaveholders. The Church also received significant funds from philanthropists… who made their money from slavery. These contributions were used to build churches and schools, and the benefactors received wide coverage in the press for their good works. [Everyone] knew that such largesse was appreciated by the general population and that, along with the significant number of jobs that were dependent on the importation of sugar, cotton, coffee and other commodities, there was widespread support for Britain to continue operating its plantations in the Caribbean.’^[22]

The same applies to tea, spices and opium in the eastern parts of the Empire. When the British government compensated slave owners in Britain for their economic loss – the Slave Compensation Act of 1837 – 96 scheme beneficiaries were recorded as Church of England clergy.^[23]

Thousands more Anglican clergy, with their endowments and churches, were beneficiaries of investments in imported goods, shipping, insurance and financing. Several hundred continued to have their finances linked to stocks, shares and investments in plantations and their labourers well into the late 19th century. To put this on a broader context, only 68 MPs had ‘West Indian interests’, though the Bank of England did own 600 slaves, which was the same number owned by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.^[24] Granted, there were many more clergy compared to MPs, but even so, the investment from clergy is striking.

The era of ‘lucrative humanity’ was far from over, and the English economy continued to benefit directly from plantation output. The 1837 Act was predicated on the advice of a former governor of the Bank of England, John Horsley Palmer, who argued that as slavery lay at the heart of the English credit system, emancipation without compensation would undermine the economy and international confidence in the credit-worthiness of the country.^[25] In the face of that legislation, the English fondness for sugar leaves a bitter aftertaste; ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’ is an acrid legacy, even today.^[26]

Even after emancipation from slavery, former slaves were tied into extensive low-wage (so-called) ‘apprenticeships’ and their plantations (also their homes) remained bound to the labour-intensive production of crops and raw materials. Furthermore, freed slaves were often barred from owning land, were then reclassed as vagrants without work and then imprisoned unless they agreed to return to agricultural hard labour as bonded apprentices.

Emancipation was an illusion. Freedom only came when industrialisation and markets for raw materials made slavery too expensive. That was not until the final third of the 19th century, however. The raw materials and the goods that the enslaved produced were well-known to be integral to the British economy, and all parts of the Church of England were invested in keeping English finances stable.

Today, the Church of England continues to operate with its curious blend of partial blindness and selective amnesia. When the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby briefly visited Hong Kong in October 2013, he insisted on spending several hours with and paying his respects to the English Protestant missionary Jackie Pullinger. Pullinger had enjoyed massive acclaim as a Pentecostal healer among the drug dens, crack dealers, heroin addicts, prostitutes and gangsters within Kowloon’s notorious walled city.^[27] Welby, clearly impressed by Pullinger’s ministry, seemed to have no awareness that the walled city and its crime cartels were a direct result of English foreign policy, and especially the Opium Wars with China.

The propulsive effect of human trafficking on the entire British economy, and most especially its supercharging of English coffers and opportunities, inevitably benefited the national church. English national blinkers, however, have chosen not to look at slave trading as a critical element in the foundation of the Empire and, subsequently, in modern nationhood. Just as there were centuries ago, there are apologists now for the past and present who will argue that forensic accountability of the human and economic exploitation that took place on a vast scale is too complex to undertake, let alone undo.^[28]

Yet reparation and atonement for the past are rarely thought to be in the best interests of those who preside over the many gains of imperialism and empire and do not wish to lose them. Monarchical governance in the Church of England will prefer charity to proper compensation. It will argue for statements of regret rather than full reparation. The prevailing powers will deny the ongoing bitter legacy of human trafficking, ecological decimation and economic exploitation.

My question is very simple: What would Jesus do (WWJD)?

Endnotes

[1] Niall Fergusson, Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power (Basic Books, 2004), pp. 45–62.

[2] Ambrose Mong, Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and evangelism in China (James Clarke & Co., 2016).

[3] See Philip Wickeri (series editor), Sheng Kung Hui: Historical studies of Anglican Christianity in China, 6 volumes (Hong University Press, 2013–22).

[4] See William Le Fanu, Queen Anne’s Bounty: A short account of its history and work (Macmillan, 1921).

[5] Harriet Sherwood, ‘C of E paid poor 18th-century clergy with “abominable” slave trade funds’, The Guardian, theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/16/church-of-england-paid-poor-18th-century-clergy-with-abominable-slave-trade-funds-justin-welby; and Hattie Williams, ‘Church Commissioners acknowledge that slave trade boosted early funds’, The Church Times, churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/17-june/news/uk/church-commissioners-acknowledge-that-slave-trade-boosted-early-funds. See also Andrew Chandler, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church commissioners and the politics of reform, 1948–1998 (Boydell and Brewer, 2006).

[6] Samuel Richards, ‘Historical Revision in Church: Re-examining the “saint” Edward Colston’, Anglican and Episcopal History 89:3 (September, 2020) pp. 239–241; and Judith Evans, ‘Bristol, the Slave Trade and a Reckoning with the Past’, Financial Times, ft.com/content/032fe4a0-9a96-11e8-ab77-f854c65a4465.

[7] See Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons. Family, corruption, empire and war (Hutchinson, 2011), pp. 336–39.

[8] ‘Enabling Christ’s thriving church: The Church Commissioners for England annual report 2023’, churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/24-05-30-church-commissioners-annual-report-2023.pdf.

[9] The work of Mike Davis is instructive here: see especially Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, famines and the making of the modern world (Verso, 2001).

[10] Alex Renton, Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a family’s story of slavery (Canongate Books, 2021), pp. 178–79.

[11] See the discussion of tithing, agriculture and the church in the period from 1700—1850 in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[12] See Mike Davis is instructive here: see especially Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, famines and the making of the modern world (Verso, 2001).

^[13] Rebecca Paveley, ‘Jamaican church leaders call for healing, as well as financial reparations’, Church Times, churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/30-june/news/uk/jamaican-church-leaders-call-for-healing-as-well-as-financial-reparations.

[14] Madeleine Davies, ‘Caribbean commissions demand reparations for slavery from church and King’, Church Times, churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/15-september/news/uk/caribbean-commissions-demand-reparations-for-slavery-from-church-and-king.

[15] Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire 1700—1850 (Oxford University Press, 2007).

[16] Jennifer C. Snow, Mission, Race, Empire: The episcopal church in global context (Oxford University Press, 2024).

[17] For a fuller discussion of accountability, operating at a distance from responsibility, see Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Fortress Press, 2000).

[18] Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Fortress Press, 2000), p. 51.

[19] Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (Longman, 1969), p. 293.

[20] Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Fortress Press, 2000), p. 57.

[21] Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Polity Press, 2023), pp. 187–94.

[22] Thomas Harding, White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s legacy of slavery (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022), p. 182. See also Hilary Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean slavery and native genocide (University of the West Indies Press, 2013). Beckles provides a detailed account of the Church of England’s direct and indirect involvement in Caribbean slavery from the early 17th century onwards.

[23] See the report from the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context and ‘Slavery compensation: who got paid?’, History Guild, historyguild.org/slavery-reparations-who-got-paid.

[24] See Will Bolton, ‘Bank of England owned nearly 600 slaves and two plantations in Britain’s Caribbean island colony of Grenada in the early 1770s’, The Telegraph, telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/15/bank-england-owned-nearly-600-slaves-new-exhibition-reveals.

[25] Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Polity Press, 2023), pp. 196–9. See also Thomas Piketty, Capital (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press, 2020), pp. 208–13. The discussion of corrupted sources of capital is also excellent in Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How capitalism became the religion of modernity (Belknap Press, 2019).

[26] James Walvin, Sugar: The world corrupted from slavery to obesity (Robinson Publishing, 2017); Freedom: The overthrow of the slave empires (Robinson Publishing, 2019) and A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the origins of global power (Robinson Publishing, 2022).

[27] Jackie Pullinger, Chasing the Dragon (Hodder & Stoughton, 1980). Such testimonies of healing miracles were a common feature of Anglo-American charismatic evangelicalism in the last quarter of the 20th century. However, this genre of Christian literature will generally avoid any prying into the social, economic, political and historical causes of disease, illness or addiction in communities and countries.

[28] For example, see Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A moral reckoning (Collins, 2023).