The crown, the cabinet and the UK’s legacy of slavery

can go on a grand tour of Europe, so they can build a new wing on the country house.”

The Smiths and their partners gained control of more plantations – and more than 700 enslaved workers – in the late 1820s, when a large customer defaulted.

One of their plantations was the Holland Estate in St. Elizabeth Parish on the west of the island, an expanse of about 4,000 acres surrounded on three sides by wooded hills and bordered to the south by the Black River. The Smiths’ share was just under 40%. The lead creditor, John Gladstone – father of future British Prime Minister William Gladstone – enlisted the Smiths to join him in purchasing an additional 118 enslaved people in the hope of doubling sugar output, documents reviewed by Reuters show.

In 1833, parliament voted to end slavery. The Slavery Abolition Act took effect in 1834 – but for several years the newly freed workers would be forced to toil for their former enslavers without pay. Their so-called apprentice status kept them in the fields, although they had to be compensated to work over 45 hours a week. Parliament voted to end the apprentice system in 1838. While John Gladstone had operational control of the estate, he kept the Smiths abreast of affairs with regular and detailed updates about costs and revenues at Holland. He sought their approval for changes in managerial or working arrangements, letters show. The Smiths’ replies to Gladstone have not survived.

Gladstone’s letters emphasized details relating to bad weather or other operational misfortunes. Yet he conveyed little interest in the welfare of the enslaved, discussing only their productivity. In one letter, dated August 13, 1834, he discussed the plan to “break in the negroes by degrees.”

Another letter, written by Gladstone’s son Robertson, discussed the reluctance of apprentices to work hours above the statutory limit for a fee. Robertson Gladstone proposed that food rations should be denied to children under the age of 6 – children older than 6 worked – unless their parents agreed to the additional hours.

“If they are not disposed for their children’s sake to avail themselves of so advantageous an offer it would be well at least for a time to withhold all supplies,” Robertson Gladstone wrote to the estate’s manager, on behalf of all the owners.

Typically, those rations supplemented food provided by the children’s parents, who were allowed to cultivate small plots of land, historians say.

When Britain abolished slavery, the government offered no compensation to the enslaved. But it did compensate their enslavers for the loss of what was considered their property: the people they had held in bondage. Britain borrowed 20 million pounds in 1835, equivalent to about 40% of the government’s total annual expenditures, to pay slaveholders.

Ledgers from the time, preserved in Britain’s National Archives, record the names of George Smith and his relatives as recipients of almost 3,000 pounds in compensation for losing the people enslaved at Holland Estate alone – by one calculation, some 4 million pounds in today’s money.

Smith died in 1836.

‘A UNIVERSAL WRONG’

The warehouses the Smith family funded in the old West India Dock in London’s East End still stand. There, ships once unloaded goods from Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies. A plaque at the dock entrance bears its original inscription, announcing an undertaking that “under the favour of God, shall contribute stability, increase and ornament to British commerce.” The buildings are dwarfed now by the glass and metal skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, built on the former docks. And yards behind the plaque at West India Docks is an empty pedestal.

Until 2020, it held a statue of Robert Milligan, one of the founders of the docks, who also traded in enslaved people and owned plantations in Jamaica. It was removed in 2020, during protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which helped accelerate a re-examination of Britain’s links to slavery.

Very few people living in Britain owned slaves – less than 0.1% of families when parliament voted to end slavery in Jamaica and Britain’s other colonies. In U.S. states where slavery was legal, in contrast, there was about one slaveholder for every four households in 1860, the year before the start of the Civil War.

That might explain why a recent poll pointed toward an ambiguity in British public opinion. The 2021 Ipsos survey showed that Britons were evenly split between those who said they are ashamed of the nation’s involvement in slavery and those who said they are proud that the UK was one of the first countries to abolish the trade – 20% on each account. Another 18% said they feel both proud and ashamed, and 42% said either that slavery was too long ago to feel either way, or that they didn’t know. Some Conservative Party politicians and academics have pushed back against efforts to explore how historical figures and institutions benefited from slavery.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022 bemoaned the toppling of a statue related to the slavery trade, saying, “What you can’t do is go around seeking retrospectively to change our history.”

And current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has rejected calls for Britain to apologize to Caribbean countries or pay reparations, saying that “trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward.” nViews are different in Jamaica, across the Atlantic.

Today, the land where the Smith plantation Farm Pen sat is owned by Jamaica’s government. The place is overgrown with grass, palm trees and acacias, and the fields are dotted by piles of dumped rubble.

A few miles away, in capital Kingston, Mayor Delroy Williams earlier this year pointed toward the turquoise waters of the harbor. “This was where the ships transporting Africans from West Africa docked,” Williams said. “But do we want to just remember here as that? No, we really want to move Kingston and move

Jamaica, into an era of self-respect, of honor, and of dignity, human dignity.”

Vast wealth was sent to Britain, he said, with no regard for “the devastating consequences to Jamaica and to other countries that experienced this system.” By slavery’s end, more than 1 million people had been forcibly taken from Africa and sent to Jamaica, according to data compiled by academics.

“Not to feel guilty for a universal wrong would be wrong,” said Williams, who favors reparations for the many ills left in slavery’s wake. “All the benefits derived from slavery come right down to the current British society and the negative impact on the Jamaican society.”

In the past decade, Caribbean leaders have publicly called for Britain to pay reparations for its role in slavery. In 2013, CARICOM, an intergovernmental organization of more than a dozen member states in the region, established a commission on the subject. Its chairman has argued that Britain owes the descendants of the enslaved 76 billion pounds, saying in 2017 that the funds would be used to revitalize the region in “a Marshall Plan to help to clean up this mess that we inherited.”

Near another former plantation where George Smith’s firm once did business, Winsome King sells ackee fruit from a market stall. She too favors reparations.

“Some people say forget about it, but some people only forget about things that doesn’t happen to them,” she said. The British, she said, “should do the right thing.”