The UK abolished the slave trade more than 200 years ago. But the wealth it created still shapes the country today. A new database reveals the businesses, families and monarchs enriched by slavery. And it’s forcing a reckoning in the UK that’s long overdue.

Guests

William Pettigrew, professor of Global British History at King’s College London. Lead Investigator and Editor of the Register of British Slave-Traders. Author of the new book “Britain’s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The 2006 film “Amazing Grace” is the story of a pivotal moment in British history.

WILBERFORCE: It is with a heavy heart that I bring to the attention of this house a trade which degrades men to the level of brutes and insults the highest qualities of our common nature. I am speaking of the slave trade.

CHAKRABARTI: Actor Ioan Gruffudd plays William Wilberforce, the British member of Parliament who, beginning in the late 1780s, began pushing for an end to the transatlantic slave trade within the British Empire. Slavery was deeply entrenched in British commerce, and not just regarding its former colony, the recently independent United States.

The slave trade was instrumental to Britain’s fortunes in its Caribbean colonies. In 1787 alone, 88 slave ships sailed from Liverpool, mostly bound for the Americas, and they would carry tens of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Outside Parliament, abolitionists gathered testimony about the horrors of the trade, organized boycotts, and built public pressure against the people and businesses profiting from it.

We have taken a petition calling for the abolition of the slave trade to all the great cities of this country. It has been signed by over 390,000 people.

CHAKRABARTI: Still, abolitionists lost vote after vote in Parliament. In the movie Amazing Grace, here’s a moment where Wilberforce continues his campaign undeterred until a pivotal moment in 1807.

(CLIP PLAYS)

Noes to the left, 16. Ayes to the right, 283.

Abolition of the slave trade to be passed.

CHAKRABARTI: A dramatization of a real moment in British history because Wilberforce and the abolition movement had succeeded. Britain abolished its participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. However, that did not mean that slavery itself became illegal in the British colonies.

That didn’t happen until 1833, and even then, abolition came with some pretty significant caveats. It did not apply everywhere in the British Empire. Territories later colonized by the UK were allowed to keep slavery as a local practice, and the practice lasted even longer in British protectorates. For example, slavery persisted in Bahrain until 1937, at least legally.

But in the popular British imagination, these are just forgettable footnotes to the towering and heroic story of people like Wilberforce and the abolitionist movement. After all, Britain had been home to the world’s largest abolitionist movement, hadn’t it? And Britain cleansed itself of slavery’s stain long before the Civil War forced a similar reckoning in the United States, didn’t it?

It’s a nice story, one that also conveniently forgets another footnote, that wealth from the slave trade, though abolished in 1807, the wealth was so vast it went on to help finance many of the institutions that define modern Britain. Historian William Pettigrew has spent years trying to uncover that story.

He led a team of researchers that has identified around 13,000 people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans. It’s called the Register of British Slave Traders. Pettigrew is also a professor of history at King’s College London and author of the new book, “Britain’s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History.”

William Pettigrew, welcome to On Point.

WILLIAM PETTIGREW: Hello, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s begin with a deeper understanding of just how widespread slavery was in the British colonies before 1807. How would you describe it?

PETTIGREW: It was a pillar of some of the most lucrative areas of the British Empire for the British state. The Caribbean, in particular, Barbados, which had been deploying enslaved African people since the 1630s, then Jamaica, which was really the jewel in the crown of the British overseas imperial economy, then of course the mainland American colonies prior to the formation of the United States.

It was a mainstay of capital generated to support economic growth in Britain, in what is probably the most formative period in British history. If you look across the 17th and 18th century, this is the moment when the key institutions of the state, the key aspects of British culture are established and defined.

And against this backdrop we have slavery and the trafficking of enslaved African people a key feature of that development.

CHAKRABARTI: How much wealth are we talking about Professor Pettigrew in terms … is there a number that you can apply in terms of the percentage of, I don’t know, Britain’s GDP at the time?

Is that even a relevant way of measuring the amount of wealth we’re talking about from the slave trade?

PETTIGREW: It’s complex. Historians have attempted that in various different ways. And I think the figure that they keep coming back to is somewhere in the region of 10 or 11% of GDP. This is derived from the profits of slavery more than the profits of the trafficking of enslaved African people.

Those were obviously related things, but they were economically separate, too. But I think one of the things that historians have tried to do, and certainly what my research team and I have been doing is to look beyond the issue of finance. Obviously, finance is key, it’s a key feature of development but we’re also interested the deeper connections between the traffickers of enslaved African people and the formation of institutions of welfare or institutions of religion to really make it clearer even beyond this core issue of finance how central the slave trade was to this core period of British development.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, and that’s what we’ll do throughout the remainder of the hour. But before we get there, I feel compelled to ask you some more questions about the actual sort of almost physical nature of the slave trade. Because we should not turn away from the truth of its horrors.

I don’t know, pick a company that was central to the slave trade in Britain in the late 18th century. What company was that? How many ships did they have? Where did the ships launch from? Where did they go? Who did they enslave? Tell me that story.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. As we begin to establish which British people were investing in this, it’s easy to separate out those individuals from the inhumanity, the awful, harrowing nuts and bolts of this this traffic.

We could point to a changing structure for how the slave trade operated across the 16th, 17th, and 18th century. By the time you get to the 18th century, it’s largely a business driven by small syndicates of investors, essentially private small firms, often with a family connection, and these firms were passed down through generations, especially in the provincial ports of Bristol and Liverpool.

But going back in time in the 17th century, the business was really established and led by state-sponsored companies, often backed by the royal family. And so there’s a sort of changing structure for the business across time. It really begins with a sort of elite flavor, but across the 18th century it becomes more and more democratized.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay, so let’s stay focused on the 18th century then. So as you said, small groups of investors or family tradition would buy what, shares in companies that were engaged in the slave trade?

PETTIGREW: That’s exactly right. So you’d buy a specific investment in a specific crossing.

And you would invest your funds in that. And these groups could be two investors up to 32 and beyond, and that would help to purchase an export cargo for that ship. It would help to employ a captain and crew and an insurance policy. And then that ship would make its way down to the west coast of Africa, spend in some cases many weeks exchanging those goods for enslaved African men, women, and children.

And then it would make its way across the Atlantic Ocean. And the mortality rate amongst those stored in those really awful conditions on those ships was on average about 15%. And then they would be exchanged once they reached the Caribbean or mainland North American colonies for mostly tropical commodities to be brought back to the European market.

Here we’re talking mainly about sugar tobacco and rice.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That’s the triangle. Exactly. When you describe it that way, it’s interesting. In, for example, in my high school history courses, we did learn about, the slave trading triangle and the centrality of the sugar leg of sort of that geometry of grotesquerie, if I can call it that.

But what you had just said about that export goods would be loaded onto the ships in Liverpool or Bristol, and then those would be taken to West Africa and sold or traded for captured and enslaved Africans. That’s a part that I had never fully understood, Professor Pettigrew. And I feel like it might seem minor, but it’s rather important because it shows that on every single leg of the transatlantic slave trade money was being made, even in the export of goods to West Africa.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, absolutely. And this is where the initial stimulus for the British economy comes from. What were these goods being exported to West Africa?

Initially, they were the sort of products that the English economy had made for centuries. These were cloth, woolen products that had a kind of dubious utility in West Africa. But they began to notice a change in demand amongst the West African vendors of enslaved African people.

They were more and more interested in alcohol, often imported into England from continental Europe. More and more interested in manufactured goods. This plays a very important part in stimulating what ultimately becomes the Industrial Revolution in England. West African demand is key to fueling that.

And then firearms. Firearms become very important to the slave trade because if there’s one way to ensure a sustainable supply of enslaved African people, it’s to encourage warfare between different African groups. And so this really helped, not only to stimulate the manufacturing of guns, provide employment in places like Birmingham in Great Britain but also to provide the weapons that would fuel the warfare that produced the supply of enslaved African people.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: William Pettigrew joins us. He’s a professor at King’s College London and lead investigator in a new publication called The Register of British Slave Traders. It is a giant register of thousands of people who profited from the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries in the UK.

And Professor Pettigrew also says that it’s a document that shows how the slave trade really went on to establish the institutions of modern Britain. And by the way, you can take a look at it. It’s at britishslavetraders.org. We also have a link to it at our website, onpointradio.org. So Professor Pettigrew, let’s take a look at some of the most prominent and also lesser-known names in the registry, and let’s start with the Crown.

Because I believe, do we go as far back as Elizabeth, in order to understand the monarchy’s investment in the transatlantic slave trade?

PETTIGREW: That’s absolutely right. Yeah, from the beginning, it’s really striking. The initial crossings transporting enslaved African people by English investors at that point were backed by the most powerful people in the country.

Not just the leaders of the city of London, the financial district, not just the court, not just the Royal Navy but also the Crown itself, in this case, Queen Elizabeth I. She provided some of the investment for some of those early syndicated voyages, but also lent a huge ship that her father, King Henry VIII, had purchased from the Hanseatic League, the Jesus of Lübeck, to transport some of these enslaved African people to the Spanish-held territories overseas.

So yeah, from the beginning, we see the striking way in which the most powerful people in the country behind launching this traffic.

CHAKRABARTI: I think in the register or at least The Guardian has reported on its reporting on the register, that there was even a logo that had the crown, like literally a representation of the crown on it from the South Sea Company in 1714.

Is that right?

PETTIGREW: That’s correct. This is one of the most striking and awful things to encounter. Another member of my research team Nicholas Radburn discovered this. The image of the brand that was inflicted onto enslaved African men and women —

CHAKRABARTI: Physically branded onto them.

PETTIGREW: Physically branded on them with very clear instructions on how to do that. Took the form of a logo representing that company, the South Sea company, as well as woven into that logo, the crown itself. So there couldn’t be any more striking and disturbing way in which the institution of the crown was connected to this.

It couldn’t be any more direct than that.

CHAKRABARTI: So Elizabeth I, that’s way back then. There’s a period of British history where the monarchy is temporarily deposed. But then the restoration occurs, and I understand that after that, so after 1660, the monarchy becomes even more invested in the slave trade.

PETTIGREW: Absolutely. And that’s the key phase, I would say. Imagine there are few political institutions around the world that are more successful, more long-lived than the English and then British monarchy. And when it’s at its absolute lowest ebb. seeking to find projects to restore itself, reestablish itself, not just financially, but reputationally, that project is the trafficking of enslaved African people, among others.

So what happens with the restoration of the monarchy is that the royal prefix is added to a series of projects. One of them is the establishment of what we would now regard as modern experimental science. The other one is about reopening the theaters in London after a period of closure. And another one is putting the royal prefix monarchical funds behind the trafficking of enslaved African people.

So it has not just a material basis of connection. We’re talking here about a way to restore the monarchy’s reputation by establishing it, by connecting itself with this seemingly innovative and cutting edge business.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me more about that? Because, you call them actually royal slave trading companies, right?

That the monarchy was so deeply invested in this. And maybe I’m struggling a little because I’m looking at this through 21st century eyes, but you said that by doing this, the crown actually reestablished, burnished its own image in the eyes of the British people?

PETTIGREW: That’s right. Yeah. So we’re talking here about a monarchical connection. There’s not just large substantial sums of money to invest, but also the decision to place the royal prefix in the title of this company. The English had other trading companies trading around the world. They’d had the Virginia Company, they’d had the Massachusetts Bay Company, they’d had the East India Company.

But none of these had the royal prefix. The monarchy decided to place particular importance on this activity. And corresponding with that is James, Duke of York, the king’s younger brother, actually attended the meetings of this organization as a senior executive and these took place in the royal palace.

So it’s hard to kind of overstate the connection. And furthermore the motto of this organization was basically, translated from the Latin, if you want economic growth, you need a monarchy. And the way that economic growth was understood to be best generated was through the trafficking of enslaved African people to the plantations of the Caribbean.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. I’m looking here that there’s one company, the South Sea Company, that the monarchy was heavily invested in the 18th century, early 18th century, and it looks like that this one company trafficked more than 43,000 enslaved Africans from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas in just a period of 26 years. It’s an astonishing number.

PETTIGREW: That’s right, yeah. And even its precursor, the Royal African Company combined with its two earlier companies, transported somewhere in the region of 170 to 180 enslaved African people. And just to … I’ll give you two bits of context on that. That makes it the largest single contributor to the transatlantic slave trade of any nation, and that’s more than 50% of the enslaved African people who were at any point transported to what is now the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. At a speech in front of the heads of British Commonwealth Nations, this was back in 2024, King Charles made a comment about this history of the monarchy, and he said he’s committed to learning more about Britain’s colonial past.

KING CHARLES: I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate.

KING CHARLES: It is vital, therefore, that we understand our history to guide us to make the right choices in the future. Where inequalities exist, for example, in access to opportunity, to education, to employment, to health, and to a planet in whose climate our human race can both survive and thrive, we must find the right ways and the right language to address them.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Pettigrew, your response to what the King has said in recent times?

PETTIGREW: I do think it’s remarkable, King Charles’s response to the reporting of our research project. But again he straightforwardly welcomed a deepening understanding of British history and its connection to this and the centrality in some cases of this awful trafficking.

So that really was quite an extraordinary intervention to say, “Look, we need more research projects like this. We need to understand in clearer terms exactly what, what our history consists of even when that can be painful and uncomfortable.”

CHAKRABARTI: I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out, maybe you wouldn’t Professor Pettigrew, but racism was still quite rife in even Charles’s own family until recent years, I’d say, because his father, Prince Philip, was a notorious racist. I remember one of many quote-unquote, “gaffes” where he was visiting Australia in the early 2000s, meeting with Aboriginal groups there, and he said, “Do you still throw spears at each other?”

That was one of his milder gaffes when it came to I would say his publicly known secret of being a racist. So that history is actually not that far away when it comes to the British royal family. But they are only one institution of many who profited from the slave trade, and I’d like to actually turn to another long-lived and centrally important institution in the UK, and that is the Bank of England.

Tell me about its relationship or indirect investment in slavery.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, the bank confronted one key aspect of its connection to this in 2020, ’21, when it discovered in its archives that it was actually the owner of a plantation in the Caribbean. The plantation, as I understand it, had been there to, as part of a financial deal that the bank was able to acquire through that transaction.

But perhaps more foundationally, if you look at the early history of the bank and the initial subscribers who generate the capital for the bank’s operation in the 1690s, again, we have an interesting overlap with some of the architects of England’s transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people.

So we’re talking here about the possibility, although it’s difficult to be precise about this, that some of that capital, that investment capital into the bank had a direct connection to the traffic.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. A bank though, being what it is, and especially a central bank, this is one of those sort of nodes in which then the wealth generated by the enslavement and trafficking of human beings spreads across the rest of England, does it not?

PETTIGREW: That’s correct. That’s why the connection with the bank is I think important and so essential to get clear in people’s minds.

CHAKRABARTI: So do, were you … I guess it’s really hard to trace exactly, we can’t trace pound for pound where money went, but is there a way to describe how much we’re talking about in terms of where it went?

Are there other institutions in England right now that you think wouldn’t exist had it not been for the kinds of money that the Bank of England was making off profiting from the slave trade?

PETTIGREW: I think it’s more important to stress how endemic the financial upside of the trafficking of enslaved African people was across a whole range of financial connections. I think actually it’s very difficult in most cases to be precise about the scale of connection, just because, the way money of course is fungible. It gets mixed together. If you, if I look at a particular investor in the Bank of England, a subscriber who happened also to be a trafficker in enslaved African people, it’s very difficult within that person’s portfolio to be precise about, how much of their wealth came from this business because the money gets mixed together.

So what we can do is make a connection between those institutions and those individuals to say that they are connected and understand and appreciate that significance without the possibility in most cases of being precise about that.

CHAKRABARTI: Fair point. But there are some very specific institutions that you do mention. For example, many people in the UK are extremely familiar with, its formal name is St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, but I understand everyone there calls it St. Bart’s. How does that hospital play into this story?

PETTIGREW: This is one of the really surprising and important things I think that the project shows us, again, moving beyond your initial, but completely understandable connection about financial scale is the connection we found between hundreds if not thousands of the individuals in the dataset to basically welfare projects.

In the course of the research, as we established financial connections between individuals who were traffickers and other organizations, we found connections to about 900. The vast majority of those were charitable organizations. They were schools. They were almshouses for the elderly. They were hospitals.

They were parish charities to support the poorest in society. So what we’ve been able to demonstrate is this, you know, inhuman business playing a often and largely progressive part in the development of a social safety net for the British people. Tell me more about that because that’s an uncomfortable irony, to put it lightly.

PETTIGREW: It is. It is. And I think it can be documented through the leaders of these organizations. This comes back to, I think a 16th and 17th century English discomfort with making money through trade, that merchants were understood to be greedy, acquisitive, self-interested.

So they responded to that by huge acts of philanthropy, and this was especially true in the city of London. So significant proportions of these individuals’ wealth went into nurturing these institutions, the parish, the hospital, the school and the almshouse. And, from our perspective you might think that, were they atoning for something?

They were atoning for society’s disapproval of their sort of seemingly self-interested activity, not any kind of moral discomfort with the buying and selling of human beings.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s interesting because you point out also that this belief that the transatlantic slave trade was a positive source of funding for charities isn’t just limited to the UK.

I think in the piece that you wrote for The Guardian, you said that many in Britain justified trafficking believing it was an act of philanthropy for West Africans that they were enslaving. The claim was that they’d be better off in the plantations of Barbados than they would, in their homes in West Africa.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, and that shows you how deep this philanthropic agenda went certainly in the way in which merchants justified their existence publicly. This is a, obviously, an extraordinary claim, but it shows you the sort of cognitive diff- dissidence and moral gymnastics that had to be performed to make this trafficking sustainable over almost 250 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. I just wanna, we can’t … there are thousands of names. There was 13,000 names in the register, so obviously we can only talk about a fraction of a percent. But it’s remarkable how you trace how even the great institutions of British science, the Royal Society, that key members there had invested in the transatlantic slave trade.

Playwrights, painters, composers, including George Frideric Handel had earnings as investors in the slave trade. So we’re talking about science. We’re talking about the cultural development of Great Britain also during this time. It seems that there’s no sector of society that it did not touch.

PETTIGREW: That’s what it seems like. Certainly, of the 13,000 individuals, which over a 250-year period, that’s a tiny proportion of the English then British population. But they appear to have a really outsized influence. They’re positioned in a certain way within society to actually effect change in a way that’s beyond and disproportionate to their numbers.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Pettigrew, before we get to what are we supposed to make of this register today, what should we do with this knowledge, there’s a couple more names and institutions that I wanted to touch on.

We talked about the Crown. We talked about the Bank of England. I suppose the other major political, social, and cultural institution in the UK is the Church of England. Tell me the story that’s revealed about the church’s participation.

PETTIGREW: The church its connection to this operates on a number of levels, and firstly, and the church has led on this, by the way, has interrogated the connection between its endowment the basis of its wealth and the South Sea Company.

So there’s been a lot of public debate about the church’s revealing of this connection. And of course, there are other dimensions to the church’s involvement, individual reverends and clergymen investing in it directly, particular parishes, as I mentioned before, particular diocese, particular church buildings being supported by traffickers.

These are all connections that come through in the register. But I think even more important than that was the enormous moral authority that the church gave to the system of plantation slavery. In the 17th century, there was this kind of formula that if you baptized an enslaved person that person would have to be freed.

But by the time there’s a huge amount of money at stake in the 18th century, the church gives its blessing to the position that says, “No you can congratulate yourself as a slave owner by baptizing an enslaved person, but you don’t have to free them.” Which creates this kind of extraordinary position where Christianizing the African labor force and brutalizing them takes place in the same place and at the same time.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then just moving a little bit more directly into politics you say in The Guardian that disagreements about the best way to expand Britain’s slave trade were present at the birth of the political, the modern-day political parties in the UK, now known as what the Conservatives and Labor, but then Whigs and Tories.

Tell me about that.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, and again, this speaks to, I think the position of the slave trade featuring and developing at the most formative time in British history. So you have, in the 17th century, a civil war between those people who favor a particular form of Protestantism against those who favor another, but there’s also a constitutional aspect to that disagreement.

And those disagreements don’t go away once the monarchy is restored. And one of the leaders, in my view, the most important English slave trader of the 17th century is the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, who was the person who ran that organization I was talking about earlier, the Royal African Company.

Now, people wanted to block him from the succession to the throne because he was a Roman Catholic. And the people who wished to prevent him from being blocked became the Tories, and the people who wished to block him became the Whigs. Now, one of the ways in which that fault line was nurtured and sustained was it came from his leadership of the Royal African Company.

Those who resented the monopoly that the Royal African Company had over the trafficking of enslaved African people, they were fueled in their opposition to other aspects of his role. And so the Whig Party emerges as an opposition to James that then begins to develop an alternative model of how the slave trade might work. And then this into the early 18th century, that model is ultimately successful.

And what we see is the emergence of a kind of free trade. In other words, the royally backed monopoly is dispensed with, and the English then British developed this sort of pioneering free trade in enslaved African people, and that’s why the British really dominate the slave trade of the 18th century.

But that disagreement is there in the kind of, in the DNA of the party system.

CHAKRABARTI: We keep mentioning the English, but you also note that after the what the Act of Union, many Scots actually also embraced the opportunities to invest in the slave trade. But there’s one more connection here that I had never, ever seen been made before and that is between the transatlantic slave trade and another massive revolution that began in the UK, but that changed the world, and that is the Industrial Revolution.

Because you write how first and foremost, the existence of these slave trading ships and the requirements of the ships themselves really helped the development of port cities like Liverpool, which we mentioned in the beginning, and then the development of places like Liverpool and Bristol allowed those cities to be connected with other places further inland on the British Isles.

And then you also say that some of the seed funding that went into creating the technologies and companies that made the Industrial Revolution, and this is the connection I’d never seen made before, came from the profits made from the slave trade.

PETTIGREW: Yeah, that’s right. So once you have the slave trade deregulated and those monopolies ended there’s a really sort of interesting phase of competition between these various different port cities around the UK.

Who can dominate this trade? And there are various ways in which those cities promote their city as the most effective place to do that. Liverpool really wins out because it has close to it this sort of open hinterland in which manufactured goods can be made more efficient and more easily connected to the port.

That’s why the slave trade plays such an important part in developing the network of canals in that part of the country. So you have here, as I was saying earlier, the need to supply manufactured goods to West Africa. But you have this determined competition to generate those manufactured goods at lower and lower prices, and that’s what leads to this sort of the division of labor and releases in productivity.

But you also have the laying the groundwork for the, a sort of national system of canals that integrate this economy together. And this generates profits for slave traders that are then reinvested in the same industries into banks locally that then start to lend money to people who have industrial patents.

And it’s, again, it’s very difficult to be precise about the economic significance of this, but it’s undeniable through our data and other data that there’s a connection between these individuals and some of those breakthroughs in the improvements in productivity that we’ve traditionally called the Industrial Revolution.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, the fact that we can’t be precise, I think, is because it is so deeply woven into the story of Britain in the 17th and 18th century, as you’ve been saying. When things become so pervasive, it’s hard to tease apart exact cause and effect. But that’s the point, right?

It’s so pervasive. Now, of course, there’s a huge question of what should we do with this knowledge, right? What should Britain do with this knowledge? And if you ask the nations, the independent nations that were once colonies of the UK, they have some very specific ideas.

For example, there are several nations in the Caribbean who believe that it’s time for reparations. For more than a decade, the Caribbean Community of States, or CARICOM, has organized around a regional plan for reparations. So let’s listen to a little bit about that. Mia Mottley is the prime minister of Barbados, and she spoke at a reparations conference earlier this month.

MOTTLEY: We speak about a reparatory movement for slavery because of the extent to which slavery really was that greatest crime against humanity.

CHAKRABARTI: CARICOM’s plan goes far beyond direct payment. It also calls for investment in public health and education and debt cancellation. Now, the British government says it has no legal duty to pay reparations for acts that were not violations of international law at the time.

Others argue that with so many challenges domestically in the UK, the country cannot afford to help its former colonies. Here’s Mottley’s response.

MOTTLEY: Principles only mean something when it’s inconvenient to stand by them. And it will be inconvenient at any point when you are seeking to repay debt that allowed you to be able to dominate 60% of the world for centuries. It is going to be inconvenient, but it is going to be right.

CHAKRABARTI: Barbados is now assembling historians and economists to quantify the country’s legal case for reparations, and Mottley wants other Caribbean nations to do the same.

MOTTLEY: We are not monsters. We do not bear arms. We have come to have a conversation, and if the conversation cannot be had, we have come then to fight a cause, which means that we are coming after all of the people of the world to make our case.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados. Professor Pettigrew, just your thoughts on that?

PETTIGREW: We’re historians and so we’re not activists or politicians and we don’t engage directly and explicitly with this debate, but we recognize that the data we’ve gathered is relevant to this conversation.

And we see it as our duty to provide high-quality information to inform that, the ongoing debate. And I would just make the connection between what King Charles was saying in an earlier clip about the importance of education and health care. There’s actually a striking similarity between Charles’s comments and aspects of the CARICOM 10-point plan- for reparations, which as you rightly pointed out, is no longer about, quant- solely quantifying the debt. Of the 10 points Charles mentions a couple of them in passing, although he mentions it in a different context. But of the 10, I’d say five of them are really strongly connectable to the conclusions of our research project.

Investing in education, defining culture, improving health care, protecting families, supporting sovereignty, these were the effects that the investment in the slave trade had on the development of Britain. And I would just highlight that what we’re talking about here is a striking similarity between what the CARICOM nations are envisaging, and actually the historic effects of the exploitation of millions of African people on the development of Britain itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We just have a few minutes left, Professor Pettigrew, and I’m going to do something that to your British ears will seem very American. I would like to make this personal for you. What was it like for you to uncover year after year, name after name, family after family, and to see this web of influence and money and cultural foundation that the transatlantic slave trade had on your nation?

I’m wondering if it changed your image of Britain or made you rethink some things. You’re already a professor of global British history, so none of this should came as a surprise to you. But how did it have an impact on you doing this research?

PETTIGREW: No, thank you for asking that.

It’s inherent to this business, the brutality of it, the reducing of human beings into numbers. That can be numbing as well as deeply depressing. What struck me, though, was the level of connection, as we were discussing earlier, how endemic it was and how many different spheres of British life were connected to this.

And also, that sense of a disproportionate effect. 13,000 people was a lot of people to research. It took us a long time. But actually, that’s a tiny proportion of the population. And we were struck, I think, by the diversity of that group, the significance of female investors, the interesting role of refugees and recent immigrants who used the slave trade as a way to improve their social position. And then that conclusion I mentioned earlier, that one of the striking connections to this is not just to the economic development of the country, but also to those really progressive forces in British life, this fixation with freedom the British nation defining itself as uniquely free.

It was that freedom that smashed the monopoly and expanded the slave trade without any irony. But also, institutions of charity, the progressive forces within society that are still largely with us in Britain had a connection to this as well. So that brought it into the present in a way that I think was quite profound for me.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.