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LONDON — As Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain visits Jamaica this week, he has been confronted with an old and awkward moral conundrum resonating in Europe and the United States: Should a country pay reparations for slavery?
On Tuesday, Jamaica’s prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, raised the issue of reparations with Mr. Cameron during his visit, the first by a British prime minister to the island in 14 years.
Motivated by centuries-old grievances and a desire to right past injustice, 14 Caribbean countries have been cataloging the damages for which they blame the legacy of slavery, with the aim of demanding reparations and an apology from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands, which engaged in and profited from the slave trade. Britain transported more than three million Africans across the Atlantic.
Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and in 1833 it freed all slaves throughout its empire, offering compensation to their owners — but not to the slaves themselves. In March 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was sorry for the slave trade months after his statement of “deep sorrow” was criticized for falling short of a full apology.
Grappling with the legacy of the British Empire has proved a tangled challenge. Mr. Cameron’s office said Wednesday that he did not believe that paying reparations was the right approach. “We are talking about issues that are centuries old and taken under a different government when he was not even born,” it said in a statement.
On his Jamaica trip, Mr. Cameron has sought to play up the close ties between the two countries. He announced that Britain would spend $38 million from its foreign aid budget to build a prison in Jamaica where Jamaican criminals in Britain could be sent to serve out their sentences.
The question of reparations is not merely a political one for Mr. Cameron. In 2013, it emerged that he was a distant relative of James Duff, a member of Parliament and an army officer in the 18th century. (Mr. Cameron’s office declined to comment on the family connection, but advisers said privately that it was unfair to blame him for someone else’s actions, so long ago.)
The family connections came to light when researchers at University College London studied how influential slave-owning families were compensated after slavery was abolished. Mr. Duff was awarded 4,101 pounds (roughly £3 million, or $4.6 million, today) for the 202 slaves he forfeited in the Grange sugar estate in Jamaica.
The reparations issue, and the legal and moral questions it raises, has reverberated globally. In the United States, some black scholars and human rights activists have called for African-Americans to be compensated for two and a half centuries of slavery. In 2008, Congress formally apologized for the “enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.” In 2010, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered an aid and debt-cancellation package to Haiti, invoking the “wounds of colonization.”
In the Caribbean, some campaigners have called on Mr. Cameron to personally atone and apologize on behalf of Britain.
LONDON — As Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain visits Jamaica this week, he has been confronted with an old and awkward moral conundrum resonating in Europe and the United States: Should a country pay reparations for slavery?
On Tuesday, Jamaica’s prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, raised the issue of reparations with Mr. Cameron during his visit, the first by a British prime minister to the island in 14 years.
Motivated by centuries-old grievances and a desire to right past injustice, 14 Caribbean countries have been cataloging the damages for which they blame the legacy of slavery, with the aim of demanding reparations and an apology from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands, which engaged in and profited from the slave trade. Britain transported more than three million Africans across the Atlantic.
Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and in 1833 it freed all slaves throughout its empire, offering compensation to their owners — but not to the slaves themselves. In March 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was sorry for the slave trade months after his statement of “deep sorrow” was criticized for falling short of a full apology.
Grappling with the legacy of the British Empire has proved a tangled challenge. Mr. Cameron’s office said Wednesday that he did not believe that paying reparations was the right approach. “We are talking about issues that are centuries old and taken under a different government when he was not even born,” it said in a statement.
On his Jamaica trip, Mr. Cameron has sought to play up the close ties between the two countries. He announced that Britain would spend $38 million from its foreign aid budget to build a prison in Jamaica where Jamaican criminals in Britain could be sent to serve out their sentences.
The question of reparations is not merely a political one for Mr. Cameron. In 2013, it emerged that he was a distant relative of James Duff, a member of Parliament and an army officer in the 18th century. (Mr. Cameron’s office declined to comment on the family connection, but advisers said privately that it was unfair to blame him for someone else’s actions, so long ago.)
The family connections came to light when researchers at University College London studied how influential slave-owning families were compensated after slavery was abolished. Mr. Duff was awarded 4,101 pounds (roughly £3 million, or $4.6 million, today) for the 202 slaves he forfeited in the Grange sugar estate in Jamaica.
The reparations issue, and the legal and moral questions it raises, has reverberated globally. In the United States, some black scholars and human rights activists have called for African-Americans to be compensated for two and a half centuries of slavery. In 2008, Congress formally apologized for the “enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.” In 2010, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered an aid and debt-cancellation package to Haiti, invoking the “wounds of colonization.”
In the Caribbean, some campaigners have called on Mr. Cameron to personally atone and apologize on behalf of Britain.
