Slavery was a crime Why were we never compensated?

Every Heroes Weekend Jamaica celebrates its heroes and its heroine for their valiant fight against slavery and injustice, and for their role in advancing a nation of such remarkable people. Our struggle now has the backing of the world. In March the United Nations General Assembly voted the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity, by 123 votes to 3 with 52 abstentions. Britain abstained, with no intention to pay for the crime.

When it ended slavery in 1834, the only people Britain compensated were its own slave owners. Parliament granted them £20 million for the loss of their “property,” about 40 per cent of the government’s annual spending. Britain borrowed to pay it, and that borrowing was folded into government debt that was not fully paid off until 2015. The people who had been enslaved got no land, no tools and no capital.

Other nations who went through similar things were compensated in cash and in kind. In 1952 West Germany agreed to give Israel 3 billion marks in goods and services to resettle Jewish refugees, and a further 450 million marks for Jewish victims of the Holocaust living elsewhere. In 1988 the United States gave a formal apology and US$20,000 to each surviving Japanese American interned during the Second World War. In 2013 Britain itself paid £19.9 million to more than 5,000 Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising. The descendants of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean have received nothing. So what about us?

What is owed?

Reparation for the Caribbean should come as opportunity. CARICOM’s ten-point plan of 2014 calls for a full formal apology, debt cancellation, technology transfer, and investment in education and public health. I would add land to that list. Across the region the freed were sent out with nothing to produce with. Britain can fund land titling, scholarships in science and technology, and investment in the industries the Caribbean missed. Jamaica’s story shows why.

What did freedom come with?

Freedom came with two handicaps. The first was the absence of productive assets. The newly free were expected to earn a living without land of their own, in an economy where land was the main source of income. The second was the collapse of coordination. The plantation was a brutal system, but it was an organized one. It produced sugar at scale and fed the triangular trade that made Britain, Spain and Portugal wealthy. When the freed population left the estates, production broke into small plots farmed for survival.

Thirty years of that produced the Morant Bay War of 1865, when Paul Bogle and his followers marched on the courthouse. Governor Eyre answered with martial law, and the Royal Commission later found that 439 people were put to death, at least 600 were flogged and 1,000 homes were burned. The discontent had been building across the island since Sam Sharpe’s war of 1831.

What has changed?

Less than we would like to admit. Jamaica has about 900,000 parcels of land, and only about 55 per cent of them are titled. That leaves roughly 400,000 parcels where families have lived, farmed and built for generations without being able to prove ownership. Untitled land cannot be mortgaged, sold easily or passed on cleanly. The Prime Minister himself called the gap between possession and title “a barrier to finance, to security, to inheritance.” Wealth that cannot be used as collateral cannot grow.

Wages are the second parallel. In July 2026 the minimum wage rose to J$17,000 a week, about US$107. A full year at that rate comes to roughly US$5,600. Jamaican people have maximum potential, and the country keeps negotiating over the minimum.

Where did Singapore go?

Singapore was also a British colony, and in 1960 it stood exactly where we stood. That year Jamaica and Singapore had almost exactly the same GDP per capita, US$424 and US$428, according to the World Bank. In 2025 Singapore’s figure was US$98,814. Jamaica’s was US$8,003.

The difference was the choice of industries. Singapore rode the technology wave of the 1960s and 1970s. It trained its people to make technology goods and kept moving up the value chain. Jamaica stayed with agriculture and moved into tourism. I put it to my students this way: Singapore exports a container of microchips and Jamaica exports a container of banana chips. A container of banana chips may be worth tens of thousands of dollars. A container of microchips can be worth tens of millions. An economy built on a few exposed sectors is susceptible to external shocks, and Jamaica has paid for that exposure for fifty years.

Can Jamaica catch this wave?

Tourism can grow, and it should. The risk is letting one sector stand in for the whole economy. The luxury developments planned for the south coast may employ a few thousand people. The other two million-plus Jamaicans need high incomes too. We have seen this model before in the free zones, where owners earned supernormal profits and Jamaicans earned wages and overtime.

We missed the technology booms of the last century. Artificial intelligence is the one in front of us now. My company, Textron Technology, designed AiDiA, an AI companion teddy bear now sold on Amazon and at the UWI Mona Bookshop. It is manufactured in China, but it was designed in Jamaica and Textron owns the design, so the intellectual property stays here.

What would justice look like?

Economics teaches scarcity and the non-satiation of wants, the principle that more is always preferred to less. Applied without balance, it rewards consumption and individual accumulation. Our own philosophical inheritance, from the sages of ancient Kemet to the Ubuntu idea that I am because we are, puts the community first. Emancipation should have given our people the means to produce. Reparation for the Caribbean in land, education and technology can still do it. Until Jamaica moves from consuming to producing, and gives its people title to the assets they already use, Bogle’s march remains unfinished business.

What should reparation for the Caribbean look like? Tell me in the comments.

Andre Haughton is a Professor of Economics at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, specializing in international finance, global political economy, the structural challenges facing developing economies, and development in small states. He is the author of Overcoming Productivity Challenges in Small Countries: Lessons from Jamaica and Developing Sustainable Balance of Payments in Small Countries: Lessons from Jamaica. He has been recognized as the University of the West Indies’ Most Outstanding Researcher (2017) and for the Most Outstanding Research Project (2024), was named UWI Alumnus of the Decade (1999–2009), and is an IMF Distinguished Academic Fellow. Beyond academia, he is engaged in entrepreneurship, youth development initiatives, and strategic economic thinking aimed at advancing Jamaica’s development trajectory.

Sources: UN General Assembly vote, 25 March 2026 · The National Archives (UK), NDO 4 and T 71 series · UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery · HM Treasury, Freedom of Information release, February 2018 · Luxembourg Agreement, 1952 · US Civil Liberties Act, 1988 · UK Foreign Secretary’s statement to the House of Commons, 6 June 2013 · CARICOM Reparations Commission, 2014 · Jamaica Royal Commission report, 1866 · Jamaica Information Service, 14 May and 24 March 2026 · World Bank, World Development Indicators