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Hilary McD. Beckles Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2013. xv + 292 pp. (Paper us$30.00)
Hilary Beckles has written a forceful, lucid, and detailed historical argument to support a claim for reparations by the British government to Caribbean nations. The call for reparations is a response to crimes against humanity committed by Britain, specifically the genocide against the indigenous populations of its former Caribbean colonies and the enslavement and trading of millions of Africans over hundreds of years. The work proceeds in two parts, history and advocacy, although the categories often overlap. Beckles first provides a cogent overview of hundreds of years of imperial history, carefully outlining the conquest of various Caribbean islands and the extraordinary enrichment of the British state, the Church of England, banks, merchants, plantation owners, and slave traders from the labor and lives of enslaved Africans, especially in Barbados and Jamaica. He follows with an overview of recent efforts by Caribbean activists and government leaders to put the issue of reparations on the global stage and before British authorities. His focus throughout is on the Caribbean case and Caribbean leadership in the reparations struggle, with gestures to significant developments in reparations claims or settlements in other contexts.
Beckles aims to dispense with enduring myths of British collective memory, notably the emphasis on British support for abolition at the expense of appreciating the deep and...