The Big Payback: The Case for Reparations for Slavery and How They Would Work (Faber & Faber, 2025) by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder explores issues related to how best to resolve the inequality resulting from centuries of British “enslavement of African people and the ongoing racism still suffered by millions across the world.” The book will be available on October 7, 2025. [Also read an interview with the authors at The Guardian.]
Description: At the abolition of the slave trade two centuries ago, the British government paid huge amounts of compensation to slave-owners. Only in 2015 did British taxpayers stop paying off this debt.
How is it that slave-owners were paid compensation from our taxes, yet the enslaved and their families were not? Why should the descendants of former slaveowners still benefit from inherited wealth while the successors of the victims of slavery receive nothing, and may have even paid towards the debt of compensation through their taxes?
Beginning with these simple but startling questions, Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder explore the burning issue of how best can we resolve the inequality resulting from 400 years of the enslavement of African people and the ongoing racism still suffered by millions across the world.
Talking to reparation experts, economists, politicians, and anti-racism campaigners, including Bell Rebeiro-Addy, Robert Beckford, Kenneth Mohammed and Kehinde Andrews, they investigate how reparations can work, and how we can help to make them happen.
For more information, see https://guardianbookshop.com/the-big-payback-9780571380015/ or https://www.amazon.com/Big-Payback-Reparations-Slavery-Would-ebook/dp/B0DZ72F7L1
Also read an interview with the authors at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/24/lenny-henry-marcus-ryder-the-case-for-reparations-slavery
The Big Payback: The Case for Reparations for Slavery and How They Would Work (Faber & Faber, 2025) by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder explores issues related to how best to resolve the inequality resulting from centuries of British “enslavement of African people and the ongoing racism still suffered by millions across the world.” The book will
