[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item and related links to our attention.] “Experts put estimate for economic harm done by 200 years of chattel slavery at $2tn, but stress this is ‘not an invoice.’” Paul Lashmar (in Bridgetown, Barbados) and Natricia Duncan (in Kingston, Jamaica) report for The Guardian.
Britain stole 25 million years of life and labour through slavery in Barbados, according to research by a team of international experts. Their report concludes that Barbados’s population of African descent have suffered damages estimated at up to $2tn (£1.5tn) from 200 years of chattel slavery.
The head of the research team, Coleman Bazelon, said the total reflected the magnitude of the damage done, but he emphasised that the figure was not a bill for damages but the factual foundation for dialogue. “This research is not creating an invoice for anybody to pay,” said Bazelon. “It is an accounting of the harm that was done … a recognition of the harm that was done that is the starting point for reconciliation.”
Barbados was the first major British colony to force enslaved people to work on its plantations from the early 1600s. It is also a founding nation of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) which advocates for reparations.
Bazelon was the lead co-author of the 2023 Brattle analysis, which was included in the report on reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean.The analysis estimated that chattel slavery affected 19.9 million people, including those who were captured, those who lost their lives while being transported from Africa, and those who worked on plantations and their descendants.
After Britain abolished slavery on 1 August 1834, £20m was paid in compensation to enslavers for loss of their “property”. The enslaved people themselves received nothing.
Bazelon conducted this new research through the non-profit organisation Public Interest Experts. “What they asked me to focus on was: what was the value of the labour stolen through slavery in Barbados,” Bazelon said. Speaking at an event in Barbados to preview the research earlier this month, Barbados’s minister for pan-African affairs and heritage, Trevor Prescod, said: “You can’t erase history … My job is to give an Afrocentric redress to the imbalances that occurred during the period of slavery.” [. . .]
Prof Alan Lester, from the University of Sussex, a leading expert on the British empire, said: “It’s not surprising that – when you add up the value of lives appropriated to make money in Barbados, Britain’s oldest slave plantation colony – you get such an enormous figure. “The inequalities entrenched by slavery have only been exacerbated since, as compensation was paid to slave owners rather than the enslaved and independence left Caribbean islands drained of capital and indebted to western institutions.”
The 2023 Brattle analysis estimated that the value of harms from transatlantic chattel slavery in 31 territories in the Americas and the Caribbean amounted to $100–131tn in total, of which $77-108tn represented harms during the period of enslavement, and $23tn the continuing harms since.
The analysis was commissioned after an international symposium on reparations and international law concluded that transatlantic slavery was unlawful.
Last month 123 nations at the UN general assembly voted that chattel slavery was the gravest crime against humanity. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/30/uk-stole-25-million-years-of-life-and-labour-through-slavery-in-barbados-research-finds
For background, see: “Reparations study urged as development blueprint
Shamar Blunt, updated by Benson Joseph, Barbados Today, April 14, 2026
https://barbadostoday.bb/2026/04/14/reparations-study-urged-as-development-blueprint
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images: The Emancipation Statue in Bridgetown was crafted in 1985, 19 years after Barbados gained full independence from Britain.]
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item and related links to our attention.] “Experts put estimate for economic harm done by 200 years of chattel slavery at $2tn, but stress this is ‘not an invoice.’” Paul Lashmar (in Bridgetown, Barbados) and Natricia Duncan (in Kingston, Jamaica) report for The Guardian. Britain stole 25
