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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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Britain’s King Charles III told Commonwealth leaders in Antigua during his recent visit that the trans-Atlantic slave trade fills his heart with horror and his soul with "the most profound personal sorrow."
Profound sentiments indeed. Charles may well be sincere. But he didn’t apologize for slavery. Nor did he get out a checkbook for any reparations. And the reason for that is pretty simple: nobody is forcing him to.
Days earlier, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham had gone further than any predecessor, declaring himself open to calls for a formal state apology for the slave trade. Such a move, opponents fear, could open the legal floodgates with sharp financial consequences.
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But Burnham had also plainly ruled out financial reparations, writing that he does not believe Britons today can be "held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous." We are clean of our great-great-grandfathers’ sins. The sorrow is genuine. And it’s free.
The Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, welcomed the shift in tone but rejected the red line Burnham drew. Its chair, St. Lucian Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre, said that "an apology without repair is incomplete."
The argument is still about whether states involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including Britain and the U.S., should pay for the moral crimes of their ancestors. But few people ask the prior question: What actually makes reluctant states pay reparations?
History has answered this question repeatedly. For centuries, reparations were typically not the product of some sorrowful moral consensus. They were imposed after defeat in war or extracted from those with no power to refuse: coercion over conscience.
The slavery reparations movement has, whatever your view, assembled formidable moral and economic arguments, and increasingly legal ones. But it lacks a realistic means of making the supposed debtor pay, and an authority able to declare the debt settled.
Losers Pay
"War reparations are paid under duress," Simon Hinrichsen writes in When Nations Can’t Default, his history of the practice since 1800. The payer has usually just lost a war. Occupation, or the imminent threat of it, is a potent inducement to start shelling out.
France paid after Waterloo, a bill Hinrichsen estimates at about 22 percent of a year’s output, and again after the Franco-Prussian War, about 25 percent. German troops stayed in France until the final installment in September 1873. Germany and Japan then paid out after both world wars.
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Iraq is a good modern example. After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council created a commission that awarded $52.4 billion to roughly 1.5 million claimants over the invasion of Kuwait, paid from a share of Iraq’s oil export revenue.
Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad could not simply dispute the bill and stop paying. When the last payment cleared in 2022, the Security Council confirmed the process was "complete and final."
Starting a claim of reparations takes serious coercion, real or threatened. Closing a reparations account needs an adjudicator, a collection mechanism, and someone with the final authority to say it’s all settled.
The Haitian Exception
Haiti is an exception Hinrichsen flags. Haitians defeated France and declared independence in 1804. In 1825, French King Charles X demanded 150 million francs to compensate France’s former colonists and slaveholders as the price of recognition.
His envoy delivered the terms backed by the intimidation of a squadron of warships.
Hinrichsen puts that bill at roughly three times Haiti’s annual output. Haiti had won the war, but it still spent decades paying the side that lost. So, perhaps the real rule isn’t merely that the loser pays. It’s whoever can’t refuse to. Would you argue with a warship?
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Britain’s abolition settlement wasn’t reparations, but it followed similar logic. When Parliament abolished slavery across most of the British Empire in 1833, it paid £20 million—about 40 percent of annual government spending, no less—to compensate slave owners.
Why? Because the law recognized their claims. This was a grim compromise vital for abolition. The enslaved, whose claims the law did not recognize, received nothing. It was legal coercion. The borrowing behind the payout was not fully repaid until 2015.
Settlements That Never Settle
Today’s reparations movement has no gunboats or a standing army capable of an invasion to force the reparative justice they’re demanding. Its would-be army is, instead, moral pressure, diplomacy, politics and, increasingly, the courts.
Jamaica has secured a referral to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, still its final court of appeal, on questions including whether Britain owes Jamaicans a reparatory remedy. A preliminary hearing is set for March 2027.
But the resulting opinion would only be advisory. It couldn’t order Britain's Treasury to pay. And Britain told the U.N. in March that there is "no duty to provide reparation for historical acts" that didn’t violate international law when committed, a premise Jamaica is contesting.
This has the potential to be legal coercion. But it lacks any bite at the moment.
Were that to change, any such move to extract wealth from an increasingly economically challenged and divided Britain is likely to provoke a mass popular backlash from those who had nothing to do with a slave trade that ended two centuries ago.
Even a willing Britain or U.S. would face a harder question: What would the money settle?
A 2023 Brattle Group study for a reparations symposium put certain elements of trans-Atlantic slavery’s harms at $100 trillion to $131 trillion, with Britain’s share alone across 14 countries more than $23 trillion. The U.S. is even higher, not far off $28 trillion.
These are staggeringly huge numbers. And its authors listed further harms they could not quantify. A whole year of U.S. GDP is valued at $33 trillion.
CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan runs from public health and education to debt cancellation, monetary compensation, and decolonization. Its statement asked that talks also cover Indigenous genocide and laborers brought from India and China. There is no single invoice.
Would a payment bind individual descendants, African states, people not yet born?
The international relations scholars Adam B. Lerner and Pauline Heinrichs call this the paradox of international reparations. They count just 21 international reparations programs since 1940, most paid by former Axis powers.
No state, they note, has paid for the slave trade.
Reparations are meant to settle accounts. But because the international system lacks any authority able to guarantee finality, agreements often inspire "a cascade of further financial claims" instead.
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Then there is the mode of payment. How could any state realistically pay such phenomenal amounts over a reasonable time scale? What happens when the money loses value over time because of inflation?
Moreover, why should they pay at all? Is it fair for today’s taxpayers, who have not themselves benefited from slavery, nor may any of their ancestors, to pay for a historical horror they are not responsible for in any way?
Why do African slave-traders from the period get let off the hook?
And why only the trans-Atlantic slave trade? It was vast and industrial, but not the only slave trade in history, nor the only grave moral wrong. Why stop at the slave trade? Every society has a moral accounting to make for its history somewhere.
In recent years, there is also an increasing amount of economic literature calling into question the financial value and significance of the slave trade to British and American economies
Was it really such a source of imperial wealth, as many claim, or just a fraction, most of it held by a small number of fabulously rich people? And perhaps even a drain overall to the economies of Britain and America?
So many complex, almost unanswerable questions cascade down from the deceptively simple word "reparations.”
Reparations Precedents
You might argue that this is a clear category error. Slavery reparations aren’t war reparations. CARICOM says its campaign is not about blame or revenge. Democracies do sometimes pay without being defeated.
The U.S. apologized to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and, under a 1988 law, paid each survivor $20,000. Britain agreed in 2013 to a £19.9 million ($27 million) settlement, costs included, with 5,228 Kenyans over abuses during the Mau Mau emergency.
The Netherlands apologized for slavery in 2022 and set aside €200 million ($225 million). Germany offered Namibia €1.1 billion in 2021 after recognizing a genocide.
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Reparatory acts plainly can happen without coercion. But read the fine print. Each payment was firmly bounded—to identifiable living victims or to development, awareness, and commemoration rather than compensation.
Germany’s is the clearest. It named the genocide and offered the money, but stipulated that "legal claims for compensation cannot be derived" from the offer.
Britain denied liability and said it didn’t believe the Kenya settlement set a "precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration."
States have shown they will pay when they can contain the account. What they resist is a liability with no obvious end. And that’s before you even compare the scale of these payouts against what’s proposed for slavery reparations. They’re tiny.
Burnham’s offer fits this pattern. Alongside a possible apology, his government is proposing a debt-restructuring initiative for the Commonwealth’s poorest countries, to be led by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
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CARICOM’s answer is that debt relief cannot substitute for reparatory justice. It doesn’t carry the same meaning.
Calling a transfer "reparations" binds an admission of responsibility to a payment, the very combination that, Lerner and Heinrichs argue, governments fear.
When then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte delivered the Dutch apology, he described it as "not a full stop, but a comma." He meant it as an opening, but it also captures the whole impasse.
A movement seeking repair wants a comma. But a state contemplating payment wants a large, clear full stop, fearing the commas will never end.
For most of history, the side with the stronger army chose and imposed the outcome. Slavery reparations have no victor, no agreed bill, and no one empowered by the many different and conflicting interests to write the full stop.
That’s why the argument has proved so much easier to begin than to end. King Charles is too polite, but he might as well have said to the Caribbean leaders: You and what army?
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