Why Robert Jenrick is wrong about the British Empire

Robert Jenrick at a Tory leadership hustings (Picture: The Conservative Party)

The Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick’s shamelessly declared in the Daily Mail newspaper that the victims of British imperialism should be grateful to the British Empire. 

To be fair, this was very much the view of New Labour, of the likes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and there is every reason to think that Keir Starmer shares this view today. His response to the demand for reparations for slavery has been little better, and makes this pretty clear.

The claim is, of course, absolutely outrageous. Nothing better demonstrates this than the history of slavery.

The horrors of British involvement in the slave trade and the appalling exploitation of slaves in Britain’s Caribbean colonies—men, women and children worked to death for profit—are not the focus of Jenrick’s attention.

Instead, it is the British abolition of slavery that is celebrated as showing the Empire’s humanitarian side. This is a gigantic distortion of history.

Slavery was not abolished out of any humanitarian concerns, but because the British government had become convinced that the slaves could no longer be kept in chains. Successive slave revolts, culminating in the great Jamaican revolt that broke out on 27 December 1831, doomed British slavery.

The revolt began as a general strike involving over 60,000 slaves, but the British unleashed bloody repression and it turned into a rebellion. One slave woman, shot for her part in burning down her owner’s sugar works, defiantly told her executioners, “I know I shall die for it, but my children shall be free.”

Troops killed over 400 slaves and executed another 326 in the aftermath of the revolt.

The last to die was the leader of the revolt, Samuel Sharpe, hanged on 23 May 1832, who made it clear that he “would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery”.

The military brutally flogged hundreds more, with some being flogged to death.

What worried the British government, however, was that this bloody repression did not appear to intimidate the slaves. According to one minister they seemed to be “burning for revenge for the fate of their friends and relations” with many of them “regarding death as infinitely preferable to slavery”.

He was convinced that if slavery was not abolished, then the slaves would free themselves. The minister was worried that news might arrive at any time that “Jamaica is in the possession of the negroes”.

It was this fear of slave revolt that led to the abolition of slavery, not any humanitarian concerns on the part of the British ruling class. The slaves would continue revolting until they had overthrown their masters and the only way to pre-empt this was abolition.

There was a powerful mass movement in Britain demanding abolition at this time, a movement rooted in the working class, with petitions signed by more than 1.3 million people.

Establishment historians reduce this movement to the respectable figure of politician William Wilberforce. They present persuasion, appealing to the conscience of our rulers, as the way forward rather than struggle and revolt.

What about the question of reparations? The British government has already paid reparations—but to the slave owners, not to the slaves. The government borrowed some £20 million to compensate the slave owners, an unprecedented sum.

In today’s money it would amount to £300 billion. But the people being compensated were rich and influential so it was accepted.

The £20 million loan was not finally paid off until 2015. This means that the descendants of Caribbean slaves living in Britain, the Windrush generation, would have been paying taxes that went towards the cost of their ancestors’ emancipation.

This is what the British Empire was all about.