Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, shared a platform with Esther Phillips, the island’s poet laureate, at the London School of Economics earlier this month. It was an evening of emotionally charged history as well as politics. Ms Phillips read from her poems about slavery; Ms Mottley spoke about the challenges facing the Caribbean and colonialism’s myriad legacies.
For two centuries, Barbados was at the centre of the hugely profitable British sugar trade along with Jamaica and other islands. Built on the backs of enslaved men, women and children, and continued under the exploitative conditions of indentured labour for decades afterwards, the plantation system cast deep shadows from which the islands have struggled to escape. People in the Caribbean, says the historian Matthew Smith, are always thinking about this history in relation to the way they are now.
Today, Barbados, the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, with a population of 281,000, is heavily reliant on tourism and is struggling under a huge debt burden. It is also on the frontline of the climate crisis, to which small island states are highly exposed. Like other poor countries, Barbados bears very little responsibility for the historic carbon emissions, mostly produced by western industrialised nations, that are causing temperature rises. Since being elected in 2018, Ms Mottley has pushed the climate agenda, speaking of the “death sentence” that global heating represents for the Caribbean. At Cop28, she called for a 5% tax on global oil and gas profits – yielding $200bn annually – to fund poor nations’ climate needs.
Ms Mottley has read the room. The British West Indies, except for five small islands, are independent states. As part of a reckoning with the legacy of British colonialism, there has been a republican shift. Barbados removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state in 2021. Of the 14 countries beyond the UK that retain the monarch as head of state, at least six in the Caribbean want out. Some want a formal apology from the royals about the crown’s role in the enslavement of Africans. As Cynthia Barrow-Giles, a professor of political science at the University of the West Indies, told this paper, Ms Mottley “believes this region represents a civilisation that is still untapped, and she wants to untap it”.
Notorious indemnity
The region is emerging from the shadows of history to find a stronger voice. The UN resolution in November to shift decision-making on global tax policies and rules away from the rich world was co-sponsored by the Bahamas, a Caribbean island fed up with being called a tax haven by more egregious offenders like the EU. Caribbean figures are also walking the corridors of power. The UN’s top climate official, Simon Stiell, was a former environment minister in Grenada, and the alliance of Caribbean and Pacific islands has been a crucial source of pressure on wealthy governments. Prof Avinash Persaud, an ally of Ms Mottley, played a key role in formulating the Bridgetown Initiative under which crisis-hit countries would qualify for automatic debt relief and new, low-interest loans to fund mitigation.
The Caribbean has long struggled to escape the national interests of big powers. Cuba continues to suffer under “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed under Donald Trump. There might be better news for Puerto Rico, a US territory where citizens are obligated to pay taxes but have no votes in Congress. Its Spanish colonial cultural heritage is one of the reasons that becoming a full US state was never a given. However, that might change. The US Congress is considering a bill that would provide the island’s residents with a choice in 2025: become a sovereign nation associated with the US, declare independence or start on a pathway to statehood.
About half of the Caribbean’s population lives on the island of Hispaniola. Haiti occupies its western third, while the rest is taken up by the Dominican Republic. Both have similar-sized populations, and have been invaded by the US and ruled by dictatorships. Both were occupied by empires – Haiti by France and the Dominican Republic by Spain.
France appears to be the more historically destructive rule. The notorious 1825 indemnity of 150m francs that Paris demanded – and got – as a condition of recognising Haiti’s (already won) independence was estimated to have cost it $115bn in today’s money. That’s a lot for today’s 11 million Haitians. Haiti currently teeters on the brink of state collapse amid a marked resurgence of gang violence. Its bigger neighbour, meanwhile, is not just one of the most successful economies in the Caribbean but also in Latin America. The disparities have created tensions. The Dominican president, Luis Abinader, sealed all land, air and sea borders with Haiti this September, and is running for re-election next year on his hardline, racist policies that include building a wall between the two countries.
Reparative function
The question of legacies of enslavement has been an important question for the Guardian, which launched its Cotton Capital project earlier this year. The Scott Trust – the Guardian’s owner – announced a £10m investment in a restorative justice programme, including an expansion of our journalism in the Caribbean. This followed research that showed the wealth of the paper’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and that of most of his backers was connected to transatlantic slavery.
UK society is redressing past wrongs too. Glasgow University, the Church of England and the National Trust are all attempting to make amends for their respective historical roles in slavery. In the Commons, an all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations is chaired by the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy. History has a way of magnifying the costs through the work of compounding time. That’s why serious research comes up with such large bills for damages for enslavement. In one study, Britain alone was reckoned to owe $24tn. Reparations, as Ms Mottley says, are not only about money. They can include apologies, education initiatives and the return of artefacts and human remains. Prof Catherine Hall, in her forthcoming 2024 book, Lucky Valley, argues that history itself can have a reparative function.
Eric Williams, the historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, contended that the Caribbean needed an “inward hunger” to find the solidarity required to remedy its peoples’ condition. The region’s stature on the world stage has waxed and waned. But it undoubtedly remains a microcosm of a wider struggle for an economically just, politically confederated, multicultural world.
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