Could you introduce yourself and your work?

My academic career started with a PhD on South Africa. Broadly, I was looking at the British colonial foundations for what became apartheid. Apartheid is normally associated with an Afrikaner nationalist government after 1948. What I tried to do was explore some of the key foundations for apartheid that lay in the geographies of white supremacy imposed by British imperialism during the 19th century, which Afrikaner nationalists inherited and then put to use to advance specifically Afrikaner, rather than generally white, interests. So that was my sort of entrée, if you like, into academic research.

I then stayed within the broadly the sort of ivory tower of producing peer-reviewed research articles and research monographs about the sets of connections that linked different colonies to each other and to Britain and the way that one couldn’t really understand a society of any one colonial space without thinking about it as part of this broader imperial entity. And neither could one understand the shaping of modern Britain without thinking of that as part of a broader imperial entity too.

And then a kind of sliding doors moment emerged around 2020, when Black Lives Matter was happening on the streets of Britain, and when I was seriously ill and taken out of my normal research, teaching, and managerial regime. Suddenly, I found the right-wing press in Britain, Conservative politicians, a whole sort of right-wing ecosystem of think tanks in London—all of them conspiring to defend British colonialism, even in the Caribbean, even including slavery, by deflecting the attention to anti-slavery and away from the preceding centuries of slavery, trying to justify British colonialism rather than think about its uneven impacts. And these flagrant misrepresentations, falsehoods, sometimes downright lies, were starting to swamp our media in the UK as this right-wing backlash set in against Black Lives Matter, the movement itself being mischaracterised as an alien import of radical African-American activism.

So I thought to use the time I had out of my normal academic life to put these two things together. My area that I’ve been working on for so long is suddenly important and a part of our political landscape, and I might as well put what I do know already to good use. So that was when I started to carve out a separate trajectory within my academic career of trying to combat some of this misrepresentation, not just in relation to slavery and anti-slavery but in relation to empire as a whole.

How is the context of ‘culture wars’ in the UK shaping public policy and narrative?

I think the best way of answering is to give a sort of brief genealogy, as I see it, of the culture wars’ development in the UK. There is a longer-term structural context to bear in mind before we come right up to the last few years, which is that the British Empire has not generally been taught critically in Britain until relatively recently. And even the discipline of imperial and colonial history only really started to undergo a shift away from the perspectives of the white male administrators of empire in around the 1980s–1990s. So, we’re not talking that long ago when post-colonial ideas, feminist ideas, started to infiltrate the academy even, and started to change the way that academics understood the empire, by listening to the voices of colonised peoples, listening to the voices of black and brown women. These are relatively recent and relatively radical transformations to the way that imperial history was conducted in universities, let alone taught across the broader population.

We were schooled that empire was largely benevolent, that what mattered was Britain’s abolition of slavery, not Britain’s practice of slavery beforehand.

And that takes some undoing, that socialisation takes some unpicking, and there’s psychological resistance to unlearning what you’ve been learning for decades. So that’s part of the context. And into that context, you’ve got, on the one hand, the historiography changing—the importation of these ideas that empire wasn’t, and shouldn’t just be seen through, the mindset of those who administered it. That it had all sorts of manifestations in colonies around the world of which we were taught nothing at all. That it generated all sorts of experiences that have been kept from us. Then, on top of that more holistic historical revisionism and the disturbance it causes, you’ve got anti-racist mobilisation, anti-racist activism, which has clearly been contending the effects of colonialism all along.

There were two defining moments coming closer to the present. Black Lives Matter seemed to be a pivotal moment. That really put the frighteners on conservatives who want to protect that long-held cherished view of Britain and Britishness associated with empire.

The Rhodes Must Fall movement, which obviously came via South Africa and University of Cape Town students toppling the statue of Cecil Rhodes, was a precursor both for BLM and for the backlash against it. Rather than accepting the history and then questioning the decision to remove the statue, people like Nigel Biggar, who is one of the foremost culture warriors on empire in Britain, decided to defend Rhodes’s historical actions themselves.

So when you see conservative politicians and media outlets articulating these defences of empire, putting up this wall against any reparations discussion or any critical discussion, it’s usually Biggar’s ideas—like this—that one must go back and find justifications of various kinds for colonialism—that are being regurgitated in various forms.

Biggar was one of those who basically said BLM, with the attention it had drawn to people like Colston and formative historical processes like transatlantic slavery, should be forgotten. Instead, the focus should be on anti-slavery. Along with tactics like exaggerating the costs of the anti-slavery West Africa Squadron, exaggerating its impact, and reiterating 19th-century propaganda, they created the idea that after abolition in 1833, the British Empire expanded only to put down slavery.

Then Black Lives Matter 2020 provoked a genuine panic among a number of conservatives that the British social order might finally be changing. The idea of anti-racism might not just be a sort of a little thing for liberals to dally in every now and then anymore. Institutions as entrenched, as quintessentially English as the National Trust, the Bank of England, and Oxbridge colleges might actually start to effect more structural changes.

But then you’ve got another powerful force feeding in, and that is domestic politics after Brexit and the fact that defending Britain’s imperial reputation became part of the whole debate about the Conservative Party and its relationship to Brexit in the 2019 election.

It wasn’t so much that imperial nostalgia drove the Brexit vote. That was more about mobilised hostility to Eastern European immigration. It was more that, in the 2019 election, the Conservatives targeted “red wall” voters who were seen as socially conservative and as being proud of their Britishness. And so these kind of culture war attacks on the woke people who were undermining that pride were seen as electorally vital. The Conservative Party started telling red wall voters that not only have they got nothing, but “they” want to take away their pride in their past.

That became very powerful as a political electoral strategy in Britain. And I don’t think you can understand this culture war context and the situation that we’re facing now in terms of reparations without understanding how powerful that message is. Reparations is a scare word because it’s been weaponised as a form of attack on the so-called ‘white working classes’ in these red wall seats, who will have to pay for them. So it’s seen as an electoral asset to maintain historical pride, no matter what the reality, no matter what the historical truth is, but to maintain pride in a certain white-centred version of Britishness is electorally very significant still.

How do we navigate the huge onslaught of misinformation around repair?

I think it’s a key question. It’s absolutely essential to all of this. And I guess, the single most important strategy and response to those who seek to deflect from or trivialise transatlantic slavery is to insist on identifying transatlantic slavery as an unspeakable crime against humanity – the phrase that was used in respect to the Holocaust. Unless you do that, unless we’re able to establish in the public consciousness that transatlantic slavery was of a different order, a different scale, a different degree of dehumanization from any of these ‘what abouts’ or comparisons with the many other forms of oppression and atrocity there have been in modern history, that are constantly mentioned to deflect from thrown at reparations demands, then you are not going to succeed.

People will always be able to deflect from it and say, well, “‘the Arab slave trade was just as bad, you know, people were castrated in it.”’ So what I’m trying to do is just patiently to point out that, of course, all slaveries are bad. Speaking historically, the Arab slave trade was not as transformative of the globe as the Atlantic slave trade. And if you want to itemize individual cruelties, it wasn’t just captives of Arabs who were castrated. African men in the Caribbean and the plantation complex were also castrated (and so, by the way, were Mau Mau rebels in British torture camps of the 1950s). But in addition to that, you could itemise all of the aspects of chattel slavery that make it a crime against humanity that is even more unspeakable than other forms of slavery in history. So I think that that’s critical for your project. 

And partly the problem there is this very long tradition in Britain of just sweeping under the carpet aspects of empire that don’t reflect well on the imperial power. Operation Legacy, the name for the project to destroy or hide documentary evidence that might embarrass the British government (such as that torture in Kenya) was called that for a reason – to shape a partial and overwhelmingly positive legacy of Empire. We’ve had centuries of that legacy shaping here, even though there’s a rich record of  liberal protest too, and it’s only just beginning to change. So although slavery is being taught in schools now, much more than it used to be, (I think most kids now do at least a lesson on transatlantic slavery) that point about the sheer inhumanity and scale of transatlantic slavery is fundamental.

How do you view and understand reparatory justice as it is currently developing?

I think there’s many dimensions to this. I’m trying to do some work with colleagues in auditing of all the activities, which are not so much engaged in reparations per se, but are engaged in uncovering institutional links with slavery and revealing hidden truths about the past. That truth-seeking is the first step towards thinking about repair and possible reparations. There’s no kind of institutional repository of all of that activity. 

It strikes me that some kind of website compiling all of these activities would be a first step. And then potentially putting them in touch with one another, creating some kind of forum in which ideas and information can be shared.

I know that there are so many of the same conversations being replicated across the place, which could fruitfully be brought together in terms of who do you consult with about the historical truths that might call for reparative justice? Who gets any funds that you give? What should be the principles underlying that? And at the moment, you’ve got all this disparate activity with all these institutions and individuals doing their own thing, both in terms of investigating the past and making demands in the present, quite often without much consideration of what is feasible in current political and economic circumstances. So some kind of coordination, some kind of linkage, I think is a key activity that you may want to be involved in on the reparation side.

While presenting historical facts is absolutely important, sometimes facts alone don’t change people’s minds. Is there another, possibly more productive, approach that appeals to the emotional side of “British Pride” that could help us make better progress on this conversation? 

I think you’re absolutely right. No matter how many facts you lay out, that won’t necessarily change minds. Where knowing your facts can be helpful is when you can challenge the facts that those refusing even a conversation produce. So if you can build up a stock of their misrepresentations you if you can say, for example, actually, no, Britain wasn’t the first country to abolish the slave trade. That was Haiti. Actually Britain didn’t spend 2% of its national income suppressing the slave trade; it spent something more like 0.05%, and actually no, British ships did not free captives taken from other ships; they took them to be assigned to work as unpaid “apprentices” in different places across the Empire. So every time they come at you with incorrect “facts”, if you can destabilise that, I think you can build up a picture of how their worldview has been generated on the basis of misrepresentation. I think it can be more effective to correct their false “facts” than presenting your own true facts.  

Most importantly though, I think reparations will only occur if they can be portrayed as, and are actually, in Britain’s national self-interest. Politically, that’s how it’s going to happen or it won’t happen at all. And there are ways that reparative measures can be presented as being in Britain’s self-interest. And much of the premise behind Bigger and others, much of their attacks on the woke, anti-colonial people, is that somehow they’re undermining the West. They’re making us to be too self-critical to sustain morale at a time when the West needs to defend its core values against authoritarian states. So I think it’s helpful to draw attention to what those core values actually are.? They are universal human rights, they’re liberalism, they’re the ability to be self-critical and to reform, and they are underpinned by certain values – slavery being wrong is one of those values that conservatives like to proclaim. If Britain wants any kind of lingering remnant of its former global influence, perhaps reparations of some kind is the way to go – a new form of soft power at a time when China especially is constructing a web of obligations through relatively generous loans. for example.

To repair Britain’s global relationships with former colonies, with the Anglophone world, is to establish a new moral stature for Britain on the world stage. If you can focus on technology transfer that actually works for the benefit of Caribbean nations, for example, it’s a genuine transfer of technology at the cost of, let’s say, no profiteering by British suppliers. That seems to me to be quite a fruitful intersection between Britain’s national interest and the world’s interest in dealing with climate change, if it’s low carbon technology, and a genuine reparative gesture that’s meaningful because it does involve actually indirectly financial transfer if Britain forgoes the profiteering that usually comes with technology transfer. Longer term debt relief would also be a substantial reparative measure.

One of the strands of our research makes the link between the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and what’s showing up in society today in the Caribbean. Do you think the UK is ready to have that conversation? 

I think you would have to be fairly canny about how you convey those ongoing structural injustices and inequalities instituted by slavery, and how you connect those very directly with British responsibilities. So, you know, once you start getting into sort of crime figures and health figures in Jamaica, there’s too many opportunities for people to jump in and say, well, they’ve been independent for a long time, nothing to do with us. 

It’s very difficult to do because I think multiple trajectories have to be pursued at once. You have got to try and establish the idea that transatlantic slavery was an unspeakable crime against humanity on a scale equivalent to the Holocaust, whilst developing that thread of continuity between that crime against humanity and Britain’s responsibility today, to establish that kind of moral connection. And you’ve got to try and sell it as in Britain’s interest to do something about it.

And those are some of the lessons from how the anti-slavery campaign worked really, that the groundwork was done by people like Cugoano and Equiano making that direct link between their narrative, their story, their suffering and the responsibility of Britons. The narrative that was put in place there was; you have a moral responsibility, then activists started to sell the story that getting the British government to pass legislation would do Britain good. It could be a moral leader in the world. Now, we all know that it’s much more complicated than that.

It’s that kind of congruence of different activities, different forces, different stories that worked. The additional problem now of course is the passage of time. The antislavery activists were working at the moment, with an ongoing and evident injustice to correct for which Britons were primarily responsible at that moment. Generating that sense of responsibility across two centuries is far more difficult. I think it could provide a tipping point in the future at some point. 

Thank you very much for your time, and the wealth of information and insight you were generous to share. Is there anything else you would like to say?

There’s an opportunity to revive discussions of transatlantic slavery and its afterlives coming up with the commemorations for the bicentenary of the 1833 abolition of the Slavery Trade Act. Already there’s a parliamentary group being convened to talk about how officially 2033 might be celebrated. And I think that gives a great opportunity to consider the possibility of developing that narrative of reparations being the next stage in Britain’s leadership on abolition of slavery 200 years ago. You could argue that the moment should be marked now with a reparatory gesture for what came before abolition. That seems to me to be a powerful narrative.