Dispelling common myths about chattel slavery

June 30, 2025

By Nyala Thompson-Grunwald, Researcher, The Repair Campaign
The scale of the transatlantic slave trade and the brutal repression of lands and peoples in the Caribbean, Americas and Africa remains unprecedented1. The Caribbean archipelago was the experimental lab ground for industrialised dehumanisation and extractive modes of production2. The system of chattel slavery enforced an ideology of inhumanity that persists today. Entire communities, populations, cultures were condemned as ‘chattel’ in the name of economic monopoly – this is what is called the Plantation system. Plantation estates were sites for the deliberate ruin of land and natural ecosystems, damaging nature, agricultural industry and output for generations to come.4 This system was also the site for establishing administrative and political infrastructure to benefit certain parties over a majority of others. Most importantly, plantation estates were death zones5. This system was the site for institutionalising the death-damned conditions of existence of certain bodies and populations.6  Chattel slavery was far different from any other form of enslavement as this oppressive, corrosive process defined the dependence of mass profit and extraction of resources on the disposability of prescribed ‘non-human’ bodies.
The notable cost of ending chattel enslavement (period spanning 1600s-1830s in the British empire) was the  £45,281,738 million compensation package that enslavers in the Caribbean, Cape Colony and Mauritius island received.7  The government committed to paying £20 million of that sum8. The rest of that sum, £25,281,738, was to be ‘paid off’ by emancipated populations as so-called ‘free labour’ during an Apprenticeship period of 4-6 years9. Emancipated populations were forced into ‘paying’ for their legal freedom under similar conditions of brutal assault, torture and wanton killing as under the system of chattel slavery – reproducing the conditions that generate capital through bloodied hands.10 It is critical to understand one the hand that emancipated populations paid far more to compensate enslavers of the loss of their ‘property’ than the British government itself did.11 On the other hand, devising that freedom must be paid for by enslaved populations set the precedent that, for certain communities, freedom was a right that had to be earned. The estimated cost evaluated to ratify the abolition of slavery is only a fraction of the profits reaped by the British empire over nearly 3 centuries of enslavement and an overall near 4 centuries of British colonisation in the Caribbean region alone.12 For instance, between 1783 and 1793 alone, merchants in Liverpool made profits of £15 million from the transatlantic slave trade13. Those profits were reaped by just a portion of the merchant class in Britain. Between 1740 and 1776 alone, exports from Jamaica increased between £650,000 and £2.4 million14. Enslavers in Caribbean colonies were often far wealthier than metropolitan British landowners, contributing more to Britain’s economy and industry, one enslaver in Jamaica was worth £692 million at the time of his death in 1813.15 By the end of the 18th century alone, the British slave empire excavated profits of at least £70 million worth of blood capital16. The profits that enabled the modern development of industry and wealth in Britain were far more than the cost for ending enslavement, drained through a bloodline from the system of enslavement and imperial colonisation.
The debt the government paid was an insurance transaction over the loss of property. These are claims made to families, the majority of whom resided in and owned property in Britain as well. The awarded compensation circulated through British banks and economy, wealth that was re-invested into British wealth.17 This ‘debt’ never had anything to do with the wealth robbed from the bodies of emancipated populations, nor the lands they were imported to and forced to make a home in. More importantly, this sum disproportionately shadows the exorbitant wealth extracted from plantation colonies and enslaved and then emancipated populations before, during and after Emancipation. In 1833, the British government paid a part of the compensation package to enslavers as devised in the Abolition Act, a sum of £20 million. £15 million of this sum were paid in cash, the remaining £5 million in government stocks18. Briefly, the government funded this compensation by generating what are called gilts, the interest of which was placed on the burden of British taxpayers19. In 1835 the Rothschilds, a wealthy banking family (also an enslaving family in Antigua) bought £15 million in perpetual government bonds, meaning that these bonds had no expiry date and could earn annual interest on their repayment for years, decades or centuries, in this case for 180 years20. The sum of £15 million is the loan that British taxpayers were co-opted into paying for generations afterwards (plus interest) until 2015 for the sole benefit of preserving a social order that presents benefits for some and not others.21  In 1833, the total £20 million sum represented just under 5% of both the real and nominal GDP of Britain that year: under 5% of the total goods and services (so, generated income) produced by Britain: the generated income for Britain that year was barely impacted by this payout.22 Furthermore, during the period of apprenticeship (1834-1848, thereabouts), enslavers in the Caribbean made at least £27 million (just over £2,7 billion today in consumer price inflation, thereabouts £200 billion today as proportionate to growth in gross domestic product) in profits from the plantation afterlives of chattel slavery.23 These estimated profits made up more than the close to the £25 million meant to complete the agreed upon close to £45 million compensation package, and this is only in Caribbean plantation economies24.  The total compensation package of just over £45 million (a portion of which was the £20 million provided by the British government) was devised for enslavers at that time to re-invest their assets from plantation economies into the British economy, and into global British imperial strategies of extraction25. While the British government certainly used 40% of their total managed expenditure for the 1833 Abolition Act, taken – briefly – in a fuller context, it is clear that this sum was only a fraction of the wealth excavated from British plantation economies in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Cape Colony prior to, during the process of, and after the 1833 Abolition Act.
The 1833 Abolition Act  ratified the gradual emancipation of enslaved persons , mandated in the interests of the property-owning planter class in Britain and in the plantation colonies.26 Abolition was never about abolishing a genocidal system, this Act legislated the terms and conditions of continued British imperial expansion.  The British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 occurred alongside further British imperial invasion and expansion elsewhere in the world, in the African continent, the south-Asian region and Ireland, for instance.27 Abolishing one system of enslavement divested profits and investments to other sources of colonisation and resource extraction, in the Caribbean and elsewhere.28 The British Empire founded its imperial wealth and gain through the transatlantic slave trade, and any piece of legislation or policy that followed was never in the interest of what was right, but what was to the highest profit. This does not dismiss the extensive revolutions launched in the Caribbean in the years preceding Emancipation, nor the efforts of black abolitionists and other abolitionist movements in Britain. These movements were crucial in pushing those in power to act, however they, wrongfully, did not have any say in the actual legislation of what Emancipation was and what freedom should look like, in the face of MPs with stakes in the Caribbean plantocracy who favoured strategies to safeguard the longevity of their (brutally taken and viciously maintained) property and assets.30 
The first populations who did not consider slavery to be either moral nor legal were enslaved populations themselves, trafficked out of the doors of no return and through the Middle Passage and/or born into captivity.31 Across both sides of the Atlantic, the system of chattel slavery was resisted and disrupted as much as possible from the first stages of its implementation, by indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, enslaved African populations in the Caribbean and Americas, as well as by scattered, gradually collectively mobilised abolitionists in Britain and Europe.32  Governments, following 1492, invented laws to regulate the ownership of human bodies and agency. This through the ratification of several Codes in French, British and Portuguese empires.33 Slavery as a system of forced labour has a lengthy, scattered, traumatic history prior to the Middle Passage that cannot be dismissed, yet none of these were to the extent of permanently and brutally transforming human relations and existence.34  Lastly, the system of chattel slavery as engineered by British, French, Dutch, Spanish… empires and fed by the transatlantic slave trade, was by definition racialised and racialising, and therefore cannot be compared to any other form of enslavement throughout history.35 The economic, industrial, agricultural and political processes as well as brutal processes of racialisation and dehumanisation that have emerged from chattel slavery are still a part of how our world operates today, having been re-cut and tailored to be globally reproduced36. Plantation means the economy of rapid over-exploitation of land and natural resources, resulting in wasteland ecosystems.37  Plantation means the administration of policy, infrastructure to serve the interests of monopolised extraction and dispossess indigenous and trafficked communities.38  Most of all, Plantation means the “slave labour death camps” which instituted the brutal torture, assault, rape and mass murder of African populations.39  The transatlantic slave trade was exceptional and yet foundational, and it was constantly fought against by enslaved populations in occupied colonies and by free Afrodiasporic populations across the Black Atlantic.40
Haitian revolutionaries first abolished slavery in 1791. The Haitian Revolution fought for and obtained the legislation of abolition from a European empire, a pivotal revolution that pushed France to legally abolish enslavement for the first time in 1794.41 Following this and several other revolutions in the Caribbean and in Britain, members of parliament (MPs) were forced to pay attention to consistent, gradually more widespread abolitionist movements. In the North Americas, since the 18th century, states across the United States were legislating manumission and gradual emancipation processes.43  The legislation ratified by the French empire and North American imperial power, the Haitian Revolutions, alongside widespread movement for revolution in the Caribbean, all shaped the British policy and Abolition Act of 1833.44
Stationing 10% of the Royal Navy forces off the coast of West Africa was an attempt to prevent the continuing profits Spanish, Portuguese, French, Baltic, US…empires that were still reaping from the human trafficking of Africans.45 Any resources or captives seized during this period were transferred to serve British interests46. It is also considered that the strategy of the Royal Navy at this time meant to prevent materials leaving a continent that the British were in the process of colonising.47 This strategy simply prevented some extent of the extraction of profit from another state power in the name of increasing its own robbed profit48. During the years that the Squadron was operating, those ‘liberated’ from non-British ships that were re-captured by the British were transferred from enslavement under another European colonisation to enslavement or forced labour under British imperialism: 4 out of 5 of re-captured persons were sent into the systems of chattel slavery and Plantation in the British Caribbean and/or other plantation colonies administered by the British.49
The legal codes put in place throughout the 17th century by French, British, European powers mandated the legal status of enslaved Africans as ‘chattel’. Entire communities and cultures were swallowed into one racial denomination and deemed to have the same rights as a piece of furniture51. The intent of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system was to build a massively extractive model with high profit-value that underdeveloped the natural wealth and resources of certain areas to the explicit benefit of other.52 This sounds like an economic strategy with no genocidal bearing: excepting that this economic strategy could only have been developed through genocide, over the mass graveyards of the Middle Passage and old plantation estates in the Caribbean.  When working with the histories of enslavement and colonisation in the Caribbean, a useful tool is to compare the frequency of ships carrying trafficked Africans arriving in Caribbean islands, with the profitability of the given colonies at the same time.53 A high ‘turnover’ rate (so, a high number of ships carrying new enslaved labour arriving per year in one plantation colony) would often indicate an increased capacity to fund the purchase of enslaved persons and the docking of ships in the port.54 This in turn, briefly indicates two things: an incredibly high mortality rate and great wealth within the colony55. A high mortality rate alongside high periods of profit in a colony reflects the increased overwork, torture, rape and assault of enslaved populations – the cost of paying for ‘supply’ was far less than the profits received from the ‘demand’.56 For instance, in Haiti, CLR James is one of the sources that records the systematically brutal torture and wanton killing of enslaved persons, as the colony was the wealthiest and most profitable for the French empire enslavers could afford to do so.57  In the British context, Thistlewood’s records are an anthology of vicious and systematised dehumanisation.58 bell hooks also indicates that it was in times of low profit and crop output that enslavers most forced reproduction between enslaved persons, to build numbers of an enslaved workforce at little to no cost comparative to purchase.59 This was an intentional, systematic genocide of African persons illustrating a part of a genocide that was fuelled, actively sponsored by British and European colonial powers for the sake of mass extraction and enrichment of these powers.60 This could not exist without a sustained genocidal system of dehumanisation and oppression.61

The limited lens that views ‘kleptocratic leadership and corruption’ as symptomatic in Caribbean governments and political infrastructure, is accurate only in that British and European colonial powers built Caribbean administration for the purposes of extraction and exploitation, and such even after independence in the 1960s.

The model of the Plantation economy imported so-called ‘commodity’ to work on ‘commodity’  for the economic and consumer interests of some. The Plantation model also developed the first version of mass production of one goods or service for mass export and trade, generating a maximum of profitability for an increasingly wealthier ruling class. Following Emancipation, colonial administrations across the Caribbean implemented policy that, for instance, prevented land-owning rights, wealth accumulation from emancipated populations – in practice, it was ruled that freedom was to be in legal status only, and that African, indigenous, Caribbean populations of every island were to be left with little to no agency with which to develop their own society and economy.

Without the Plantation model, racial and extractive capitalism could not exist. The structures of Caribbean societies and economies today still operate according to the Plantation model – including sustaining self-serving interests.

  The African Union, formally established in 1999, has recognised, since its inception, Afrodiasporic populations as another branch of their union. Representatives and mission plans have since mentioned the need to sustain a pan-African dialogue regarding reparatory justice.62 This is already an ongoing process. The participation of certain African empires in the transatlantic trade to serve internal warfare interests was triggered and exacerbated by European colonising powers63. British and European merchants were present in the ports on West African soil, some meeting with heads of kingdoms to negotiate the terms of their trade – these merchants may not have been the ones capturing African populations themselves, but the mass sale of Africans as chattel and imprisonment of Africans at the various ‘doors of no return’ alongside that coast could not have existed without British and European imperial demand for cheap and deemed-disposable labour.64 The African continent, while European colonisation was focused on the plantation economies in the Caribbean, the Americas, Mauritius and Cape Colony, was also subject to several gradual attempts at European occupation and monopoly of resources65. The elite, ruling classes that participated in the variably coerced abdication of African resources, power and people at the hands of British and European colonisers did so in a ‘class-based gambit’ that may have benefited them short term, but only served to enable the deliberate impoverishment of the African continent at the hands of European powers.66 European colonisation in Africa, alongside the co-opting of certain African ruling classes in the oppression of other Africans, outnumbered enslaved persons in the US, Cuba and Brazil by 1850 (those are the last 3 states where emancipation was fully ratified for the entire population).67 The precedent set by Emancipation in the Caribbean in 1833 shaped emancipatory processes in Africa, further engineering the continued theft of resources in that continent, and genocide of Africans, to the detriment of every strata of African societies.68

1 Michael Banner (2024), ‘Chapter.4 Eleven (Mostly Not Very Good) Objections to Reparations’, Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!, Oxford University Press, pp.51-91

2 Malcolm Ferdinand (2021), Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from a Caribbean Perspective, translated by James E Maraniss, Polity Press

3 Rinaldo Walcott (2021), The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom, Duke University Press

4 George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in plantation economies of the Third World, Zed Books 1982

5 Walcott (2021), ‘Chapter. 5. Plantation Zones’, The Long Emancipation, pp.19-23

6 See previous reference

7 Padraic Scanlan (2022), Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, Little Brown Book Group,

8 Hilary Beckles (2021), ‘Chapter.1. Roots of Poverty: Emancipation Business Model’, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparations Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder and Poverty, pp.16-26, p.24

9 Kris Manjapra, ‘Chapter.4. Rewarding Perpetrators and Abandoning Victims Across the Caribbean’, Black Ghost of Empire: The Failure of Emancipation and the Long Death of Slavery, Penguin Books 2022, pp.95-117

10 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, p.106

11 Beckles, ‘Roots of Poverty’, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean, p.25

12 Padraic X Scanlan, ‘Chapter.1. Blood and Sugar: Britain’s Wars for Slavery’, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, Robinson 2020

12 Padraic X Scanlan, ‘Chapter.1. Blood and Sugar: Britain’s Wars for Slavery’, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, Robinson 2020

13 Scanlan, ‘Blood and Sugar’, Slave Empire, p.67

14 See previous reference

15 Scanlan, ‘Blood and Sugar’, Slave Empire, p.41

16 Scanlan, ‘Blood and Sugar’, Slave Empire, p.49

17 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding the Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire

18 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding the Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, p.98

19 See previous Reference

20 Rothschild data from the Centre for the Legacies of British Slavery, Manjapra, ‘Rewarding the Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, p.106

21 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, p.105, David Olusoga, ‘The Treasury’s tweet shows that slavery is still misunderstood’, The Guardian UK  ,  (12/02/2018)

22 GDP data from the Bank of England ‘a-millenium-of-macroeconomic-data-for-the-uk’, Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Slavery at the end of Slavery, Cambridge University Press 2010, 

23 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding the Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, Beckles, ‘Roots of Poverty’, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean,

24 See previous reference

25 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding the Perpetrators’, Black Ghost of Empire, p.97 , Scanlan, ‘Blood and Sugar’, Slave Empire

26 Scanlan, Slave Empire 

27 David Eltis & David Richardson, ‘Chapter 6. Abolition and Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press 2015, pp.271-291

28 Manjapra, ‘Rewarding Perpetrators‘ , Black Ghost of Empire, p.97

29 Manjapra, ‘Chapter.3. British Antislavery and the Emancipation of Property’, Black Ghost of Empire, pp.69-95

30 Scanlan, Slave Empire

31 Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora, Harvard University Press 2009

32 For some references, see Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade, Stephan Palmie and Francisco A Scarano eds, ‘Part IV. Capitalism, Slavery and Revolution’, The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples, University of Chicago Press 2011, pp.243-331, Lennox Honychurch, Resistance Refuge Revival: The Indigenous Kalinagos of Dominica, Papillote Press 2024, Katherine McKittrick, ‘Rebellion/Invention/Groove’, Small Axe n.49, Duke University Press 03/2016, pp.79-91, 

33 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery

34 Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe n.42 , Duke University Press 11/2013, pp.1-16 p.2

35 Conversations with Dr Padraic X Scanlan, November 2024

36 Conversations with Dr Padraic X Scanlan, November 2024

37 See previous Reference

38 See previous Reference

39 See previous Reference, Conversations with Rev. Dr Michael Banner November 2024

40 See previous Reference

41 For reference about the Haitian Revolution, please see CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage Books Edition, Random House 1983 as a foundational preliminary text

42 Manjapra, ‘Chapter.2. Punishing the Black Nation in Haiti’, Black Ghost of Empire, pp.45-69

43 Manjapra, ‘Chapter.1. Making Africans Pay, Gradually, in the American North‘ , Black Ghost of Empire, pp.11-45

44 See previous Reference

45 Eltis & Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

46 See previous Reference

47 See previous Reference

48 Conversations with Dr. Padraic Scanlan, November 2024

49 Eltis & Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

50 Scanlan, Slave Empire

51 For Britain, please see for instance Catherine Hall et al, Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, Cambridge University Press 2014, for France, please see article XLIV, ‘Le Code Noir ou Edit du Roy, servant du Reglement pour le Gouvernement et l’administration de Justice et la Police des Iles Francaises de l’Amerique, et pour la Discipline et le Commerce des Negres et Esclaves dans ledit Pays’, 03/1685, accessed from the archives of l’Assemblee Nationale Francaise

52 Beckford, Persistent Poverty,

53 The Slave Voyages Database, B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807-1834, John Hopkins University Press 1984

54 See previous References

55 See previous Reference

56 James, The Black Jacobins, Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt, Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development, University of West Indies Press 2009

57 James, The Black Jacobins

58 Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire

60 Scanlan, Slave Empire

61 Walcott, The Long Emancipation

62 Insight from the African All-Party Parliamentary Conference for Reparations, October 2024,

63 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,

64 See previous Reference

65 See previous Reference

66 See previous Reference

67 See previous Reference

68 Manjapra, Black Ghost of Empire,

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