Remembering Emancipation on both sides of the Atlantic
August 13th, 2025
The Repair Campaign met with Professor Matthew J. Smith, a Jamaican scholar of Caribbean Histories, to discuss the memory of Emancipation.
Good afternoon, Professor Smith. Thank you for meeting with The Repair Campaign to discuss British emancipation and your work. Could you introduce yourself and your work?
I’m Matthew Smith, a professor of Caribbean history at University College London (UCL) and director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS). My focus is on Haiti and Jamaica.
How did British abolition legislation define the disenfranchisement of emancipated populations post-1838?
The story of British abolition is that it properly happens on two fronts. One front is what’s happening in the British Parliament and the other front is what’s happening in the Caribbean. Let’s take the first one. The British Parliament is heavily pressured throughout the first decades of the 19th century by the anti-slavery campaign, a campaign that in many respects is, in Britain, one of the largest mass movements galvanizing protest organisations. It was remarkable, leading to a first phase to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. Once that was abolished, there was an expectation that eventually the planters would see that slavery itself was going to be unsustainable because the planters had relied so heavily on the transatlantic trade in Africans that once that came to a grinding halt and they were only left with the populations in islands that they would realize that slavery itself couldn’t last. This did not happen. In fact, the planters had essentially been reared on a system that goes all the way back to the foundations of British colonialism in the Caribbean that was purely driven by profit. How can they extract more? How can they clear more lands, plant more sugar cane, plant more coffee?
There’s, of course, the way in which the world forces are sweeping across the Caribbean. The pressure that imposes in parliament spurs a separation of views. It becomes quite intense from those who support the planters, which is an increasingly shrinking lobby of persons, to those who are more sympathetic with the abolitionist cause, because they believe now with all of what’s happening in the United States, with the production of cotton, with what’s happening in other places where they had competition, the decline in sugar in Haiti…all of those things mean that Britain’s main economic activities have to be beyond agriculturally grown sugar.
That pressure is leading to what eventually becomes the abolition decree in 1833 to be effectuated in 1834. And as you rightly said, it’s not full freedom. It’s only partial freedom. Now for a long time, the story of emancipation was much of what I’ve just said.
But historians, particularly historians from the Caribbean, had convincingly in the past half century made a powerful adjunct to that argument that you can’t divorce what was happening in the Caribbean from the actions that take place in Parliament, particularly the resistance of enslaved persons in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, in Jamaica in 1831 to 1832… What those three rebellions prove is that enslaved persons understood that there was a move afoot to question the long existence of slavery. Whether or not parliament was going to award emancipation, they were going to accelerate the clock on it. And the great line from Eric Williams’ Capitalism on Slavery on this point is, quote, “emancipation from above or emancipation from below, but emancipation”. The idea that whether we are going to fight for it or we’re going to wait for it, we’re going to get it.
What it does set up from the very beginning is two different ways in which emancipation is remembered. In Britain today, emancipation is remembered as the story of the saints, Wilberforce, Clarkson, etc. The so-called anti-slavery society. In the Caribbean, we celebrate Sam Sharp, the people who resisted as the people who are most instrumental in getting emancipation through.
How do we reconcile these two memories in reparatory justice work?
So even if you’re saying that the enslaved persons are no longer meant to be chattel, human property, the place itself where they are “freed” is property of a colonial metropole. That’s really crucial because we cannot separate colonialism from the story of slavery in the Caribbean. Slavery comes with colonialism and colonialism comes with slavery. We are immediately set up as islands that were production houses for the profit of empire. So when abolition comes that way from above, it comes at a time and in a way that is meant to reinforce that colonial relationship where we determine how your freedom will be, what it will look like and what possibilities of the exercise of that freedom are available to you. Emancipation, when it arrived, was an incomplete project. It didn’t give anything beyond the end of formal enslavement to the free people, right? They [enslaved persons] were turned on by every institution that they could possibly rely upon. I mean, there are priests and pastors who went around some of the islands, the countryside and so on, coming up to 1838 and gave testimonies or sermons, basically quite literally saying to the apprentices just before they became free, ‘the freedom you have is a gift to you from England’. So this is a freedom that is not your entitlement. You’ve been gifted the freedom from someone else. And what you do with that gift has to be in respect of the giver of that gift.
That psychology only exists within a colonial space of control. And that’s what’s missing. That recognition of that framework of colonialism and especially the power that comes with it helps us to understand why the construction of the memory of abolition was so different.
How can reparations address the plantation’s afterlife?
There’s a normal view of reparations, which is a view of people now paying for something that happened nearly 200 years ago. And the problem, obviously, in doing it that way is a sort of flattening out of the history from 1838 to 2025. One way to overcome it is, as we’ve just said, to see it as not just a question of slavery, but slavery and colonialism. That’s important because once you start to change the lens of it, it presents new possibilities. And so that when people think about repair, that is not just a repair in the sense of a form of recompense in the memory of our ancestors, but it’s a repair for all of the things that came with slavery and its afterlife, which is the entire apparatus that was not only carried over but constructed to keep emancipated people subjugated, right?
What is going to be important here is to resist the flattening out by emphasizing the way in which Caribbean people since 1838 have struggled to get to this point. So reparations itself doesn’t just come out of the blue. It’s the sort of culmination of a struggle for some sort of voice, some sort of…fair justice really for what has happened, which only accumulated as time went by. So it doesn’t end actually in 1838. It just changes course and picks up differently afterwards. And to do that would mean, I believe, or could involve as one possibility, to go through a little bit more the story of that struggle, how hard it has been to dispense mentally with the uniform of colonialism, which is a hard thing to do.
But to do it, you have to look at the various achievements and gains along the way. And you look at some of those Caribbean writers and thinkers you have mentioned, you look at the way in which Caribbean people have sought to carve out some degree of autonomy in their lives. And the way in which what we’re seeing now should be seen as a broader reparations movement on behalf of ancestors who have been fighting since 1838 – not just those who were fighting slavery, but those since 1838 to get to this point. How to make that argument can be a bit challenging because it’s not a simple one to make. We also suffer very greatly from the fact that in Britain – and again, it comes down to the residual power of colonialism – our histories often need to be mediated through British history to have value. And that’s highly troublesome because it’s almost as if you say that what has happened in the Caribbean since 1838 doesn’t really matter unless it is in some way a response to something that happens over here.
Thank you very much for your time and insight during this conversation, we look forward to hearing more from you.
It was my pleasure to chat with you, these are good questions.