Letter of the Day | Britain thrived by slave-built wealth, now scorning it
Published:Friday | April 25, 2025 | 12:05 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
I was watching BBC news which reported that the Britain’s state-owned energy company will not be allowed to use solar panels linked to Chinese slave labour. In fact, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, will introduce an amendment to legislation to ensure there is no slavery in Britain’s energy supply chains. This news could not pass without my pausing to reflect on the fact that my ancestors were forced to give 400 years of slave labour which built British wealth and was a major contributor to their Industrial Revolution.
Slave labour in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, and many more islands played a significant role in Britain’s wealth-amassing Industrial Revolution. The massive earnings generated in the late 1700s from Caribbean sugar and tobacco plantations was instrumental in financing and fuelling industrial growth in Britain. British merchants and investors profited immensely from the exploitation of enslaved Africans on the plantations. They used the huge profits made from our blood, sweat, and tears to invest in British industries, infrastructure, and technology. The transatlantic slave trade – of which the monarchy in Britain held a monopoly – and Caribbean plantations were integral to the economic foundations of industrialisation in Britain.
Britain seeks to protest against Chinese slave labour, but it is responsible and obliged to return the wealth that they gained, by way of reparations. Britain until 2015, took taxpayers’ money to pay the planters’ hefty compensation in 1838 for the loss of their enslaved. They totally ignored our parents’ free, forced labour, and divided £20 million blood money among already-wealthy plantation owners.
Britain knew better, as they boast in their popular patriotic song composed in 1740, 100 years before slavery ended, that “Britons won’t be slaves”. That song reflected a sentiment of national pride and resistance to any oppression of their citizens. They enacted the Magna Carta in 1225 to protect the human rights of their people. We, too, want closure and restoration of our inherent dignity as humans. Be it solar panels or sugar cane, slavery’s abhorrence stinks and must be corrected.
BERT SAMUELS
Attorney-at-Law