Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello Human Resources listeners, this is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...
takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.
We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.
You're listening to a special bonus episode of Human Resources. Our guest today is Chris Manjapra, author of the brilliant Black Ghosts of Empire, The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation.
The book explores emancipation and abolition, and how the end of slavery actually helped codify racial inequality and oppression into our present. Here's our conversation. I am a professor of history. I live in Boston. My family is from Bahamas. That's where I'm born. And my
My mom's family comes from Andros, which is an island, one of the biggest island of Bahamas. And, you know, we have in our line the experience of slavery. So we have a group, I mean, a line in our family who came to the Bahamas, who were brought to the Bahamas long ago in 1700s. Another line came much more recently, probably in the 1880s, forcibly brought there during the illegal slave trade.
So in my bloodline is this history of forced displacement and the African diaspora and all the questions that that leaves me with, you know, today. So that informs what I write about, that informs how I think. When did you start becoming aware that this was not just history, but something that you wanted to laser in and study yourself rather than just being a part of the fabric that you've grown up with?
I think I've always known that this is not just history, but this is family history. And I think when growing up and you hear stories from my mom, for example, about things she experienced while she was growing up, or when I ask questions about my grandmother or my great-grandmother, and sometimes we don't have the answers because of what slavery has done, or even the ways in which when I see
You know, I, as I mentioned, grew up in the Bahamas, partly grew up in Canada, moved to the United States. So when I meet other Black people in different parts of the Americas or when I've traveled to Africa, you know, all of this is very much personal history because I feel like I'm meeting people who we share our
fragments in common and there's something in me that wants to understand how we fit together. And that is an intellectual interest, but it's also just there's something emotional about it as well that I think informs
Why become a historian? Why I want to write about the things I write about. So you've written this amazing book, which is Black Ghost of Empire, which I have right here. In the beginning of the book, you talk about this void caused by slavery, this lack of history, which you mentioned there with some of your ancestors, your grandmother in particular. Are there any gaps that you know from your own personal history that pushed you into doing this in the way you just discussed?
Like I mentioned, in my family, I never knew the names of any of my ancestors before my grandmother. And so that was a void. That has been this void. And it's had left me with such curiosity. Where did we come from? How did we get here? There are things that happened in our family that feel like they are reverberations or something that must have happened earlier. And
And so that's the concrete void. I, in traveling to the Bahamas on my own, came across folks who do some ancestry research and who have access to some of the archives. And it's through working with them that I've now learned the names of
some earlier ancestors and, you know, taking the history back to places where my mother had no idea, you know, we could go, for example. And that is something that, you know, I dedicated my book both to my mom as well as to my fourth grandmother, who has shown up in the archives. It's almost as if she came to find me is how it feels to me. And it's so interesting that every time I speak with my mother now, we always...
bring in our ancestor. We always reference her as if she's in the room. So writing the book was also a journey to that place that both of us didn't know in terms of Lorena and Woodside, this ancestor of mine, and also to the place that she came from. And in that place, there also happens to be this thing called the blue hole, which I had never seen before, which is a void, but it's more than a void. And so all of these things kind of came together and they...
affirm for me that when we stare into the void of our family history, it's not emptiness that comes back. There is voice, there is a presence that speaks to us. And I've experienced that in writing this book. What was it about staring to that voyage and hearing those reverberations that made you want to focus on the age of emancipations?
you know the blue hole itself is is andros has a lot of them and they exist across the caribbean and mexico and other parts of the world but there are these deep holes that go down um into the into the island bedrock i was standing around one of them in andros and what um struck me as i was looking into this deep deep deep water hole was that the surface of it was actually like a mirror
i just that blew my mind and and the mirror was showing the environment so there were these pine trees around and there was the sky and there was myself and there was my friend and so that metaphor of what
looks back at us when we look into the void just really captured, captivated me. And so that becomes a metaphor in this book. But what is looking back at me when I ask questions about the voids in my family history is not only the history of slavery, but it's also this history of how slavery ended or supposedly ended. And that, that is important because the ways that slavery ended, the
what we call emancipation, were actually designed to do something that we don't often talk about, which is to actually continue the
rule of racial oppression and to continue the dynamics of enslavement, but just in other ways. And so that's the message that was coming back to me as I was looking into this family history and looking for my grandmother's fourth great grandmother. And it's an important piece to how we understand our past because it helps us explain why things that happened seemingly so long ago
still have such a impact on our lives today it's because the the mechanisms that were supposed to stop them didn't stop them you know they perpetuated them so that's the theme of the that's the theme of the book could you just quickly define emancipation as it's commonly understood for any listeners who might not be quite aware of what emancipation is
- Yes, of course. Emancipation very simply is the term that we use to talk about the processes that ended slavery. So abolition is another very common term that we use to talk about the end of slavery, the end of the institution of slavery. And emancipations are in some ways the toolkit that's used to make abolition happen. The laws, the policies, the arrangements, all of those are what constitutes
and emancipation. And if we look at the term itself, the term comes from Roman law, and it means to let free from the hand. That's the definition. That's what it means, you know, in terms of its etymology. And so it's a legal and procedural process whereby slave owners agree to voluntarily let the slaves free.
And that's how, and so all of the arrangements that go into emancipation are, have been in the favor of the enslavers because it was, these are ways to allow them on their terms to let go of what they thought to be their property in African people. So that's what an emancipation is, both in terms of like how we think of it every day, but also like what its legal terms are.
You in the book obviously are seeking to reinterpret the word emancipation as may be suggested by the evidence. It's not a process of freedom per se. And even the word emancipation, what do you say that implies about ownership? I differentiate emancipation from liberation. And emancipation is about agreeing or assuming that the ownership right to African people actually exists.
lay with the enslaver. That is inscribed in the very term emancipation, as opposed to African people owning themselves, you know, as human beings. And so that's, for me, the difference between emancipation and liberation work is that emancipations reaffirmed the property rights of enslavers in a variety of ways and rejected the
the obvious truth that Black people, like all people on earth, are self-owning. You know, we are full human beings. We are not property. So to be freed as property is still to be
seen as property, which is what emancipations did. And then what's so important in this story is that in response to the many emancipations that happened throughout the 19th century, Black people always began liberation projects. So it's not as if they just agreed to the terms of emancipation. They saw those terms as the reason to organize, to resist, to
demand reparations. And we've been doing that as people in the wake of every single emancipation that took place. So yeah, this is a different way of thinking about what emancipation means. Emancipations are not things that end a story. They have been for Black communities always the
the beginning of a new struggle. And that for me was really important to track across different locations of the Atlantic world. What were some of the broad patterns that repeated themselves in emancipations across different empires? You argue that the first sort of emancipation process comes from the American North. What did that look like?
There are five main types of emancipation, which we can talk about. And also just to start us off, observe that these five different types, they interrelated with each other and it's kind of like this entangled relationship.
or weave of different ways of preserving the rights of slave owners and of continuing the bondage of black people after emancipations happened. And the very first type that the model in some ways was something called the gradual emancipations.
And these began in the American North, especially in places like Pennsylvania. And 1776 was the year in which the American Revolutionary War was the context, was the year in which this was beginning to be developed. And they developed, like I'm saying, this toolkit.
They, being enslavers and the political elite, developed this toolkit that soon began to travel to other parts of the world and would continue to travel for like 100 years to come and define many other emancipations. And the key to this toolkit was, number one, that when abolition happened, when emancipation processes were
were complete, what Black people would experience after emancipation would be for a period of time, the continuation of bondage. So for example, children born after emancipation date in Pennsylvania, 1780, they had to live in slavery for another 18 years or sometimes a little longer. So until their 18th birthday or beyond. The reason being that the enslaver said they need to be trained
into their freedom, as well as they need to pay us through their free labor for the cost of our loss of property. So the burden being put then on Black people as lost property, as opposed to Black people being compensated or the harm they experienced being redressed as
human beings who were imprisoned and kept in captivity. That was the key to how the gradual emancipations worked. And we see that seed replicating over the course of the coming century and every other emancipation. The bottom line being that Black people were made to always be the debtors. They always had to pay
for freedom. And enslavers across the board always received reparations, compensation, some kind of payment or restitution because their property rights were recognized by the state. This basically set the terms for why race works the way that it does today and why we as Black communities experience the kinds of, well, have the kinds of experiences that we have today.
In particular, when you say set the terms for today, could you detail some of those just so that people are really aware? So if we think about so many categories of social experience, so for example, just access to housing, just access to food security, access to education.
just access to equity in law, the overrepresentation of Black communities in the carceral system, the way that policing targets Black communities. So in that list that I've just given, housing,
Food, prisons, policing, and political representation, the under-representation of Black communities in representative government. You know, what's interesting about these key pieces of our civic life is that Black communities, as we know and can be shown in the numbers, do not experience economic
equity in these domains today, nor have they since the emancipations happened. And my point is that in the wake of each emancipation, this is precisely what Black communities were asking for. So these were the contents of what they called reparations and restitution. They were always asking, back in the day, they would ask for land, they would ask for the vote, they would ask for security, and
They would ask for a just compensation to return to them the wealth that had been robbed from them, plundered from them. And they were not given that back.
back in the day when the emancipations took place. And that created this ongoing, it's almost like a recursive story. It's an it's like a reverberation, that when it was it was not settled back then. And it's not been settled since. And that's the deep cause for why we see the systemic inequity today. Right. And so and so another way to say it is what would
what would address this inequity, it begins with going to the root cause, I think, which is saying we need to actually stop as a society, stop and first of all, recognize what has gone wrong and then make the amends and the restitutions to correct that, those structural problems, structural racism. You obviously mentioned that there are five types of emancipation processes. Could you detail those for us?
I mentioned the gradual emancipations. 1780s is when the gradual emancipations began. By the time that we come to the 1820s, there's a new emancipation model, what I call the retroactive emancipation, which is something that the French state imposes on Haiti, which had freed itself in a liberatory war, in a liberation war, 20 years earlier.
But in 1825, the French imperial government imposes an emancipation on the Haitian people, which is a huge debt that would take more than 60 years to repay. And then there would be all kinds of interest that the Haitian people had to pay for generations afterwards to pay off this debt. So that was important.
$22 billion in today's money was demanded eventually from the Haitian people. That was the retroactive emancipation. Then about a decade after that, in the 1830s, comes the compensated emancipation, which the British emigrated
empire then carries out across its plantation colonies. And here, what the innovation is, is that the government pays a huge cash distribution to British slave owners, and that creates its own debt legacy that continues for 180 years and was finally repaid only in 2015.
The compensated emancipation in the British Empire sets this model, which then many other European empires follow. The Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Swedish, others, the Danish. And then the next big new innovation in paying slave owner compensation comes later.
in some ways well in many ways during the american civil war america copied britain by the way in washington dc it paid a compensated emancipation in in in the in the city of dc but then in 1865 there's what i termed the war emancipation that happened and that's when you know almost half a million black people in the american south were set free and
Initially, there was the hope that there would be a proper reparations for what slavery had done to them and their families. But basically within the first year after the war ended, President Johnson reversed whatever progress was being made and paid in some ways this huge reparations of confiscation.
confiscated lands back to the slave owners. And over the coming decades, we have Jim Crow, we have the Black Codes, we have the lynching campaigns, a variety of ways in which we can think of this as benefits that slave owners as the ruling class derived through policy and through law to ensure that their rule, their order of racial oppression would continue. And that
effect. What happened back there and you know, after 1865 and onwards is what the United States is still living with today, you know, in a regime of racial oppression, which continues.
And then the final and the last form of emancipation is what I call the conquest emancipations. I think of this as the way that a global war on Black lives began to expand in and through emancipation struggle. So by the time that 1870s rolled around, 1874, the British are becoming a major imperial presence in Africa and the West Coast of Africa in particular. And they
what the the the Gold Coast colony which is today's Ghana they actually conquer officially through saying that they are there to emancipate the African slaves so they use the British the French and then later other powers the German others they used this kind of term or
or banner of emancipation as a justification for the conquest of Africa. The story is about, in some ways it starts in this small place, Philadelphia in 1780, and it ends across the oceans back in Africa. But it's a growing story about how racial property, how racial oppression
is being vented through emancipation and allowed to expand as opposed to being addressed and redressed. Why did the British choose compensated emancipation as their model of choice and how did that help them consolidate their power? Because as you argue in the book, these emancipations, the choice, the process usually comes through an economic interest.
So the key here is private property, you know, private property. What the British Empire did is it innovated a way to free enslaved people that would fully respect the claim to private property of British slave owners. And
You might say that the gradual emancipations, which were the earlier model, which were taking place in the North, in the American North, they left slave owners in many ways feeling that, you know, they still had gripes. They did not feel that they received their proper compensation for the loss of their racial property.
We think about even the Fifth Amendment of the American Constitution, and that was that amendment was all about clarifying how important property rights were to the new nation of the United States.
So when the British came around, you know, some decades later to their emancipation, they saw this, I would argue, as a way of perfecting what emancipation could be by making it even more in the interest, more clearly in the interest of the enslavers, by ensuring that the property rights of the enslavers were perfected.
being equitably, as they would say, redressed. And that's the language when we read the Abolition Act of 1833. You know, something that I find so interesting is so many of the articles in that act have nothing to do with the interests of the enslaved. It's really an act that is about property, property of the enslavers and how that is going to be protected and honored.
through basically paring out this valuation process, calculating the monetary value that every single living enslaved person in the Caribbean was claimed to embody, and then paying that amount, that calculated amount back to the enslavers. And that was what the compensation involved.
Along with not only that, but guaranteeing the enslavers, in addition to their cash payout, a set of years ended up being four years of free labor of the enslaved so that that would be an additional form of payback, additional way of paying for this loss of property rights. So to...
boil all of that down to something very important. What we see in the compensated emancipation is that a rule of racial property is being respected and continued through emancipation as opposed to being abolished or ended, right? So emancipation in that sense didn't actually bring about abolition.
And that's why today when we have abolitionists, when people are on the street, Black Lives Matter in Britain and in the United States, and people call themselves abolitionists, that is a proper way of speaking about what they're doing because emancipations did not bring about abolition.
And obviously it was your work that revealed British taxpayers had been paying off compensation given to slave owners upon emancipation up until 2015. How did you discover that research and why do you think no one had spotlighted it before? I discovered that just by chance. I noticed something in the archives that caught my attention. No one had until that time in 2018 had kind of asked
when the West India loan, which was taken out in 1835, it was a huge loan that was the equivalent of 40% of the British GDP at the time, when that loan was repaid. We just never asked the question and we didn't do the research to find out when. And so when I started wondering, well, if it was a loan,
that the british government took out when did it when did the british government pay it back that was the question that led me to um sending a number of freedom of information act requests um to uh hm treasury
and doing some archival research at the Bank of England, at the Rothschilds Bank and elsewhere. And that's what eventually uncovered this, you know, the fact that this was a 2015 redemption. It took until that time for this to end. So that's, and then the question that you ask after is, why did it take us so long to
I think that the real answer to that is the mainstream wants to move on. I think of when...
the then Prime Minister Cameron, who right in 2015, like we know, went to Jamaica and was saying it's time to move on from the history of slavery. This is not unfamiliar. This happens in, this is the common way of speaking often amongst white liberals in Britain and in the United States and many other European or white dominant societies.
which is to say, look, it was long ago. It's time to move on. And also to focus on this narrative of inclusion. Things were not perfect back then. We've been doing a lot of work and we've included our minorities in our system. But that is a very convenient narrative because it allows us to not ask the questions about how history actually happened and how
things that supposedly are deep in the past and over are not over. And this debt legacy is just a very concrete way of making that point, right? That it has people have been, the British public had been paying that West Indian loan
until 2015. Not only that, the Caribbean colonies had been helping to pay that loan until 2015. So that's just one concrete metaphor and it manifests in so many other social ways of how we continue to pay for this history that is not over. So we have to shift to something more, something other than it was in the past and let's talk about integration because
unless we fix the problems in terms of the social structure, integrating, you know, quote unquote minorities into a broken and unjust system is hardly desirable. Who wants that? I mean, that's not satisfying. That's not satisfaction.
It really, the processes and sort of legal structures that you outline really reminds me of the way that Northern Ireland's borders were drawn, for example, and how that was deliberately set up to create one certain structure and a political system that couldn't really work the way we would understand political systems to be functioning. And it seems really similar. And I'm thinking as well about the Queen still being head of
of several Commonwealth realms. And the fact that the monarchy recently has come into crisis in Britain because they've been told that a lot of these countries are gonna start the process of removing them as heads of state. - What I think is interesting about what you're saying is that what we can just call colonialism still is at work. And it's at work, yes, in places like the Caribbean,
We can look at the rest of the global South, Africa, Asia, and other places give us comparative examples, but it's at work right at home in the British Isles or in Northern Ireland is a great example of that.
And I'm also noticing how it seems harder and harder for the narrative that we are all under
and happy under the queen, that that narrative seems to be just a little more unstable as time goes on. And we're more able to talk truth. Or maybe it's not even that. What it is is that there are more
avenues for people who hold different kinds of truths, different kinds of experiences to express their views. There isn't as much of a control on what the narrative is. And that I think is very, very refreshing. We see the way that the Caribbean spoke back, right, to the Royals and basically changed the narrative.
i thought that was amazing or what barbados has done it really begins to change a narrative which i'm imagining must be a little distressing to um you know the ruling classes
Yeah, I think they can do with a little bit of distress. So I want to zoom in on Haiti because it's a really interesting example that you pull out. It's an enslaved population who liberate themselves but still retroactively get emancipated by the French. Why is that? You've touched on it briefly, but I'd like to go into it deeper. And also, how was Haiti treated as a nation prior to France officially emancipating them? Haiti...
was freed itself in 1804 was the is the official date in which Dessalines declared Haiti free and what happened in the aftermath of that was a boycott an international boycott official boycott by France Britain America Spain other European countries and so because Haiti
had decided to free itself on its own terms, it was then punished. And not only that, its freedom was not recognized. And that's like a national, at the national level, but you could think of it almost at a personal level as well, that when Black people
demanded freedom on their own terms, that was not recognized by slave owners. The slave owners only recognized Black freedom if it happened on the slave owner's terms. So that's the narrative. That's what's happening here. It took
20 years for France to agree to recognize Haiti's independence. And that happened in 1825, like I mentioned, under King Charles X. And when the king of France agreed to recognize Haiti, he framed it in terms of quote unquote, conceding
the freedom of the Haitian people as if it was his to give. And even after 1825, the French state often still called Haiti by its colonial name of Saint-Domingue.
again, showing that there was no real will to recognize the Haitian nation as an equal in the international domain. And so that has how the international order, which was organized by European nations and by this time also the new American nation, how they functioned, which is to
recognize only themselves as equal and to insist on putting the first revolutionary Black nation on earth into the category of something lesser, something subordinate. And look at the experience that Haiti has had over the coming centuries to this very day in which it has been a site of both European and then American colonization.
Now, having said that, the other side of the story is the way that Haiti served and still serves as a kind of sentinel of liberation for Black communities internationally.
In the years after the Haitian Revolution, we have people from New York and from the Carolinas, from Cuba and from Jamaica, who are actually moving to Haiti because it was the one place on earth where Black people could have full citizenship.
And we know that, you know, anti-slavery activists across the American North and other places, they were creating, you know, centers or meeting houses that they named after Haitian leaders, like the Boyer Halls that were opened up in New York City. So there is both in the story of Haiti,
a way for us to think about how this racial oppression continues at a kind of international level, as well as at an international level to think about how early pan-Africanism emerges as a response to these unjust emancipations, right? That what Black communities do
when they are faced with this kind of ongoing oppression is that they mobilize, they organize, they find each other and they form, you know, ways of resisting. And I think that to me is a really inspiring part of the story. I don't see this story as depressing or as pessimistic. Sometimes people say, well, why are you so pessimistic? I don't see this as pessimistic. I see it as realistic.
Because I think that the history that we have is very repetitive in how it likes to treat Black people and deny Black people their freedom. But the optimism that I feel is in the legacy of forms of movement building, resistance, and the demands that Black people continue to put forward to say, the only kind of freedom that we will be satisfied with is full freedom. And that
That is what continues today in so many different ways. Yeah, I saw actually, I think, probably what you're referring to, the review in The New Republic, which...
called the work pessimistic which was by a white academic and I found its conclusions quite confusing but I wondered how you would discuss some of the points it raised saying that you know you didn't talk as much about the ways that enslaved and free black communities created the political context that made these laws possible. What would you say to that because it seems a strange reading of your work to me but I'd like to give you the space to respond.
There is this real push to want to tell histories of integration, to want to say that black communities used the structures that they had and then
created, helped create those structures and then, you know, inhabited those structures and integrated themselves into them. And that's what our history is. And I just disagree with that way of looking at history. I think structures have been, um, set up often in the image of, um, elites often in ways that are repetitively about, um,
oppression and continuing the rule of racial property. And what happens in response is not that black communities just, you know, integrate themselves. No, they, they work in and through those systems to move to something beyond them. So that's, it's a real different way of looking at how history works. It's not that, um, because, uh,
emancipations to each one was failed and designed to operate in these unjust ways that somehow this is a story of pessimism and you know all we have is uh failure no that's not that's not what it is the story is that because power interests the ruling groups seek to recreate their
privilege over time. What others who are oppressed do in response is two things. They strategically use those systems that they are given to
to their best advantage, but they don't satisfy with those systems. They move beyond those systems. And that's what I often find with, let's call it the white imagination, is that today, is that this imagination has a hard time thinking beyond, you know, beyond what the current structures are. So, for example, you know, Black communities historically and today talk a lot about reconstruction.
and what a true reconstruction of society and the state would look like. That's a discussion about going beyond. Black communities talk a lot about
collective property and collective benefits like the land bank movements that have been part of the past and part of our present. And what I think often the mainstream hears in that is this is an attack on private property. There can be nothing beyond private property. Many black communities have been thinking beyond private property for a very, very, very long time. And one last example is
I think black communities in the past and the present have really lifted up the importance of reciprocity, of creating a world in which we can depend on each other, trust each other. I write about one reparationist who wrote in the 1890s. Her name was Anna Julia Cooper. And she had this language of saying, what we need now is a universal amnesty and a
reciprocity for American society. And so here's a Black woman who was born under slavery, who was experiencing Jim Crow, and she was talking about the need to
trust and reciprocity between everybody in a society. That's something that I think Black communities have long asked for, have tried to practice today, but it rubs up against, you know, what I think defines a lot of our problems, which is this idea that
There's a racial group that has particular privileges and other groups who have to wait. And another point there that I find interesting is this white imagination, I'll call it the white liberal imagination, it also focuses a lot, a lot on this idea of gradualism. Like,
we're taking small steps. Things take a lot of time. Let's just wait. And in the future, full integration will happen. That gradualist way of looking at change. But from the very beginning, like,
If we go back to 1780, one of one reparation is famous reparationist in London, Ottobock Koguano. He wrote this book in which he said, what we need now is restitution and reparation.
And he also said that when black, when enslaved people rebel, that rebellion has to be celebrated because it's not about waiting for the future. It's about full freedom now. And so when that's what I find resonating, you know, in the abolitionist discussions today, all the different kinds of abolition that we could talk about is this demand for
full freedom today. It's not something that Black communities need to wait for. And so all of that to me is actually really optimistic. I'm sure that for other groups, for other people, they might hear this and feel upset, distraught, or feel pessimistic because it means that the way things work would have to change. But yes, the way things work need to change because the system is still based on racial oppression.
It's fascinating to me that the gradualist sort of perspective is applied to ideas of freedom and liberation, but it's not applied to the initial enslavement or violent act of conquest. There's no gradual act of conquest there. It happens and then people are suddenly put under this brand new regime or find themselves enslaved. The whole point of enslavement was that it was so brutal and sudden and freedom snatched away. But the freedom has to be given back gradually.
That's right. The conquest and the plunder happens suddenly and immediately. But freedom can only be delivered gradually with no defined purpose.
delivery date, right? It's always the post-dated check. Freedom is post-dated check, but the conquest is like an immediate transfer to the bank. That's the contrast. And there's definitely a fear there in the white liberal imagination, which I want to add also goes beyond people who might be racialized as white. The white liberal imagination affects a lot of people. And the fear that what they have done to others may be done unto them.
Yes, yes, yes. Again, isn't that a failure of imagination?
isn't that a failure to recognize that other communities who are in touch with history in a different way may have no interest in replicating that history. There's something beyond the dynamic, this returning over and over again dynamic that I think we experience, that
that actually a lot of people want to break out of, you know? So I think that's a real, that's that, that, that speaks to that failure of emancipation and to a certain kind of, I would call that the pessimism.
I was going to say, I was going to say that is the pessimism. It is that idea that is the pessimistic idea and not the idea that people can go beyond, that they can imagine bigger, better and completely break down the existing structures. I just want to ask, as we're coming to the end of our time, a bit about C as a society of emancipation, because you talk about it in the book.
and I find it really interesting. The sea obviously plays a huge part in the process of enslavement and the images we have of enslavement with the Middle Passage. And then it became a site where supposedly emancipation was taking place, especially once the British got involved. What did those sea emancipations look like? What were they supposed to be? And what were they in practice?
The sea emancipations began in earnest in 1807, and the British innovated there. This was when the end of the slave trade was declared by the British Empire. And there was a process that was introduced to free slaves.
who were held in the holds of slave ships. And it involved basically setting up a colony in Africa, the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone as an emancipation port. And squadrons would, British squadrons would patrol the,
the African coast, the West African coast, they would commandeer slave ships and they would take them to Freetown. And then the enslaved would be led out of the holds and would enter this emancipation process. So up until now, this is sounding like a kind of abolition taking place. But then what happens is this
recursive act of what we've already seen in the gradual emancipation that the enslaved were first renamed as contraband or as they were seen as property that was being brought out of the holds of the ships as opposed to as people. They were then
assigned or consigned to up to from seven to 14 years of bondage and in many cases they entered into a lifetime of bondage so they in many cases re-entered forms of slavery um and that that uh
emancipations mode, then spread to a number of other ports around the Atlantic, you know, creating this sea emancipation scheme. And it touched Cuba, it touched Brazil, it touched parts of Africa, and it touched Bahamas. Bahamas was a major place in which people who were emancipated at sea would be sent, but then would be sent into bondage.
So that, I think, fits into the story of all of these other emancipations and also because it talks about how all of these histories are kind of tangled together. They touch each other because they're all sharing the same ocean in a certain way. We're coming to the end of our time together. First of all, I want to say, is there anything that you would like to bring up that you think has been missed or hasn't been discussed in relation to this work?
You know, my book ends talking about reparations in the context of this history that we've been discussing. And I think it helps us understand what reparations means today by seeing reparations as the counterpoint to this continuing story of failed emancipations.
We might say that reparations is the pathway to true abolition and emancipations were a false pathway that promised abolition but never delivered it. So I think that is the message that the book is really wanting to send because it's a message to our present.
And it wants to point out that reparations struggle today is actually a lot about so much more than what is comfortable to, let's say, the liberal mainstream. The liberal mainstream in Britain and in the United States would like the reparations discussion to be about an amount of money.
And how much should it be and to how many people? And then how are we going to figure out who qualifies and who doesn't? But if we step back from that, that's exactly what emancipations were doing just the other way around. You know, they were all about calculating and property and paying individuals, except the individuals were slave owners.
So it's easy for the system to do what it knows to do in reverse, but the system still stays the system. It still stays a system that's based on ideas about private benefit, private property, monetizing harm and so forth. But the real problems that we're facing are structural, systemic, policy, law. They're about entitlements, they're about benefits. They're about returning generational wealth to communities that have been plundered.
And to make it short, they're about really thinking beyond the structure we have. So that is the discussion about reparations. It's not about an amount or a check. It's about changing our society and how it works and stopping racial rule. So I think that, to me, clarifies in my mind what's at stake today and why the reparations debate exists.
and movements are so timely.
so timely, not just for black communities, but for, for, for our societies more generally. Yeah. We're trying to, we're trying to finally address in with truth and with justice, things that have been buried. And like I say, ghost line, you know, for a very, very long time. So it's, I find this like a really exciting time that we're in because
because it's harder and harder to maintain the kind of dominant narratives. We have opportunities for change that I think are exciting. Thank you.