What world are we defending when we refuse reparations?

As Commonwealth leaders gather in Antigua and Barbuda, Britain again faces demands to reckon with chattel enslavement, colonialism, and their continuing effects. And the debate has quickly turned to financial liability: who should pay, how much, and on what grounds? Andy Burnham has argued that “British people can’t be made to pay for the wrongs of slavery”.

For people in Britain struggling to make ends meet, the prospect of another demand on limited resources can understandably provoke anxiety. But hearing reparations primarily as a bill establishes the terms of judgment before we have considered what is being demanded. It also keeps us from questioning whose interests are served when the conversation never gets any further.

Imagining value beyond money

Money governs access to so much that it can become difficult to imagine value beyond it. Housing is treated as an investment, land is only valuable as someone’s property, care only a cost. When your ability to feed your family or remain in your home depends on money you do not have, financial calculation is a daily necessity.

But there is a difference between recognising that necessity and accepting market thinking as the dominant way of understanding what things are worth. The place where your grandparents are buried is not valuable because somebody would pay for it. A language does not matter because it’s use contributes to GDP. Community, care, a sense of belonging to a particular landscape – these things shape our lives profoundly without being reducible to a price.

And yet politicians and the media repeatedly direct our attention towards what something costs, whether it is productive, and whether it represents “value for money”. We hear claims about culture, memory, loss, community, and dignity and instinctively convert them into questions of payment.

But if we are willing to pause for a moment, another possibility emerges. What if the people calling for reparations are trying to draw our attention towards forms of damage that money alone cannot account for?

The damage was not only economic

The term Maangamizi derives from the Kiswahili verb – angamiza, meaning “to cause destruction” or “to utterly destroy”. Within the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign, it names the Afrikan Holocaust, understood as a continuum encompassing chattel enslavement, colonialism, and continuing neocolonial domination. It emphasises the deliberate destruction of Afrikan peoples and their capacity to sustain their own worlds, cultures, languages, economies, spiritualities, and relationships. Understood in this sense, the term invites us to recognise chattel enslavement and colonialism as forms of world-breaking whose organising logics remain active today.

The violence of enslavement makes the inadequacy of a purely financial account especially clear. To be made somebody else’s property was to have your body and the course of your life placed at their disposal. The authority claimed over you also extended to the relationships that gave your life meaning. You could love your child without being able to prevent their sale; you could carry knowledge inherited across generations without knowing whether the community that sustained it would survive. Your belonging to a place offered no protection against being torn from it. Enslavers could attach a price to a human being, while ignoring the cost of everything that the transaction destroyed.

This is why many reparations organisers understand compensation as part of a wider process of repair. Financial redress can address material dispossession, but cannot by itself restore people’s authority over their lives or remedy the degradation of their humanity. Repair also concerns spiritual wellbeing, the recovery of suppressed knowledge, and communities’ ability to sustain and pass on their traditions in ways they determine for themselves.

These demands concern people’s capacity to understand who they are and live with dignity. They require all of us to confront the practices that continue to undermine their power to do so. This is also why those most affected – not political elites or the media – must shape what reparatory justice involves. Repair cannot be reduced to a payment that closes an account while leaving the conditions producing the damage intact.

The world that made this possible

Those calling for reparations are also asking something even more difficult of us White people here in Britain. Reckoning with these histories means asking what was taken from those subjected to chattel enslavement and colonialism, but also what kind of society we became in the process.

What happens when we learn to see one another through categories of race that assign humanity unequally? What happens when land, labour, knowledge, care, and life itself come to be understood primarily as assets to be accumulated or commodities to be exchanged?

The devastation fell, and continues to fall, most heavily upon those subjected to these violences. But the logics that sustained them also matter to people struggling in Britain today. When housing is valued principally as an investment, people’s need for a home becomes secondary to the returns it generates. When care is treated primarily as a cost, the relationships that sustain us are subordinated to the need to save money. Our circumstances differ profoundly, but the subordination of human needs to market thinking and the relentless accumulation of wealth remains a problem we inhabit together.

For British people struggling to make ends meet, presenting reparations as another threat to scarce resources draws a powerful line between “us”, who will supposedly pay, and “them”, who will receive. It obscures both British people who are themselves part of reparations movements, and the vast and growing inequalities of wealth and power within Britain itself and throughout the world. We are encouraged to fear what others might gain, while those whose wealth gives them power over all our lives face less scrutiny.

The striking Manchester cotton workers Burnham proudly invokes offer more than a comforting reminder that many British people, mostly working class, opposed chattel enslavement. Their solidarity suggests they understood something we risk forgetting: that their humanity was bound up with that of enslaved Black men, women, and children across an ocean. Hardship gave them reason to fear for their own livelihoods, but it did not decide the limits of their concern. We honour that history by asking what such solidarity requires of us now.

Those calling for reparations are asking us to reckon with a world that made human beings property and continues to place the accumulation of wealth above the sustenance of life. Its burdens have never been shared equally, but we can recognise those differences and still refuse to let hardship here in Britain turn us against our brothers and sisters demanding repairs.

Their demand is also an invitation to participate: to confront the practices that continue to cause harm, and to build relationships through which life can flourish. To refuse that invitation is also to defend the arrangements we have inherited.

Beyond whether Britain can afford reparations lies another question: who actually wins when we defend the world created through chattel enslavement and colonialism?

We in Britain would be better served by considering whether we can afford not to hear what is really being demanded – and what might become possible if we joined together to repair what that world has broken.

Source : https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2026/11/02/what-world-are-we-defending-when-we-refuse-reparations/