by Nigel Biggar, CapX
The Church Commissioners have made a well-intentioned, ‘progressive’ mistake
When the British ended the slave trade, Africans were against abolition
Our commitment to stamp out slavery was expensive in both blood and treasure‘Decolonisation’ threatens to become expensive. Earlier this month the African Union joined the Caribbean Community (‘Caricom’) in demanding reparations from Britain for its ‘colonial crimes’, especially slavery. Caricom has already submitted its bill of £18 trillion. The African continent’s claim is bound to be higher.
Indeed, ‘decolonisation’ has already become expensive for members of the Church of England. In November 2023 the Church Commissioners of England, responsible for the church’s property assets, committed itself to deploy an initial £100 million to establish an investment fund to support communities ‘affected by historic slavery’. As they explained, ‘The immense wealth accrued by the Church Commissioners has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement… [which] was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter’. The commissioners confessed a ‘strand of complicity in an abominable trade that still scars the lives of billions… [T]he cruelty of a multinational white establishment that deprived tens of millions of Africans of life and liberty… has continuing toxic consequences…’. Hence, the need for the Church to make reparations.
The ‘strand of complicity’ concerns the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th-century forerunner of the Commissioners’ endowment devoted to supporting poorer clergy, which, through its investment in the South Sea Company, acquired ‘links’ with African enslavement.
Except that it didn’t. As Richard Dale, retired professor of international banking and author of The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (2004), has written: