The Church of England’s Historic Links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade
by Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman, Psephizo:
The Church Commissioners have pledged £100 million over nine years in reparation for what are claimed to be their eighteenth-century predecessors’ involvement in and large financial gains from slavery and the slave trade.1 They argue that the Church, through Queen Anne’s Bounty (a corporation created by statute in 1703-4 for ‘the Augmentation of the Maintenance of Poor Clergy’), consciously invested ‘heavily’ in the slave-trading activities of the South Sea Company, allowing the Bounty to benefit directly from the profits of enslaving Africans and, furthermore, that it received tainted benefactions from individuals whose wealth might well have been earned through some connection with slavery.
After research in its archives by a firm of accountants, which formed the substance of their Report (entitled Church Commissioners’ Research into Historic Links to Transatlantic Chattel Slavery, 2023), the Commissioners announced the intention of creating a £100m ‘impact investment fund’; and they have further welcomed a report by ‘a Black-led oversight group’ appointed ‘to propose objectives and structure for the fund’ which has proposed increasing this sum by ‘target[ing] assets of over £1 billion’.2
Their language has oscillated between the unambiguous use of the word ‘reparation’ and the vaguer expression ‘healing, repair, and justice’—a distinction without real difference, as can be seen in the sum being offered, its supposed derivation (‘a historic pool of capital tainted by its involvement in African chattel enslavement: Queen Anne’s Bounty’) and the extraordinarily unspecific and unmeasurable aims of the project (to ‘generate returns that would replenish and enable funding to be deployed to relevant causes in the African diaspora, ideally in perpetuity’). The disbursement seems to be practically unconditional, and principally aimed at the Black middle class: ‘Black-led businesses …Black fund managers … brilliant social entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare givers, asset managers and historians’, as the Oversight Group of the Church Commission lists them.3
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