Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History

Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. European countries have never compensated their former colonies in the Americas, whose wealth relied on slave labor. Likewise, no African nation ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.

In this book, Ana Lucia Araujo shows that these calls for reparations have persevered over a long and difficult history. She traces the ways in which enslaved and freed individuals have conceptualized the idea of reparations since the 18th century in petitions, correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives and judicial claims. Drawing on the voices of various peoples who have and do identify themselves as victims of the Atlantic slave trade, it illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations.

Taking the reader through the era of slavery, emancipation, post-abolition and the present day, this new edition boasts a new chapter that engages with the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, the seismic effect of the killing of George Floyd, calls for university reparations and the dismantling of statues. It also includes new comparisons with other calls for reparations from communities such as Native Americans and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Updated throughout, and with new primary sources, further reading and a timeline of notable events, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade explores how the history of slavery is as current today as it ever has been.

Ana Lucia Araujo is Professor of History at Howard University, USA. She is the author of Slavery in the Age of Memory (2020), Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic World (2010) and Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery (2014).