One of the most telling features of the CARICOM reparations campaign is who it does not target. Britain receives the most pressure. France, which has a substantially darker record in several respects, receives far less. Portugal, which pioneered the Atlantic slave trade and transported nearly twice as many enslaved Africans as Britain, faces almost no reparations demands. The United States, which enslaved people on its own soil until 1865, is engaged in its own separate domestic reparations debate but is not a target of CARICOM’s campaign against former European colonial powers.
This selectivity is not explained by proportional historical culpability. It is explained by political calculation: which nations are most likely to respond to pressure, which have the deepest pockets, and which are most vulnerable to reputational damage from the accusation of defending slavery.
This section examines the double liability problem that emerges when you try to apply the reparations logic consistently to all the nations that participated in or benefited from the slave trade.
