The question of why CARICOM focuses its most intense pressure on Britain rather than France is worth examining directly.
France transported more enslaved Africans than Britain in proportion to its colonial possessions. France’s plantation colonies were more brutal. France imposed the Haitian debt, a specific and quantifiable extraction from a Caribbean nation that continued until 1947. France restored slavery after initially abolishing it. France’s final abolition came forty years after Britain’s.
Britain, by contrast, was the first major slave-trading nation to abolish the trade, spent sixty years and over a thousand lives enforcing abolition at sea, and has been more willing than France to acknowledge its colonial history in public discourse.
The targeting of Britain rather than France is most easily explained by political vulnerability and perceived willingness to pay, not by any honest proportional accounting of historical culpability. Britain’s culture of public self-examination on historical questions makes it a softer target. France’s more assertive nationalism and its political resistance to what it calls “communautarisme” make it a harder one.
