The argument that a debt created by slavery remains outstanding and payable today fails on several distinct grounds.
First, the legal limitation period argument. No legal system in the world recognises a debt that is 200 to 400 years old and has never been claimed by an identifiable creditor against an identifiable debtor. The individuals who were enslaved are dead. Their direct oppressors are dead. The legal principle that claims must be brought within a reasonable time exists precisely because ancient claims cannot be fairly adjudicated. No court anywhere in the world has accepted that the limitation period should be suspended for slavery claims.
Second, the 1833 abolition payment, unjust as it was in its structure, represents the British state’s settlement of its legal relationship with the institution of slavery. It was the mechanism by which Britain ended the system. The moral objection to who received the money is legitimate. But the argument that the state has an ongoing unpaid debt because the 1833 settlement was structured unfairly is a different and much harder claim to sustain.
Third, the compound interest calculations do not hold up. They apply modern financial logic to a historical context in which neither the rate nor the principal nor the recipient is clearly defined. Different advocates reach wildly different figures using different assumptions. The Barbados government has cited figures of $4.9 trillion. Other estimates run higher or lower. When a calculation produces results that vary by orders of magnitude depending on the assumptions used, it is not a calculation: it is an advocacy number.
Fourth, and most fundamentally, the claim that today’s British taxpayers owe a debt to today’s Caribbean governments rests on the proposition that states inherit the liabilities of their predecessors without limit of time. International law does not support this. State succession doctrine recognises continuity of some obligations but not retrospective unlimited financial liability for historical crimes, particularly where those crimes were legal at the time they were committed.
