Who Really Owes Reparations for Transatlantic Slavery?

Executive Summary

The current discussion about the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade is usually caught in moral considerations, far from the practical side of international law, corporate finance, and structural economics. The article reviews the historical responsibility and resolutions regarding reparations, taking the debate from the realm of charity to that of fiduciary responsibility. In the process of studying the fundamental distinctions between the responsibility of the dead African kingdoms for slavery and the advantages enjoyed by the living Western countries and their corporations, the article discovers the secrets of the riches accumulated through human exploitation. The author explains how labor has contributed to the birth of modern financial institutions, such as central banks and shipping insurance companies, and wraps up with the account of successful practices and CARICOM’s ten-point plan for the establishment of an organized anti-inflationary system of reparations in the 21st century.

Introduction

For over 20 years, the reparations discussion has revolved around matters involving morality — an understanding of the moral lexicon that includes remembrance, apology, and guilt. This resulted in creating a substantial body of literature on reparations; however, it constrained it in terms of structural reforms. In that regard, the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates, in “The Case for Reparations,” and Randall Robinson, in The Debt, are important and have changed the way we treat the topic. They explored reparations from a moral perspective. The issue remains unresolved; there is no basis for resolving it on technical grounds, thus entailing the absence of mandatory fiduciary accounting procedures. The question of who among governments and businesses keeps the gains from the enslavement of people can hardly be addressed in the suitable international courts, during securities transactions, or treasury settlements.

The diplomatic mechanisms enabling that transformation have already been established. The 2001 Durban Declaration introduced slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity that “ought to have always been the case.” In March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly took the initiative further by declaring the transatlantic slave trade to be “the greatest crime against humanity.” Along with the UN Basic Principles on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation, these documents form the foundation of the approach that advocates treating reparations as a legal issue rather than just a moral question.

The central thesis of this viewpoint explores the idea that legal and financial responsibilities for the transatlantic slave trade reside disproportionately with states and businesses that normalized and profited from this type of exploitation. Empirical work by Nathan Nunn, Joseph Inikori, and Walter Rodney reveals that the ability to extract resources led to reduced productivity in Africa for centuries while creating wealth for Great Britain.

Traditional African stakeholders, comprised of different kingdoms (Dahomey, Ashanti, Oyo, and Kongo), engaged in their own kind of “existential security dilemma” and traded cheap labor for goods in order to achieve capital gain.

In comparison, Western and business partners converted similar transactions into irremovable capital, such as permanent monopolies, sovereign debt markets, and industrial infrastructure.

Four technical concepts help to understand the main idea. According to the theory of unjust enrichment, as contained in the doctrine of restitution, the party should return the benefit that has been retained from the wrongful act and should also calculate the amount of it. The theory of successor liability was explained by James Crawford and states that legal personality (either corporate or state) passes on the obligations from the predecessor to the successor. The concept of generational wealth deficit refers to the difference in the value of wealth between households or states created because of the generational transmission of the extraction of wealth, which was calculated by Brookings, along with Darity and Mullen. Systemic reparative justice extends beyond an individual settlement and leads to structural changes in health, education, technology, and debt structure.

The Sovereign Liability Frontier

Western Imperial States as Architects of the Legal Framework

To recognize the transatlantic slave trade is not merely an act of commerce, but it is also accepted as a process. The beginning of the transatlantic slave trade can be linked to the fifteenth century, when Nuno Tristão and António Gonçalves, voyagers of the Portuguese discovery, arrived at Mauritania and kidnapped twelve Africans, systematically trafficking and enslaving them to meet labor demands.

In 1661, Barbados enacted the Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, which would eventually find its way to Jamaica, South Carolina, and Georgia. Such legislation is called “sovereign legislation” since it is prepared by the Sovereign’s Council and enforced in the courts of the empire. It made it possible to view human beings as a separate asset class; they became chattels, which could now be insured, mortgaged, and recorded in the government’s accounts.

A French set of documents called the “Ordonnance ou edit de mars 1685,” also known as the Code Noir, provided the legal basis for regarding African slaves as property in all French territories throughout the Atlantic.

In 1672, the Crown of England established the Royal African Company, which obtained a monopoly on the trade along the West African coast and, via the T70 series in the National Archives, created one of the most comprehensive existing ways in which economic records have been generated in relation to the state-sponsored slave trade in Western human history.

The responsibility for preserving sovereign wealth fell upon the sugar, tobacco, and rum taxes, providing British customs’ income during the 18th century and, subsequently, the Bank of England’s compensation payments amounting to £20 million in 1834 (approximately 40% of the Treasury’s annual expenditure during the period), financed through government bonds, with the interest being paid off in 2015.

In the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database managed by University College London, over 46,000 individual compensation recipients have been identified; this database illustrates the close links between the investment of slave-derived capital and the development of railways, country estates, banks, and insurance companies in Britain. The links are not based on speculation; this information has been documented, archived, and categorized.

The Asymmetric Supply Chain

An honest argument must come to terms with the involvement of African kingdoms. The kingdoms of Dahomey, Ashanti, Oyo, and Kongo were not merely helpless victims; they acted as rational commercial partners and engaged in the regional framework before the arrival of European states. Research done by Robin Law and John Thornton shows that African rulers were able to dictate trade conditions on the coast, and Dahomey alone was sending between 5,000 and 8,000 enslaved people annually during the period of its participation in this process.

However, achieving structural equivalence with the so-called European empire does not follow automatically from the process of taking part in trade. Warren Whatley’s econometric research on the gun-slave cycle shows that for every pound of enslaved people exported, there was an increase in the quantity of gunpowder delivered, about 2.7 pounds per each subsequent year—so the trade turned into a regional version of the prisoner’s dilemma, where unilateral disarmament by any of the parties meant being destroyed by a neighboring state. This is not a moral justification; it is an objective description of a situation that helped sustain the supply of human capital.

The fundamental difference between the two operations is apparent in what each side took away from the trade. On the one hand, Europe received arms, alcohol, fabrics, and cowrie shells—perishable, inflationary, or worthless goods. Cowries originating from the Maldives came in trade with European ships in vast quantities and brought about hyperinflation of the domestic currencies in the Bight of Benin. Firearms rusted away, alcohol was drunk, and textiles were spoiled.

In contrast, Africa exported human resources—labor power, which contributed to the sugar production in Barbados and Saint-Domingue; and the cotton trade, which allowed Great Britain to industrialize, and later to the development of capital markets in America.

Nunn’s estimations show that without slavery, GDP per capita in Africa is about $2,679-$5,158 higher now, enough for 28-100% of the income gap between Africa and other underdeveloped countries.

Among the many factors involved, there is one that is brutally simple: the original African participants have ceased to exist as legal entities. The state of Dahomey was conquered by France in 1894 and absorbed into a territory that later became the colony of Benin. The state of Ashanti fell to Britain and was integrated into the Gold Coast, later Ghana. Oyo collapsed early in the nineteenth century.

Today, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria are post-colonial states that have emerged in accordance with the ongoing international legal processes of succession of states, which treat them as new independent successors under the tabula rasa principle confirmed in the 1978 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of Treaties.

The analysis of James Crawford is straightforward: in the absence of an explicit continuity, the liability of an extinct predecessor ceases to exist together with that predecessor’s legal entity. In contrast with these defunct states, modern Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the USA have maintained an uninterrupted sovereign continuity during the entire period, alongside their treasury, central banks, and legal systems based on the revenues coming from slavery.

Modern Precedents in Sovereign Reparative Justice

The argument that historical sovereign liability is now obsolete is rebutted by two examples from the past century. The first occurred in 1952 when West Germany entered a binding treaty with Israel through the Luxembourg Agreement that stated that, even though the German state was only three years old, its predecessor could be held liable for its deeds. Germany is reported to have paid Israel up to €3 million, as well as €450 million to the Claims Conference.

Moreover, various compensation programs initiated by Germany from 1952 to 2000 are estimated to be worth over €100 billion. Germany shows us three important lessons: the accountability of states continues to exist despite regime changes; victims can seek compensation from states for the crimes committed against them despite barriers; and umbrella organizations can make the voice of victims heard.

In 1988, under the Civil Liberties Act, the United States created its own domestic precedent by granting payments of $20,000 to each living Japanese American who had been interned in World War II, as well as a formal apology from the president. Congress stated that internment was proof of “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and failures of political leadership. “The total amount of payments received, 82,219 payments, is $1.6 billion. The statute itself states that its precedential import is limited; this did not stop scholars and advocates from using it as a model of how sovereign apologies and restitution can work in practice.

Both precedents confirm that what the Durban Declaration and the 2026 UN resolution assert as a principle is that sovereign responsibility for state-sponsored crime extends through generations and can find practical expression in legislation and treaties. The question is not whether there is such responsibility, but what the result is of that responsibility.

Corporate and Institutional Successor Liability

A. Banking and Credit Underwriting

The origins of modern global finance can be traced, in part, to the triangular trade. The Bank of England’s 2022 Staff Working Paper – an unusual move for a central bank – states that the institution has overseen the complete payout of the £20 million compensation to former slave owners and that its directors, including Humphry Morice (a four-time director nicknamed the “Prince of Slavers”), personally trafficked at least 30,000 enslaved Africans. The bank has acknowledged that portraits of ten slave owner directors have been removed from the displays.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase revealed in 2005—under pressure imposed by the “Chicago Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance”—that its predecessors, Citizens Bank of Louisiana and Canal Bank, accepted about 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral for loans between 1831 and 1865 and took ownership of around 1,250 people through mortgage foreclosures. The updated 2024 filing with the City of Philadelphia revised that figure significantly: around 21,000 enslaved blacks were documented in the bank’s mortgage records, with 1,300 of them becoming its property. Citigroup’s predecessors and Wells Fargo made similar revelations. These are not mere curiosities; they are backed by audited corporate filings established through the same mechanism used in environmental remediation or product defect claims.

While the banking relationship in Canada has not received a lot of attention, the founding investment of Scotiabank largely came from merchants located in Nova Scotia who exported timber, cod, and wheat to the Caribbean sugar plantations and received slave-produced sugar, rum, and molasses in return. 13 out of the original 17 founders made their money from this trade. Halifax Banking Company, which is a predecessor of CIBC, derived its capital in the same way, which was mainly through the Cunard ships owned by Samuel Cunard and Atlantic cod exports of Enos Collins, which fed the slaves working in sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The establishment of Scotiabank’s first foreign branch in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1889 was a purposeful downstream extension of that founding investment.

B. The Marine and Life Insurance Complex

Marine underwriting is the context in which the trading of human lives has been so thoroughly documented. A study commissioned by Lloyd’s of London and headed by experts at Johns Hopkins University concluded that, at least, a third of the slave expeditions that set sail from Britain in 1807, which was the last year in which human beings could be legally traded in Britain, were underwritten by Lloyd’s. In Lloyd’s records, one can find the risk records of underwriters Horatio Clagett and Solomon D’Aguilar, who have described the slave humans being shipped as insured cargo. The legal case of Gregson v. Gilbert (1783), initiated by the syndicate involved in the Zong massacre, in which 132 enslaved Africans were thrown into the sea, was important for establishing the legal fiction that the killing of human beings could be interpreted as “a peril of the sea.”

After issuing an apology in 2020 and producing a report in 2023, Lloyd’s donated £40 million to the community, an amount that The Guardian referred to as “reparations washing,” bearing in mind the fact that Lloyd’s did not quantify its profit from its activities in the past.

Life insurance policies issued on the lives of enslaved people were a different line of insurance products. Under the California Slavery Era Insurance Registry created by SB 2199 in 2000, all licensed insurers had to disclose plantations’ policies that were in effect before the Civil War.

Nautilus Insurance, the direct ancestor of the company we know today as New York Life, wrote 339 policies for enslaved people within the first 1000 policies sold between 1846 and 1848. Aetna has issued 7 policies on 16 enslaved workers between 1753 and 1860 and apologized publicly for this fact in the year 2000. That said, AIG found policies issued earlier by its ancestor, U.S. Life. About 400 slaveholders and 600 enslaved people were on the policies issued by 8 companies at the time of filing under the California statute.

C. Transport and Industrial Successors

Much of the railroad infrastructure that forms the basis of the American transport system was built by enslaved people. The Chicago Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance has brought to light the fact that CSX and the Norfolk Southern Railway, as well as other transportation corporations such as Union Pacific and Canadian National, acknowledge that their predecessors had enslaved workers, either renting, insuring, or buying them for track building. The Norfolk Southern Railway’s predecessor, the Mobile & Girard Railroad, recruited enslaved people in 1856 and managed to purchase 89 workers. In Canada, the directors of Hudson’s Bay Company, in particular, Andrew Colville and John Ellice, owned hundreds of enslaved persons. Moreover, the Hudson’s Bay Company was in a historic collaboration with the Royal African Company for 81 years.

D. The Fiduciary Shift

Philanthropic contributions are the primary method usually associated with this phenomenon. However, the approach in question opts to ignore the nature of the violations. It has already been proven that the philanthropic programs initiated by JP Morgan and Lloyd for $5 million and $40 million, respectively, as well as several DEI efforts, represent isolated instances without any connection to the history of injustice, let alone any calculations of the obligations or adjustments for generational deficit, which has been estimated as amounting to $10-14 trillion by the Brookings Institution and Darity and Mullen.

On the other hand, there is a functioning compliance system. The California Slavery Era Insurance Registry Act and the Chicago Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance, together with the recent cases in Philadelphia, prove that the historical disclosure operation has constitutional implications and can be enforced on the local or state level. One just needs to apply these disclosures in the accounting carried out previously regarding environmental liability, as well as pension fund shortages.

IV. The Modern Diplomatic and Legal Vanguard

A. The CARICOM Reparations Commission

Currently, the most well-developed reparations paradigm in the world is not an academic achievement but a diplomatic one. The CARICOM Reparations Commission is headed by Sir Hilary Beckles, who has managed to turn grievance into a ten-point program structure. The methodological plan, developed in 2014 and then revised in June 2026 and accepted by the CARICOM Heads of Government at their 51st Meeting in July 2026, brings together an apology, repatriation, indigenous development, cultural and educational institutions, including public health and the eradication of illiteracy, the African knowledge program, psychological treatment, technology transfer, debt cancellation, and financial compensation.

Most importantly, the proposal rejects the ‘complicity’ argument. By reviewing historical trade from the standpoint of legal/state responsibility (responsibility of sovereign entities that chartered, allowed, and taxed the trade), Beckles’ approach avoids the ‘tu quoque’ arguments (i.e., ‘Africans were also involved’).

Three particular ways the 2026 revision informs the legal argument are as follows:

1. It invokes the already established rule in international criminal law that states that there are no statutes of limitations for human rights crimes.
2. It states that gender-based violence should be included, as the evidence shows that approximately 30% of forced African participants were women.
3. It presents this demand as a global human rights issue rather than a bilateral grievance supported by international law established in the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

B. The African Union and South-South Solidarity

The African Union similarly initiated steps toward the same goal. The creation of the Africa-Caribbean Joint Mechanism on Reparative Justice in 2021 may be acknowledged as an essential institution connecting CARICOM with the AU. After that, the Accra Proclamation on Reparations was adopted in November 2023 at the International Conference on Creating a Front for Justice and Reparations for Africans. This proclamation included the establishment of three new institutions: the Reparations Committee of Experts, the Special Envoy for Reparations of the AU, and, most importantly, the Global Reparations Fund if filled with international investments and situated in Africa.

However, progress is not easy. The passage of the UN General Assembly’s resolution in March 2026 has acknowledged the transatlantic trafficking as “the biggest crime against humanity,” although not a single country in the EU has approved it. Such voting shows that geopolitical struggle is still underway, as moral and legal reasons are not accepted by those responsible.

C. From Declaration to Enforcement

The issue of discrepancies between proclamations and effective application is one of the most serious diplomatic problems for the next decade. As it has been stated in Amnesty International’s briefing of 2025 and in the study conducted by the Institute for Security Studies, the resolutions provide for political results without any binding mechanism of implementation.

There are three ways to implement these policies in practice:

1. Issuing an advisory opinion in front of the International Court of Justice, like the climate obligations;
2. Creating binding norms through CERD’s comments; and
3. Negotiation on a bilateral level, like the Franco-German agreement. France’s announcement in April 2025 of a joint Franco-Haitian historical commission considering the New York Times’s “Ransom” investigation serves as the first real-life case of this model.

One of the examples showing the success of the illegitimate debt theory is the Franco-Haitian example. From 1825 to 1947, Haiti transferred the payments to France worth about $560 million in present-day values, which potentially cost Haiti between $21 billion and $115 billion in terms of economic development. Piketty offered the amount of $28 billion as the minimum figure of compensation. In practical terms, these payments came from loans issued by French banks, which means that in terms of this case we are faced with a clear and significant chain of continuity in liability. This example can be considered the simplest pilot case, providing AU and CARICOM with an opportunity to build the enforcement framework they are going to use.

V. Taxonomy of Modern Reparative Mechanisms

If the process of enforcement architecture exists, the issue of the distribution mechanisms becomes vital. There are three different kinds of mechanisms that can be distinguished on a technical level, each of which has specific financial and macroeconomic implications.

A. Direct Monetary Transfers versus Structural Capital

The method of transferring direct cash payments to descendants is one of the most widely discussed in the public, and in terms of macroeconomic parameters, it is one of the methods with the highest volatility. In their study, Darity and Mullen made an estimation of the US domestic reparations initiatives of $10-14 trillion, as the transfers in the form of direct cash payments can span ten years as annuities with reduced risk of inflation. The technical difficulty here is not connected with the eligibility requirement but rather with introducing such a substantial amount of purchasing power into the economy that is almost fully loaded. According to Federal Reserve investigations regarding the racial wealth gap in the U.S., direct payments below the amount of $250,000 per household are not likely to reach the structural gap over the long period of time due to different rates of saving and asset appreciation.

Structural capital transfers are a viable and inflation risk-free option. Sovereign intergenerational trusts, which are modeled after the Alaska Permanent Fund and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, can use reparations funds indefinitely, only giving proceeds to communities that qualify. Community wealth funds are invested in areas that have historically been subjected to redlining and colonization. The Brookings research of Andre Perry shows that homes owned by Black people lose value systematically by about 23% in the US. This translates into losses amounting to $156 billion that can be recouped through structural capital deployment.

B. Educational, Technological, and Land Restitution Trusts

The Ten-Point Plan by CARICOM includes educational, technological, and land restitution in its structural programs for legitimate economic motives. The concept of free higher education and vocational training results in meaningful human capital, which can be passed on from generation to generation.

Technology transfer is the least developed of the mechanisms mentioned, but possibly the most efficient from an economic perspective. An analysis of the deliberate technological restraint of the societies of West Africa made by Rodney proves the theoretical point concerning the need to consider technologies as a means of restitution, not aid. In modern terms, it means that transfers of digital technologies and renewable energy equipment should be organized with the help of the Global Reparations Fund instead of the structures of the OECD Development Assistance Committee.

C. Macroeconomic Interventions: Debt Cancellation and Trade Reform

The biggest reparative mechanism that can be applied is through the mechanism of sovereign debts. Debt Justice UK asserts that much of the external debt of Caribbean and West African states can be classified as odious and colonial in character, as it consists of debts inherited from imperial periods or incurred because of the historically produced structural constraints. The Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, launched by the World Bank and the IMF, has already made possible the provision of about $99 billion in debt relief to 37 beneficiaries since its launch, demonstrating that it is possible to implement large-scale debt relief simultaneously.

An ideal structure of a reparative debt mechanism would amend the HIPC initiative in three key aspects. First, this scheme should specify the colonial debt origins classification as a separate type of debt deserving an opportunity to be totally cancelled rather than made sustainable. Second, it should establish the removal of the structural-adjustment-aided regulations that are often considered neocolonial restrictions exerting pressure on borrowing countries. At last, such an initiative should involve debt cancellation measures and favorable trade rules.

Haiti presents the clearest case. A legally binding negotiated agreement with France that (a) would explicitly nullify the indemnity owed according to Piketty’s $28 billion valuation, (b) repeal all outstanding obligations of Haiti stemming from the indemnity, and (c) establish a sovereign trust for compensatory payment would provide the precedent for the Caribbean and the demands of West Africa against the Netherlands, Portugal, and Great Britain. It is the most important negotiation in the diplomatic process today.

VI. Institutional Takeaways

The complicity of people in the transatlantic slave trade was worldwide. The same cannot be said of the liability of the actors involved. The historical polities in Africa, which acted as sources of human captives, operated in a coercive regional environment, received trade including consumables and inflationary imports, and subsequently ceased to exist as legal persons. Instead, their successor states benefited from the tabula rasa doctrine of state succession. The sovereign states of Western Europe and North America have converted the same trade into permanent capital, which figures in the modern balance sheets. The empirical record of T 70 archives, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the database of UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, the Bank of England working paper, and the required disclosures of California, Chicago, and Philadelphia are enough to calculate quantified liability according to audit standards.

The Corporate Imperative

Institutional trustees have been required to transition their mindset from one of “guilt” to that of fiduciary obligation. In the past, the historical liability was viewed as merely an area of concern for the public relations department. The tendency has now shifted to turning this liability into a regulatory risk and thereby enabling the respective stakeholders to define the new category of contingent liabilities.

Boards of institutions that continue to approach reparations in terms of philanthropic projects, such as scholarships, DEI initiatives, and other community campaigns, are now creating for their institutions the same legal risks as those of the environmental liabilities of the 1980s and 1990s, which remained unaddressed. Both the Freshfields report regarding ESG fiduciary duty and the new doctrine of parent company duty of care in the decisions of the UK courts in Vedanta and Okpabi suggest the future direction. Corporate governance in reparations will take the form of ESG development before becoming an obligatory reporting requirement and financial audit.

The ethical argument for reparations has been established, and established properly, for a generation. Nonetheless, it must be noted that the technical structure has been improved: the audits, the trusts, the methods of national settlements, the disclosure processes, and the issues related to the successor liability. The available evidence unmistakably shows that the extraction was regular, recorded, and financialized. Therefore, the structure of the reparative response should have the same characteristic. The envisioned goal is not to punish contemporary institutions for the crimes of their ancestors but to apply the identical system of accounting that created global finance to historical obligations of finance.