Pushback against a Church of England plan to pay £100 million to benefit communities affected by the historic transatlantic slave trade, by historians and, most recently, conservative MPs, reflects a division about the effects of the British Empire.
A letter from 27 MPs and Peers (members of the House of Lords) call on Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury elect, to halt “Project Spire,” which was launched by the Church Commisioners (the body that looks after the £11 bn in church central funds), after research uncovered links between the Church’s historic endowment and companies involved in transatlantic chattel slavery.
The Project Spire research asserts that a predecessor fund, “Queen Anne’s Bounty, invested significant amounts of its funds in the South Sea Company, a company that traded in enslaved people. It also received numerous benefactions, many of which are likely to have come from individuals linked to, or who profited from, transatlantic chattel slavery or the plantation economy.” This finding came from forensic accountants Grant Thornton examining historic Queen Anne’s Bounty ledgers.
However, another group of historians, “History Reclaimed” argues that “To pay reparations on the basis that ‘everyone in the eighteenth century was guilty’ will not stand historical and public scrutiny,” the Church Times reported.
They also argue that “the managers of Queen Anne’s Bounty employed an investment strategy that avoided economic exposure to the slave trade, investing in Joint Stock of the South Sea Annuities (government-backed debt instruments) rather than trading company stock.” The History Reclaimed historians suggest these mean that this was an investment in government debt, not slavery.
A war of words erupted in The Times Literary Supplement, with historians exchanging letters.
The History Reclaimed group argues it is unfair to place the blame for slavery to including the whole of the church, pointing to the campaigners against slavery, such as Wilberforce, and the many who signed anti slavery petitions.
The debate over Project Spire forms part of a “history war” similar to the debates over a “black armband” and “white armband” views of Australia’s colonial past, which is taking part in the United Kingdom over the legacy of the British Empire.
One leading figure in the debate is Nigel Biggar, the Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford. He is also an Anglican priest and Conservative peer in the House of Lords. In a Substack commentary Biggar argues “Observe how the rationale given for making reparations depends on a set of unargued assertions: that the Church’s ‘immense wealth … has always been interwoven’ with enslavement; that slavery was ‘central’ to Britain’s economic growth and prosperity; that slavery was perpetrated by a ‘white establishment’ upon Africans; and that today’s descendants of slaves two centuries ago continue to suffer the effects of ancestral enslavement.
“Every one of these claims, however, is either dubious or false.”
A response to the History Reclaimed group by the academics aligned with Project Spire rebuts the claim that the annuities derived from the South Sea Company were separate from slavery “Every excise tax charged on tobacco, sugar, rum, indigo which provided the state with the means of paying annuities via the South Sea Company, all the wealth derived from supplying the needs of plantations and trading and processing theirproducts, the gold (from West Africa, Brazil and Colombia) and silver (from Peru and
Mexico) in circulation, depended on African enslaved labour.”
A second argument by those opposed to reparations is that the Church Commissioners’ responsibilities are to the Church of England, providing stipends for clergy, and easing the burden of crumbling historic churches.
However, the proposed repartitions amount to less than one per cent of the Chutch Commissioners’ holdings