People whose ancestors profited from transatlantic slavery and its many related industries

Heirs of Slavery is a group of people who have learned that their ancestors acquired significant wealth from, or helped organise, the industrialised enslavement of African people in the Americas.

Our ancestors were plantation owners, slave-traders, merchants, bankers, investors, soldiers, lawyers and lawmakers.

Since we launched Heirs of Slavery in April 2023, we’ve been approached by many others from UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, the Caribbean, Canada, the United States and elsewhere in the world who know that they, too, have this story in their family history.

‘We cannot change the past. But we can change the consequences’

Professor Sir Geoff Palmer KT, Windrush-era migrant from Jamaica to Britain, Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University

  • There are many wrongs in today’s world that derive from the exploitation of African people and their descendants by Britain and other former colonial powers. We believe it’s important to acknowledge this crime against humanity and address its ongoing consequences. We wish to support today’s movements seeking apology, dialogue, reconciliation and reparative justice.

    We encourage others who have similarly examined their family history to consider how personal charitable donations, according to their means, can help the futures of people in the Caribbean and Britain. But our main purpose is to lend our voices, as the descendants of those involved in the business of slavery, to support campaigns for institutional and national reparative justice.

    • We support the CARICOM nations’ Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.

    • We encourage the UK government and other former colonial powers to open a dialogue with CARICOM concerning the plan.

    • We welcome initiatives from the Royal Family, the Church of England, the Bank of England and other institutions, private and public, to analyse their role in transatlantic slavery, and their responsibilities to the descendants of the enslaved today, including making historical records and archives more accessible.

    • We support efforts to better inform the British public about the history and ongoing effects of transatlantic slavery.

    • We support initiatives by University College London, the universities of Glasgow and Lancaster, and others, to research the extent and impact of Britain’s transatlantic slavery industries.

    • We welcome the Dutch government’s recent apology for the Netherlands’ historic role in slavery, and note its establishment of a reparations fund to tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies.

    We are keen to hear from you. If you want to join us, or tell us about your story of slavery and its consequences, please visit our Contact page.

  • Simply, we want to lend our voices in support of campaigns to tackle the ongoing consequences of the transatlantic slavery era in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

    People like us have, historically, kept quiet about what our ancestors did. We believe the time has come to face up to what happened, to acknowledge the ongoing repercussions of this human tragedy, and support the existing movements to discuss repair and reconciliation both in the Caribbean and in the United Kingdom.

    You can see, from recent actions by the Royal Family, the Bank of England, the National Trust and other major British institutions, that there’s something going on – a new spirit of acknowledgment and engagement that will lead to better relations within our country, as well as with those countries in the Caribbean that continue to live under slavery’s long shadow.

  • Although we are not a grant-giving body, all of us on an individual basis actively support a number of different charities and educational foundations in UK and the Caribbean. But our financial contributions can only ever be a token, given the millions of lives that were destroyed by slavery.

    We believe that we can do so much more by lending our support and our voices to movements to bring about repair and reconciliation at a national level – this is the only way that real, deep-seated change can be achieved.

  • During the slavery era the ‘sugar islands’ were, by far, Britain’s richest colonies. But after the abolition of slavery, the extra cost of producing sugar led to economic collapse, and the colonies became very poor indeed – as they have largely remained. Shockingly little of the £20 million ‘compensation’ money that the British government in the 1830s paid to 46,000 former slave-owners – including some of our ancestors – made it back to the places where slavery actually happened, let alone to those who had been enslaved.

    During the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, successive British governments considered the poverty of the Caribbean colonies, and failed to act. In the 1950s and 1960s, at the tail end of the colonial era, health statistics and educational attainment levels were far worse than in Britain.

  • It is. But the enslavement by European nations of more than 14 million Africans and their descendants is of a different order. For a start, it was entirely legal, promoted by governments such as Britain’s, which made vast amounts through taxation – in 1800, 11% of British GDP was generated through slavery-related industries.

    Furthermore, it was for the purpose of upholding the institution of slavery, and to ‘other’ the enslaved Africans, that Europeans invented racism, developing a divisive social system based around skin colour that was zealously upheld by the colonial authorities.

    Most importantly of all – the deep inequities deriving from transatlantic slavery to this day continue in the societies of all countries involved, on both sides of the Atlantic.

  • Our group listens to the descendants of those who were enslaved and, where appropriate, promotes constructive discussion between nations and institutions about how repair and reconciliation might best work for all people in this continuing story. Needless to say, financial compensation will have to be part of the discussion since, in general, the descendants of the enslaved are far less wealthy than the descendants of the enslavers.

    But it’s not just about money. Strikingly, the first demand on the CARICOM group of nations’ Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice is for a ‘full formal apology’ from the governments of Europe. An apology is long overdue, and its significance, as a starting point on the road to repair and reconciliation, cannot be overstated.

  • We deplore the present-day exploitation of the poor and vulnerable, and some of us donate money to organisations trying to prevent that.

    However, due to our shared heritage, we have chosen to concentrate on the continuing after-effects of a vast crime against humanity from which all of Britain profited. We acknowledge that much of the racism, poverty and inequality to be found in Black communities today is directly connected to the actions of our ancestors and those like them.