Britain stole an estimated 25 million years of life and labour from enslaved people in Barbados over two centuries of chattel slavery, causing damages now valued at up to $2 trillion (£1.5 trillion), according to a major new report by international experts — though its authors are emphatic that the figure is not a demand for payment but a foundation for reckoning with the past.
The research, led by economist Coleman Bazelon through the non-profit organisation Public Interest Experts, breaks down the staggering total into two components. The value of uncompensated labour stolen from enslaved people in Barbados is estimated at between $500 billion and $700 billion. When the drastically shortened lifespans of those enslaved are factored in — representing years of life taken as well as work — that figure rises to a combined range of $1.6 trillion to $2 trillion.
Bazelon was careful to frame the numbers in terms of historical accountability rather than financial obligation. “This research is not creating an invoice for anybody to pay,” he said. “It is an accounting of the harm that was done — a recognition of the harm that was done that is the starting point for reconciliation.”
The human scale behind the statistics is equally striking. Approximately 379,000 people arrived in Barbados from Africa having survived the transatlantic crossing. A further 78,000 died during the Middle Passage and never reached the island. An estimated 335,000 more were born into slavery on Barbadian soil. In total, Bazelon’s analysis estimates that chattel slavery across the Americas and the Caribbean affected 19.9 million people.
Barbados holds a particular place in this history. It was the first major British colony to deploy enslaved labour on plantations, beginning in the early 1600s, and is a founding nation of the Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, which has long advocated for reparations. When Britain formally abolished slavery on 1 August 1834, the government paid £20 million in compensation — not to the enslaved, but to their owners, as recompense for the loss of their “property.” The people who had been enslaved received nothing.
Professor Alan Lester of the University of Sussex, a leading authority on the British empire, said the scale of the figure was unsurprising given the historical context. “The inequalities entrenched by slavery have only been exacerbated since, as compensation was paid to slave owners rather than the enslaved and independence left Caribbean islands drained of capital and indebted to western institutions,” he said.
Barbados’s minister for pan-African affairs and heritage, Trevor Prescod, said the report would be taken to cabinet for ratification. “You can’t erase history,” he said. “My job is to give an Afrocentric redress to the imbalances that occurred during the period of slavery.”
The findings sit within a much larger body of work. The 2023 Brattle analysis, which Bazelon also co-authored, estimated the total value of harms from transatlantic chattel slavery across 31 territories in the Americas and Caribbean at between $100 trillion and $131 trillion, encompassing both the period of enslavement and the continuing harms since. That analysis was commissioned following an international symposium on reparations and international law that concluded transatlantic slavery was unlawful.
The political backdrop adds further weight to the debate. Last month, 123 nations at the UN General Assembly voted to recognise chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity. The United States, Israel and Argentina voted against the resolution. The United Kingdom, along with 51 other countries including many European nations, abstained. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has previously ruled out direct monetary reparations payments.
Some descendants of British enslavers have added their voices to the call for action. David Lascelles, co-founder of Heirs of Slavery, a group whose members are descended from those who profited from slavery, said: “My distant ancestor Henry Lascelles made his fortune in Barbados in the 18th century. Now, 300 years later, it’s high time we all recognise there is a debt to pay.” His co-founder Alex Renton added that addressing the legacies of slavery was “the right thing for the nation to do, morally and practically.”
