(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . What does it mean to remember slavery? [1] ['Chitown Kev', 'Chloris Creator', 'Barley Wine', 'Dan K'] Date: 2026-08-23 On August 23, 1791, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue began an insurrection against the most profitable slave colony in the world. Within thirteen years, they had defeated the forces of France, Britain and Spain, abolished slavery, and established Haiti: the first independent Black republic and the only state in history founded by people who had emancipated themselves from slavery. It is the beginning of that revolution that we choose to commemorate the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. But why do we do so? The transatlantic slave trade ended more than two centuries ago and the people who perpetrated and endured it are long dead. For the same reason we mark the end of great wars, landmark victories for civil rights, or humanity’s first steps on the moon: some moments alter the world so profoundly that their significance lies as much in the world they produced as in the world in which they occurred. The slavery that helped make the modern world The practice of slavery was already ancient when European ships began carrying captive Africans across the Atlantic. It had existed in different forms in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas for thousands of years. What emerged around the Atlantic from the 15th century onward, however, was without precedent in its scale and organization: millions of Africans forcibly transported across an ocean into a system in which enslavement became racialized, hereditary and permanent; human beings and their descendants were rendered property; and entire plantation economies were built around their labor. Barbara Solow has described slavery as the “foundation” of the New World’s incorporation into the international economy.1 Enslaved labor turned vast territories in the Americas toward commodity production for international markets. A plantation in Jamaica was not some barbaric outpost sitting beyond the boundaries of an otherwise modernizing economy. It was connected to merchants in Liverpool, financiers in London, manufacturers in Manchester and consumers across Europe and North America. Consumers thousands of miles away became the end point of production systems dependent upon enslaved labor. Its legacy was not only economic. Atlantic slavery transformed the demographic and political landscape of the Americas and Caribbean, the forced movement of peoples bringing together populations that might otherwise never have shared the same shores. It created new societies, cultures and eventually nations. It also helped turn ideas about human difference into enduring racial hierarchies and left these new societies to grapple with inequalities in land, wealth and power long after emancipation. The abolition of slavery ended the legal ownership of human beings. It could not return the world to the state in which it had existed centuries before. What survives abolition? More than 80 years ago, the Trinidadian historian and later prime minister Eric Williams caused an uproar with Capitalism and Slavery. Britain’s rise as an industrial power, he argued, could not be told as a story separate from slavery. The wealth generated by Caribbean plantations and the vast commercial networks around them—merchants, financiers, and manufacturers—contributed significantly to Britain’s economic development as well as the expansion of capitalism.2 The precise extent of slavery’s contribution to industrialization has been debated ever since. The more fundamental insight is harder to ignore: slavery produced enormous wealth, and that wealth did not evaporate when slavery was abolished. That is one half of the story. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney challenged the idea that European prosperity and African “underdevelopment” were separate histories.3 Europe had spent centuries taking from Africa: first millions of people, then labor, land, minerals and crops. The transatlantic slave trade violently disrupted African societies. Further, colonial economies could grow while remaining profoundly underdeveloped. Rodney called this “growth without development”: railways could be built, ports expanded and exports increased while the basic direction of the economy remained outward, carrying wealth away. The question of repair When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in the 1830s, the people who endured generations of captivity, violence, and forced labor received nothing. Slaveholders, meanwhile, received £20 million in compensation for the loss of their human “property.” Further, the government had to borrow to cover it, with a debt folded into national accounts for so long that UK taxpayers were still paying it as recently as 2015.4 Haiti faced an even crueler accounting. In 1825, French warships arrived off Haiti’s coast and forced the young nation to compensate former colonists. So, Haiti paid for its freedom twice: first through revolution, and then through a debt it would spend generations repaying. A 2022 New York Times investigation calculated that this debt cost Haiti’s economy at least $21 billion in growth over two centuries—and that Haiti’s per capita income today could be nearly six times higher without it.5 This history sits at the heart of the modern Caribbean case for reparations. Barbadian historian and chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, Sir Hilary Beckles, argues that the full debt cannot be understood only in terms of what was denied to individuals at emancipation. Caribbean countries inherited outward facing economies and independence handed them responsibility for building societies out of what was left behind. Emancipation ended slavery but, he argues, there was no starting again from zero. That’s why CARICOM’s ten-point reparations plan6 reaches well beyond financial compensation, calling for measures including debt cancellation and investment in public health, education and technology. Recently, the reparations conversation has gone from academic to somewhat hostile. As Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has pressed CARICOM’s case for reparatory justice from Accra to Saint Lucia, former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman didn’t just reject it—she inverted it, arguing Britain’s former colonies owe it money for its “investment, effort and contribution.” Mottley called the claim “asinine.”7 But beneath the provocation is a question worth taking seriously: can exploitation be redeemed by the benefits it produces? Empire undoubtedly left behind things of value. But how much infrastructure, education or institutional inheritance would make the loss of freedom, dispossession and violence a fair exchange—and who could possibly make that calculation on behalf of the people who endured it? What abolition asks of us now To this day, Britain has never formally apologized for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, despite repeated calls from Caribbean leaders to do so, limiting its official acknowledgment to expressions of “deep regret.” France recognized slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity in 2001 and has recently acknowledged the injustice of the debt it imposed on Haiti, though it has stopped short of restitution.8 In the United States, meanwhile, even remembrance itself has become a contested issue, as battles over books, school curricula and museums increasingly encompass not only the history of slavery but its relationship to the racial inequalities that followed it.9 But for the anti-slavery movement, remembrance does not stop at getting history right. It must also help us recognize the systems that made slavery possible—and profitable. The transatlantic slave system endured for centuries not because its brutality was hidden, but because governments, businesses and consumers were willing to accept the unfreedom of millions of people as the price of prosperity. Modern slavery is not chattel slavery transported into the 21st century. The legal structures are different, the forms of coercion are different, and the scale is different. But it exists within the same global economic system slavery helped build—one that has always been capable of producing extraordinary wealth by making some people’s freedom part of the cost. The uprising that began on August 23 was a revolt against an entire order built on human bondage. More than two centuries later, the work of abolition continues: not only to free those still living in slavery, but to build a world in which no one’s freedom is negotiable. References *Freedom United is a global community that unites individuals and organizations in the fight against human trafficking and modern slavery, registered in the US as a nonprofit. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/23/800087432/community/what-does-it-mean-to-remember-slavery/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/