Historian takes issue with Church of England’s slavery reparations plans

Professor Richard Dale, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, has said that the Church of England’s plan to pay £100 million in slavery reparations is predicated on “deeply flawed” historical evaluation.

More than three years ago the Church Commissioners published a report outlining alleged links between the Church of England and the transatlantic slave trade. Following the report, the Church of England announced its reparations plan, named “Project Spire”.

At the guts of the historical dispute is a fund generally known as the Queen Anne’s Bounty. The fund dates back to the early 18th century and was arrange to offer financial support to poorer clergy throughout the Church of England. The query is whether or not the Bounty profited from slavery.

The Church Commissioners tasked accountants Grant Thornton with finding the reply to this query. Their conclusion was that the “Queen Anne’s Bounty had purchased investments in an entity called the South Sea Company which is understood to have transported 34,000 enslaved individuals across the Atlantic”.

“The South Sea Company ceased trading in enslaved people in 1739 at which point the Bounty had invested £443 million (in today’s terms),” the findings said. 

Professor Dale, nevertheless, argues that this view is mistaken and that “there’s incontrovertible evidence that Queen Anne’s Bounty’s investments earned not one penny from the slave trade”.

Writing for History Reclaimed, Dale said that the South Sea Company was split into two entities within the early 18th century, considered one of which was involved within the slave trade and the opposite essentially a vehicle for investing in government bonds. It was this latter entity that the Queen Anne’s Bounty and thereby the Church, invested in and profited from.

Professor Dale, a specialist within the history of the South Sea Company, claimed it was an “outlandish” error to mistake two firms with similar names for a similar company.

“The Commissioners’ advisers have confused two different firms, each with the words ‘South Sea’ of their name: the South Sea Company and the individually incorporated annuity company, the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities … the report is guilty of an elementary gaffe by conflating two legally separate entities,” he said. 

Summarising his arguments, Professor Dale concluded that “the Bounty’s investments, whether in stock or annuities, earned no money from the slave trade”. 

A survey last December indicated little support for the Church of England’s reparations plans, with 81 per cent out of 500 Anglican churchgoers saying that they’d fairly the Church use its financial resources for local parishes, and nearly two thirds (64%) saying that it’s “not the role of the Church Commissioners, using funds of their care, to atone for previous injustice akin to slavery”. 

Anglican theologian and Oxford professor, Nigel Biggar, is one other outspoken critic of Project Spire. Writing in The Critic this week, he said he could find no ethical justification for Church of England slavery reparations. 

“For example, why pick British involvement in African enslavement as something extraordinary? Over greater than a century-and-a-half from 1650 some Britons were involved in trading 3.258 million of the 12.75 million Africans transported across the Atlantic — just over 1 / 4 of the overall. Whereas in about 1850 the indigenous Fulani people in now northern Nigeria were running vast plantations where they employed 4 million African slaves abruptly,” he said.

“Next, were the living and dealing conditions of slaves within the West Indies really much worse than those of commercial employees within the slums of early Victorian England?

“Further, what about all of the Anglicans who spent their lives committed to abolishing slavery within the British Empire and suppressing all around the world — do their heroic efforts count for nothing?

“And, further still, as for the ‘intergenerational trauma’ allegedly suffered by the descendants of African slaves today, how come those descendants in Barbados are faring much better on average than Nigerians, a few of whom are descended from slave-raiders, -traders, and -owners? Has the standard of postcolonial government nothing to do with it?”