Barbados now has, for the first time, a quantified figure for reparations owed for the brutal system of slavery, with the long awaited tally expected to be formally released later this week.
American economist Dr Coleman Bazelon led a team from Public Interest Experts Inc. in a six-month study aimed at putting a value on centuries of uncompensated labour and suffering endured by enslaved Africans in Barbados.
The research, commissioned at a cost of approximately $60 000 to taxpayers, has been described by local officials as a “nominal fee” for a study of its scale and significance, given its potential to influence international negotiations and legal arguments on reparations.
Speaking during a briefing at Accra Beach Hotel in Rockley, Christ Church, yesterday evening, Bazelon said the study was rooted in a rigorous economic framework that sought to quantify not just stolen labour, but also stolen lives.
“We use the approach of foregone wages, both for the period of labour that was stolen and the period of life that was stolen,” he said. Bazelon noted that because wages did not exist in the enslaved Barbadian economy, researchers had to infer them using historical proxies such as rental rates for enslaved people and the cost of their up-keep.
The team then projected those values into the present day, using economic modelling to account for centuries of unpaid debt – a process Bazelon admitted posed significant challenges.
“There are not financial markets that tell you what an interest rate to use is for a debt that’s going to be paid back hundreds of years in the future,” he said, adding that multiple valuation approaches were used to ensure the estimates were credible and consistent.
However, the study has gone far beyond wages.
The economist said the research also attempted to capture a range of additional harms – including loss of freedom, physical injury, psychological trauma, sexual violence and the broader human cost of enslavement – drawing on modern legal precedents such as compensation for wrongful imprisonment and wartime abuses.
“What sticks with me is documenting that it was actually worse than you thought,” he said, pointing to estimates from earlier work suggesting that transatlantic slavery resulted in hundreds of millions of years of life lost.
Programme advisor in the Office of Pan African Affairs and Heritage, Rodney Grant, who was integrally involved in the project, stressed that while public attention is likely to focus on the “big number”, the figure – to be unveiled later this week – is not intended to function as a simple financial invoice to former colonial powers.
Instead, it is meant to serve as a negotiating tool, a benchmark that strengthens Barbados’ hand within the wider CARICOM reparations framework.
“This gives us a measure by which to negotiate,” Grant said, adding that reparations should be understood as a long-term process involving investment in areas such as health care, education and social development, rather than direct cash payouts.
The study could also have legal implications.
Bazelon confirmed that the methodology used aligned with the type of economic evidence that could be presented in a humanitarian court, although it would likely need to be tested and refined within a legal setting.
Grant said the model developed by Bazelon’s team could be adapted by other CARICOM states seeking to quantify their own claims, helping to build a unified regional case for reparations grounded in empirical data rather than moral argument alone.
“This is just a start of a process,” he said, noting that the work represents only one component – unpaid labour – of the broader reparations question.
For Bazelon, the significance of the project lies not only in the number it produces, but in what it represents. “This debt is 400 years in the making. It’s not something that is going to be resolved in a year or five years.” (CLM)
