Church of England's £100m Slavery Reparations Based on Mistake, Says Historian

Church of England’s £100m Slavery Reparations Based on Mistake, Says Historian

Last year, the Church of England declared that it had invested the equivalent of £440 million today in the slave trade between 1720 and 1740 and thus would be paying out £100 million in a programme of reparations. However, a historian of the period, Professor Richard Dale, has now said that this is based on a mistake: the church did not invest anywhere near such sums in the slave trade and did not profit from it. Charles Moore has written about the debacle in the Telegraph.

But is the history contained in the [Church of England’s] report true? In a recent article in the Church Times, Prof. Richard Dale, a business historian of the famous “South Sea Bubble” of 1720, suggests it is not. I telephoned him to find out more.

This is the fact that, in 1723 – three years after the South Sea Bubble had burst – Parliament passed a statute splitting the South Sea Company in two. One was the trading company. The other was the company which sold what was in effect Government debt, paying interest on annuities.

The Commissioners’ report says that “anyone investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in these [slave-trading] voyages”. Prof. Dale says the opposite was the case. Those buying the annuities were consciously not investing in slavery. The statute’s purpose was to make this possible by what is now called ‘ring-fencing’, preventing any financial or legal relationship between the trading and the annuities. This was done, it seems, because the trading (of which slaves formed a big part, but not the whole) was high-risk. The smash of 1720 had showed how toxic the mixture of Government debt with high risk could be.

After the Act, [the Church of England’s] Queen Anne’s Bounty put all its money into the annuities – just the sort of lower but safer return you would expect a sober ecclesiastical organisation to seek. Once the split had taken place, it bought no shares in anything connected with slavery.

Between 1720 and 1723, it is true, the Bounty did invest £14,000 (about £2.4 million today) in the unsplit company and so, for a time, could have profited from slavery. As it happened, however, it did not. When Parliament divided the South Sea Company in 1723, it split the Bounty’s shares equally, too. The Bounty sold off its trading company shares quite quickly but retained and greatly expanded its annuities.

Will the woke ever get their history right?

Worth reading in full.