Colonialism, Slavery, Reparations and Trade：Remedying the 'Past'?

The challenge in writing about reparations for slavery is that people tend to offer polarized emotional arguments that change no one's mind. This book begins from two premises. The first is that its contributors all agree reparations for the African slave trade are justified, the payers should be national governments rather than ethnic groups, and the payees should be slave descendants rather than ethnic groups. The second is that the writers here are lawyers (a few are diplomats). Each contributor has practical experience with human rights cases. They know too much to pretend that a good thing in theory is automatically a good or possible thing to achieve. This is the book's topic. A distinguished group of experienced human rights lawyers and specialists sits down here to talk calmly about whether and how legal reparations for African slavery could realistically happen. The book derives from a conference, and contributors write clearly and well in the first person. A European expert from the reparations case for descendants of Holocaust victims discusses similarities and differences, and shapes eight basic questions. The ambassador from Ghana discusses the perspective of the nation from which the most people were kidnapped, and so on. There is a third premise here, unstated but vital: the book and most contributors are British. One contributor comes from the US, one from France, and several from West Africa. This calm conversation about the possible functions in large part because the complex blend of colors, races, cultures, immigration, colonialism at home, and ethnic cleansing characteristic of the history of the US, Latin America, and the Near East is absent from the history of black slavery in England. The lone US contributor notes the slavery-reparation issue has two elephants in the room: the large numbers of slave descendants in the US, and the survivors of the genocide of the original inhabitants of the Americas. In the end, she considers the value of apology and recommends legislative and corporate rather than legal solutions. For US readers, the rest of the book is a fascinating window into a world where the consequences of African slavery might be more simply ended. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Fernne Brennan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on reparations, discrimination law, human rights and criminal law. Her previous publications in the field include 'Race, Rights Reparations: Exploring a Reparations Framework for Addressing Trade Inequality’ in Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy (2008),and Capitalism and Human Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2006)

John Packer is Professor in the School of Law and Director of the Human Rights Centre. Prior to this, he was Coordinator of the global Initiative on Quiet Diplomacy and served as a consultant to several international organisations, governments and NGOs. He has been a Director of the Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, where he was previously Senior Legal Adviser, and he was a Human Rights Officer at the United Nations where he investigated serious violations. He is a member of a number of editorial boards of scholarly journals, and is an internationally recognised expert in the field of minority rights and conflict prevention