 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to discuss the recent visit of what are being called the Royals, Prince William and his partner Kate Middleton, who have gone to Jamaica. And their visit has sparked a lot of protests because as it happens the Queen is still the head of state of Jamaica, though Jamaica has been independent for quite some years now. Also the issue that has come up is that of slavery because Britain, Great Britain benefited from slave, not only slave trade but also production of sugar from Jamaica conducted by slaves for not a few years, couple of hundred years. And the wealth of Great Britain and now United Kingdom is built a lot on the slave trade and the sugar production and later slavery and cotton production in United States, which came to England at that time in the textile industry over there and led to the industrial revolution. We have with us Sumangla Damodaran, professor in Bedkar University and who has also been looking at the issue of colonialism and its roots in slavery and sugar production and other what would be called the plantation economists there. Sumangla, if you look at all of this, can you tell us what is the anger that we see now in Jamaica? We have seen it in other places as well. Barbados actually got rid of the royalty being the head of state quite some years back. What is the reason for this anger and what is it that the people have said over there vis-à-vis the recent protests that we see in Jamaica? Yeah, so I think the anger is about slavery of course and not just about slavery as the way in which slavery is talked about even when it is acknowledged today as something of the past and something that should not have happened is a little bit embarrassing for Britain and the West in general. But the fact that slavery was a very fundamental mode through which these societies were fundamentally exploited, there was a fair amount of expropriation that took place and of course what happened to those who were slaves and their descendants later on. So the demand for reparation therefore is I think about compensation and to also compensate not only just to pay money for what happened but also to be able to compensate for the damage that was done over generations. So if we look actually at the demands that have been made by the delegations which have met the royals, it's about educating children, it's about building capabilities of the descendants of slave populations in order to be able to compensate intergenerational transmission of the kind of underdevelopment that was wrought by slavery. One of the important things would have been to simply accept or acknowledge that they owe reparations to the descendants of the slaves because they took them out of Africa, huge numbers, of course there is also the question of reparation to Africa. This was really two sets of quote-unquote products. One is slaves being used and the merchants funding slave trade benefiting from sale and purchase of human beings and then using them in the plantation. So there are two aspects to it and what is it called the triangular trade, one funds slavery, quote-unquote slave production which is capture of human beings killing a lot of them in the process transporting them to the West Indies of course but also to Brazil and of course to United States. So all of this is one part, other is the plantation economy where the slaves are used essentially as factors of production and used to produce sugar in this particular case Jamaica being one of the biggest producers of sugar. But also not only the acknowledgement but the fact that the wealth of Britain, Great Britain at that time and today's United Kingdom is based on the wealth from slave trade and for sugar production isn't it? Yeah absolutely. So you're right. So in terms of just the profits that accrued from these two types of activities slave trade itself as being highly profitable and slaves not just being labor for the plantations but slaves in themselves producing wealth for traders and then slave owners in turn earning wealth as a result of slaves working on the plantations. The amounts of money that this involved and the number of people who were involved as slave owners and slave traders is absolutely staggering and I think that is the kind of thing that is not publicly acknowledged. It's something in Britain, it's something that is hush-hush. It's a little embarrassing if it has to be acknowledged but the scale of it is something that is not really acknowledged. So when we look at this demand for reparation I think it's the scale and of the number of people involved as traders and slave owners of course the more than 3 million people who were the slaves themselves and the kind of economy that it involved which was also substantial in creating the modern British economy and also the modern imperial economy, colonial economy. So I think one has to read all that into this demand for reparation. So it's a larger statement on colonialism and the roots of capitalism which are grounded in slavery. That's a very interesting point that you are raising. It is not just the amount but also the scale and if we look at that the figures are I think that one-fifth of the wealthy British had the roots in slave trade as slave owners or slave traders. That is one-fifth of the wealthy population when slavery was being abolished which was 1807 and of course it continued to about 1837 because it said only below 6 years and below would be freed. Others would be converted into Apprentices. So this is really about 240 years or so of enslavement and their use in sugar plantation and other plantations. But when you talk about the scale of reparation and the reparations, the other interesting point is slave owners were given reparations but the slaves not. And so descendant of the slaves of course there's no question of reparation but they were not even given say okay you till this land for so many generations now this piece of land belongs to you. The land belonged to the plantation owner who was given reparations for having freed the slaves or the state having forced them to free slaves. But what was the amount of reparations given in terms of money to the slave owners at that time because I believe that they were given actually reparations for having quote unquote the state having freed the slaves. So in Jamaica alone or in Britain I think 46,000 is roughly the number of slave owners who were given a compensation and today's value terms it's about more than 16 billion dollars is the estimate. So at that time it was supposed to be 20 million pounds but in today's price it's 16.5 billion pounds actually. 16.5 billion pounds and it is considered the largest bailout in British history. The other one was what happened with the bailout of banks in 2009. So even in that sense if you look at it just the very fact that capital is getting compensated you know itself is a statement on how important slavery was to the creation of capitalism. So it's interesting capital was compensated for having owned slaves or having traded in slaves but the slaves themselves of course as Prime Minister Cameron when he went to Jamaica said this should be forgotten this is history should just move on. Though they were compensating the slave owners up to 2015. You know it's very interesting that you're giving us the facts about the amount of the scale at which it happened because there's other case we of course talk about French Revolution being you know the great egalitarian revolution that took place at the time. But the French did not accept that the Haitians should not be slaves. In fact Saint Domingo which was what it was called at the time, Hispaniola Saint Domingo. So they when they want to become free then great Napoleon sends the army say no no this is not okay. You cannot be free. That's only for French men and then they also French impose along with the British and the Americans the United States imposes the condition. Okay you can free the slaves but you'll have to pay us compensation and Haiti being one of the poorest countries in the world today. A cause of this is the scale at which the paid reparations which are something like at today's prices 20 to 30 billion dollars equivalent. So very close to the figures that you talk about in Jamaica and they paid it over the next 150 years. It was I think till 1950 they paid the reparations and of course French is one of the richest countries in the world. Haiti is one of the poorest. So this is very similar to the issue that reparations are played to save slave owners but never to the people who had been uprooted from their place where they were born, lived, uprooted and then exploited and generational exploitation of this population. So what are the demands that now the Jamaicans have raised because I believe there is a 60 point charter which they have which they have raised vis a vis the United Kingdom. So I think the fundamental I mean there are a lot of different points which are there which are very detailed but I think the fundamental point that they are raising over there is that Britain should actually now compensate in terms of contributing to the development of the economy substantially. So in that sense it's a recognition that it was like we talk about the drain of wealth in Indian colonial history that slavery as a system apart from the massive human atrocities that it involved was also fundamentally destructive as far as their economic system was concerned. And which has remained the legacy of it has remained in terms of where Jamaica is today in the world. So the demand for reparation therefore is quite a solid one in terms of rebuilding or building for present generations as well and for future generations. So it's not a question of aid but it's a question of reparations. Yeah and it's also not just an emotional compensation in some sense you know that we pay off somebody for the damage that we cause but it's about more fundamental historical correction if that can happen but at least in financial terms. What you're saying is not just a question of restitution but it's a question of reparations which is that you must allow us today to at least gain some of that which we lost in the becoming having been converted into slaves and so on. Of course we haven't looked at the effect it has on Africa that maybe we should do it another day but you know if we look at all of this there is also an Indian angle to it because when the slavery is then demolished in this way finally they had to abolish slavery in Jamaica. The slaves walk off the plantation and said we'll never go to plantations again and therefore Jamaica takes a dip in sugar production and it's Indian endangered labour which goes to Jamaica for the sugar plantations. And also Mauritius where the slavery actually continues for longer which continues then becomes a major producer of sugar and of course Mauritius also sees indentured labour from India. So the substitution of the slave labour was done by indentured labour which was a kind of slavery but not this maybe not as brutal or certainly not as brutal as what was done for Africa. Yeah so the transition to indentured labour very often is also looked at as giving more freedom because supposedly there was freedom in the contract but there were other ways. I mean you know physical slavery in some sense probably got replaced by penal sanctions you know very very strict sanctions which against misbehavior by workers. So in a certain sense it was and there are those who have argued that indentured is very close to slavery and in that sense this unfreedom of the worker was something whether it was slavery and then later on indentured and with labour from India primarily which produced that only quasi free labour it wasn't even quasi free it was actually unfree labour. In fact it's very interesting to the way Jamaican Africans who had you know West Indian population who had walked out of the plantations they said we never going back there and they therefore looked down upon the indentured labour in West Indies for having replaced them because they thought in the totem pole therefore that's one scale lower than what they were aspiring to be. So that is quite correct to see that it was as unfree perhaps but in a different way than what was seen as the slave labour in Jamaica. The last question before we close this discussion how did it contribute directly or indirectly to the growth of the industrial revolution and the capitalist form of production because actually slave production of plantation economy is seen as somewhere in between modern capitalist production and essentially primitive it seemed to be somewhat of a primitive accumulation of capital but if you look at the production process of the sugar that takes place lot of the elements of what we would call capitalist production are also visible there except for the fact it is completely unfree labour but apart from that how would you look at that part of it that in what way does it help or brings in a new capitalist formation into being. Yeah so the plantation economy and the way in which it developed in the Caribbean or in Brazil and so on. And also Louisiana later in the United States. Yes yes was really a modern enterprise it was really modern enterprise because I mean the organization of production the precursor to the factory in some sense. I mean the interesting part over here is that the people who actually organized the slaves and got them to produce were known as factors. And that's origin of the word factory. Yes the origin of the word factory most probably comes from factors factors as somebody who actually organizes gets things together so that production can take place. And it is under slavery that kind of production which is akin to capitalist production comes into existence and the profits out of this plantation economy and also the profits from slave trade itself are also then plowed into the industrial revolution into the railways into finance. And back to plantations. And back to plantations so in that sense it is very much part of the capitalist system and therefore. Production and reproduction of capital as it were. Yeah absolutely and slavery therefore this slavery that we are talking about whether it's transatlantic slavery and also to some extent I think you know some parts of Indian Ocean slavery by the Portuguese and the Dutch and so on are absolutely modern in terms of the way in which they organize human beings in order to produce. That's an interesting point you're making though Taylor is supposed to be the modern founder of industrial management. But the elements of all of this are more advanced quote unquote extracting labor more labor from the in this case the slaves was done in exactly the Taylorist model well before Taylor comes into existence you know. So this this whole way the organization of production takes place and even the calculation how much should you actually let the slave live before he becomes a drag on the slave owner. That was calculated in absolutely capitalist terms that this much we feed him this much is to be done this much has to be this is his cost of upkeep and what does he produce and when that becomes negative we can quote unquote dispose him off. This is all actually calculated in very quote unquote capitalist modern terms. Yeah scientific management techniques quote unquote scientific management techniques and how to exploit this slave what is the maximum extent of exploitation we can do and in fact on the cotton plantations. The X when the textile so called industry not so called really industrial revolution takes place and the mills start to modernizing in terms of more and more production. The cotton plantations could keep up the growth of the demand that was taking place with only one technology as the book that the half that was never written says that the only technology they had to increase or extract more without increasing the slave population was the bullwhip. So this was the core of the exploitation the bullwhip but nevertheless the calculations are all on the basis of what you would call today scientific management. So very interesting way though a very pointed reminder of what the world has gone through and why today we have poor nations and we have rich nations. And the fact that what would be called the colonial and settler colonial nations till rule the roost calling themselves. What is it the rules the world international rule based world order which is really the quote unquote G7 in which of course Japan is the only not white race but we've been declared honorary whites. Thank you so much for being with us and getting us to understand the larger connotation of what slavery meant particularly in the plantation economy of Jamaica West Indies and of course the Americas. This is all the time we have for this discussion today so do keep watching news click and do visit our website.