How the shadow of slavery still hangs over global finance

When the infamous Zong trial began in 1783, it laid bare the toxic relationship between finance and slavery. It was an unusual and distressing insurance claim – concerning a massacre of 133 captives, thrown overboard the Zong slave ship.

The slave trade pioneered a new kind of finance, secured on the bodies of the powerless. Today, […]

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‘Regional and Revealing, Upbeat and Uplifting!’

‘Regional and Revealing, Upbeat and Uplifting!’

CASTRIES Saint Lucia, Thursday September 24, 2020:– The Saint Lucia National Reparations Committee (NRC) is promising an inaugural lecture in its schools that will be regional in content and purely Caribbean in character, with Saint Lucian and Caribbean students – and teachers – to get a first indication of how […]

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Boston University Professor: It’s Time For Reparations, Transitional Justice For African Americans

by Isheka N. Harrison

A Boston University professor is making her pro-reparations stance clear. In a, op-ed published Sept. 16 in BU Today (the school’s newspaper), Dr. Joyce Hope Scott is challenging America to not only own its original sin, but to also count and pay the cost.

Entitled “It’s Time for Reparations and Transitional Justice for […]

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Eric Williams’ Foundational Work on Slavery, Industry, and Wealth

By Katie Donington

Debates over Eric Williams’s work have ebbed and flowed ever since he first published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. His book inspired a body of historiography to which many historians of slavery and abolition have added their voices over the decades. Scholars working within the Black radical tradition took up Williams’s work, notably […]

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Broadening the Dialogue on Reparations in the Global Context

A Presentation to OECS Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs

By Earl Bousquet
Chairman of the Saint Lucia National Reparations Committee (NRC) and Member of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC)

Introduction

I feel honored to have been invited to address this 1st Special Meeting of the OECS Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs via video conference ahead of […]

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The UWI’s Golden African Stool

A clear illustration of a Caribbean luminary’s view of the Art and Science of Decolonization and Nation-building in the Age of Reparations.

By Earl Bousquet
When I attended my first meeting of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) at the Cave Hill Campus of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) in Barbados in 2014, I left […]

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Centering the History of Black Women in the French Empire

A 2007 “sans papiers” protest in Paris, France.

By Kate Dossett
aaihs.org

Annette Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire offers a bold new path for reimagining the freedom struggles of the twentieth century. The most striking scenes in this beautifully written book are the many extraordinary escapes that Black women make and […]

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‘A Journey That We Have To Join Together’: 2 Dutch Women Confront Slavery’s Legacy

Photo by Brian van der Leij

Peggy Bouva (left) and Maartje Duin traveled to Suriname together to visit a former sugar plantation once owned by Dutch nobility. Duin’s great-great-great-grandmother held a share in the plantation, where Bouva’s ancestors were enslaved. The two women documented their research into their shared, painful history for a podcast called “The […]

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Why August 23 is a more important to Caribbean History than Emancipation Day

By Earl Bousquet

COVID-19 changed almost everything in 2020.

But the global change engine has also this year accelerated the frequency of clashes between old and new, past and present, ultimately resulting in increased resistance to institutionalized inequality, presenting greater challenges everywhere for those banking on maintaining the Status Quo to guarantee traditional levels of advantageous cohabitation […]

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Saint Lucia NRC launches 2020-21 Annual Lecture Series

Monsignor calls for ‘Bold, Frank and Honest’ Regional Reparations Conversation

CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, August 21, 2020:– A Saint Lucian church leader has paid tribute to early contributors to the struggles for Black Liberation and Social development in and from the Caribbean between the 1970s and the 21st Century and called for the current discussion on Reparations […]

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The UWI gone global on several fronts, with one common denominator!

by Earl Bousquet

Whenever I say ‘I wish every Caribbean citizen would tune to UWItv
Global at least once a day’, I’m always asked to explain why — and I
always give more than one reason, each time.

One: It’s the only regional TV station and system committed to giving
the Caribbean a mirror to watch and a platform to […]

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