Conservative leadership hopefuls Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch may exemplify the party’s penchant for lacklustre and charisma-deficient candidates, but their relentless pursuit of recognition reached a new low this week.
Jenrick and Badenoch have repeatedly marginalised African and Caribbean communities; showing that the Windrush scandal was but one example of the hostile environment that has come to define Conservative policies.
Jenrick’s latest comments this week – a startling display of historical ignorance from a Cambridge-educated historian – defended the empire’s legacy while dismissing calls for reparations. In an article for the Daily Mail, he suggests former colonies should feel indebted for the “inheritance” of British legal and democratic institutions, conveniently ignoring the violent colonial mechanisms that maintained British dominance.
According to Jenrick, these colonised societies, which he characterises as primitive, should be grateful for British intervention, claiming: “The British empire broke the long chain of violent tyranny as we came to introduce – gradually and imperfectly – Christian values.”
This amounts to historical revisionism. Jenrick seems to believe Britain merely encountered pre-existing forms of tyranny in the Caribbean and Africa and that British colonial rule brought civilisation.
His perspective is disturbingly out of step with the realities of colonial exploitation and the brutal legacy of transatlantic slavery.
Jenrick insists: “I’m not ashamed of our history,” arguing that former colonies “owe us a debt of gratitude”.
As Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister, warned in Capitalism and Slavery, every generation seeks to rewrite history. And Jenrick’s statements reflect just such an attempt – a deeply flawed reframing of the brutal, self-enriching and corrupt enterprise that was the British empire.
Far from a benevolent endowment, this “inheritance” was forced upon societies that were systematically destabilised, oppressed, and deprived of autonomy. Colonial administrations, especially in the Caribbean, implanted legal systems and economic structures that served Britain’s interests, enabling an enduring extraction of wealth and resources. These systems prioritised profit over governance and perpetuated a culture of corruption.
The colonial era’s exploitation and the structural inequalities it imposed laid the groundwork for corruption across the Caribbean. While Indigenous Caribbean societies such as the Taíno, Carib, and Arawak operated on largely communal and egalitarian systems, European colonisers dismantled these networks, imposing extractive economies reliant on forced labour and brutal plantation systems, which led to the genocide of these Indigenous people.
The slave trade entrenched this dynamic, establishing networks of bribery, patronage, and exploitation that became central to the colonial model. This toxic legacy was institutionalised, creating entrenched systems of corruption that post-colonial states would later inherit.
Jenrick’s defence obscures how Britain’s former colonies have continued to be shaped – and constrained – by neo-colonial power structures, particularly through international financial institutions. These institutions, under the guise of economic development, impose structural adjustment policies that force smaller nations to adopt measures benefiting foreign investors and corporations over their own populations.
Such practices echo the exploitative colonial model, where economies are controlled from afar, extracting resources while leaving the host country to shoulder the social and environmental consequences. This is the cycle that has led to economic dependencies that keep former colonies in positions of perpetual vulnerability. Colonialism left behind legal and economic frameworks steeped in corruption and inequity.
Jenrick’s comments are but another example of recasting the brutal, exploitative legacy of empire as a gift, as reiterated by Badenoch and theologian Nigel Biggar.
The Caribbean’s history tells a different story – a narrative of resilience and resistance against centuries of subjugation and resource exploitation that has evolved into the contemporary struggle against the neo-colonial structures designed to keep it dependent. For these nations, the “inheritance” of colonialism is not a debt owed to Britain, but rather an enduring legacy of exploitation that necessitates genuine, context-sensitive reform – not patronising platitudes of gratitude.
The British empire’s legacy in the Caribbean is inseparable from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economies it sustained – industries built on the brutal exploitation of millions of African men, women, and children forcibly uprooted from their homes.
The trade was not a sideline of empire but its beating heart, powering Britain’s industrialisation and global dominance. The staggering human cost of this system – the violent uprooting of lives, the erasure of cultures, and the dehumanisation of entire populations – fuelled Britain’s economic machine.
Upon arrival in the Caribbean, enslaved Africans were cast into unspeakable cruelty on the plantations of the British West Indies. They were forced to toil from dawn to dusk in blistering heat, harvesting sugarcane, coffee and tobacco.
The vast plantations were highly profitable, producing commodities for British and European markets. Stripped of their humanity, enslaved Africans were subjected to barbaric punishments for the smallest infractions, with no hope for relief.
They were deprived of their identities, families torn apart, and resistance was met with ruthless retribution. Colonial authorities devised terrifying regimes of control. Rebellions were crushed with military force, and those who dared to resist were tortured, mutilated, or executed. British planters saw violence as a means to ensure productivity and deter rebellion.
The trade itself was an atrocity, human beings packed tightly in the dark hulls of British and European slave ships, shackled and starved, in conditions that caused many to perish before reaching the Caribbean. This was a calculation – lives were mere losses on a balance sheet. British merchants grew fabulously wealthy from this enterprise.
The scale of British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade is staggering. More than 12 million Africans were enslaved, with Britain responsible for kidnapping nearly 3.4 million Africans, more than any other nation involved in the trade between 1640 and 1807, with 450,000 dying along the way. This dehumanisation machinery did not operate in isolation; it was integrated with British economic policy, and its profits built institutions, grand houses, bolstered industries, and funded an empire. This grotesque model thrived on subjugation, a reality British leaders seldom acknowledge.
The fruits of this system – wealth, prestige, and empire – were reaped almost exclusively by the ruling class. When Britain finally abolished slavery in 1834, it did so with significant compensation – not to those it had wronged but to the enslavers who received £20m for their “lost property”, an amount that by one measure translates to £17bn today.
Enslaved people received no reparations for the broken ladder of generational wealth or for the traumas inflicted on generations. That Britain could compensate enslavers while ignoring the enslaved reveals the staggering moral hypocrisy at the heart of empire.
So today, when politicians argue that the empire’s legacy should be honoured, it is a selective memory that distorts history. Colonialism was not a benevolent force but an enterprise driven by greed and secured through violence. The Caribbean’s inherited “institutions”, are part of a brutal colonial infrastructure meant to control rather than uplift, maintaining order in a society built on oppression and exploitation.
This historical amnesia serves a purpose: it absolves the British state from responsibility, sidestepping the calls for reparations and justice as recently displayed by Keir Starmer’s U-turn following advice from judicial advisers.
The Caribbean descendants of enslaved Africans have inherited the vulnerability, poverty and instability that are the direct legacies of the empire’s brutality. For Britain to demand gratitude for an inheritance forged in blood is not only insensitive; it is an egregious distortion of history and a denial of justice. The British empire’s true legacy in the Caribbean is one of relentless human suffering, a dark chapter that cannot be rewritten as a tale of benevolence or progress.
The debt owed is one of accountability and reparation, not the presumption of gratitude.
Kenneth Mohammed is a freelance writer for the Guardian and Caribbean analyst, currently in Trinidad
