In 1790—six years after the state of Connecticut officially abolished slavery—James Mars was born there to a Black family that had been enslaved in the state. The law gave the former owner of the family the right to keep the newborn child enslaved until he was 25, even though his parents were freed.
That man planned to take Mars and his brother as youngsters to the South, to be sold into permanent slavery, but the family escaped with him. Later captured, he was forced to work in the man’s house and fields, and was sold at age 15 to another Connecticut slave owner—all sanctioned by the state’s emancipation law.
Mars’ story is emblematic of the entire process of emancipation from slavery in the U.S., from New England to the deep South, and across the world, says Kris Manjapra, a professor of history in the School of Arts and Sciences.
His new book, Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation, details a history that is often glossed over. It describes how millions of enslaved people were kept in what was effectively a continuing bondage, certainly not accorded their rights as full members of society, for more than a century.
Even as formerly enslaved people of African descent in the Americas were nominally freed, they did not receive compensation for their past labor or the abuse they had suffered. Instead, it was the enslavers who were paid, often princely sums, as governments chose to compensate them for the loss of their “property.”
“In 2018, I discovered that Britain had taken 180 years to pay off the national debt it generated, beginning in 1833, to pay reparations to enslavers during the British empire’s emancipation process,” Manjapra says. “I knew then that I had to write a book to understand the transnational significance of this discovery.”
Indeed, as he writes in the book, in 2018 the British Treasury congratulated itself for having spent £20 million in stock and bonds in the 1830s “to buy the freedom for all slaves in the Empire,” it tweeted. That debt was not paid off until 2015. In today’s dollars, that’s more than $200 billion paid to enslavers and their descendants.
And the enslaved? They didn’t see a penny of that money. They had to keep working for free for five years after being “freed” under the law, and ended up with nothing, essentially forced into poverty. “The British state never repudiated the slave-owner reparations, just as it has never apologized for the centuries of slavery that it sanctioned and promoted,” Manjapra writes. The same happened in many other countries as well.