There has been an increase of scholarly interest in the subject of reparations for historical injustices over the past two decades, a response, perhaps, to what Wole Soyinka (Reference Soyinka1999) has characterised as a ‘fin de millenaire fever of atonement’. Work such as Thompson (Reference Thompson2002) and Torpey (Reference Torpey2006) have offered valuable critical reflections on the subject. Ana Lucia Araujo's book is a most welcome addition to this literature, focusing as it does on the historical record regarding what David Scott (Reference Scott, Nichols and Singh2014) has called ‘the most intractable of reparations cases’.

The book's original contribution is constituted in its comprehensive detailing of demands for reparations for slavery in the Atlantic world made since the 18th century, with a particular focus on the USA, Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, as well as episodic forays across other Latin American countries embroiled in the slavery economy and the iniquities that form its legacies. In brisk, highly accessible prose, Araujo presents the reader with the story of this fragmented, discontinuous, transnational tradition of moral argument. The book's central claim is a simple one: that such demands have invariably been shaped by their historical and social contexts.

The central role of black women within this tradition is repeatedly marked: Belinda (c. 1713–179?) and Andrea Quesada y Acevedo (dates unknown) who demanded reparations from the descendants of their former masters in Massachusetts (by petitioning the legislature) and Cuba (by filing a lawsuit) respectively; Callie House (1861–1928) who led the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an organisation numbering 300,000 that was ultimately put down by the federal government; the communist Audley Eloise ‘Queen Mother’ Moore (1898–1997) who formed the National Emancipation Proclamation Observance Committee, and later the Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves, in order to galvanise demands for redress around the centenary of emancipation at the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Any of these figures would surely reward further historical scholarship in their own right.

The scope for what Araujo ‘counts’ as possible instances of redress being demanded is broad, ranging from world historical events such as the Haitian and Cuban revolutions to court cases to secure pensions or back-pay by ex-slaves during their lifetimes, petitions to government bodies and rhetorical appeals by well-known historical figures such as Sojourner Truth, Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson. Latterly, the book considers proposals since the 1990s by national governments and regional organisations such as the Caribbean Community's Reparations Commission and the Organization of African Unity towards programmes of redress that combine financial, material, symbolic and memorial forms of compensation. Araujo's work offers a rich field of examples for anyone concerned with debating the complexities and ambiguities of reparations claims, past and present. The story she tells might have been enriched by a more sustained focus on relations between those institutions and individuals that have demanded reparations and political parties, elite organisations (including African American institutions), trade unions and other social movements. The political character of reparations demands is frequently very difficult to specify, and a more detailed study of the political life of such demands – their alliances and enmities – would be valuable.

The extreme resistance encountered by every attempt over the past two centuries to gain meaningful forms of redress for slavery – whether financial, material or symbolic – cannot be understood in isolation. Rather, as Araujo's study shows, it needs to be analysed in a structural relation to the other form of slavery reparations, indemnification made to former slaveholders for the loss of ‘property’. Her second chapter details the extraordinary measures taken by nation-states to preserve the value of captive labour to its former owners via direct financial compensation. The view that such compensation was appropriate was, Araujo argues, ‘hegemonic’ within debates on slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas the notion that formerly enslaved people required redress was at best a marginal concern. This paradox is drawn most sharply in relation to the case of Haiti. ‘Haiti eventually had to pay huge financial compensation to France in order to obtain international recognition’, she writes. ‘Yet, despite a growing antislavery movement in Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century, there were no public debates or collective demands to provide reparations to the newly freed populations’ (57).

This initial neglect of a straightforward moral principle – that forms of support should be made available to freed people in recognition of the injustice of slavery and its continued effects in their lives – forms part of the legacy of slavery in itself, and has presented subsequent generations with the far more complex task of insisting upon the passage of obligations and entitlements through what Janna Thompson (Reference Thompson2002) calls ‘intergenerational communities’.

Though Araujo makes no definitive claim regarding the structural features of the anti-blackness that has made it impossible for reparations claims concerning slavery in the Atlantic world to gain traction, her study demonstrates the exceptional disregard with which such claims have consistently been met, by contrast not only with demands made by other historically injured groups, but even with the very slaveholders themselves, whose ‘investment’ was never in question. This is a history of contempt for black life under successive regimes of racial capitalism.