The Holes in Policy Exchange’s Attack on the Church of England’s Slavery Reparations Plan

The right-wing think tank Policy Exchange has published a report attacking the Church of England Commissioners for planning to engage in reparative measures for its complicity in slavery, with an investment endowment fund of £100 million over the next nine years.

The plan was devised after historians and accountants found indisputable evidence of the Church’s complicity. But for Policy Exchange and History Reclaimed, the lobbying organisation behind this report, it seems, evidence of complicity in slave trading alone is not enough to justify such measures. Substantial profits from it should also be proven beyond doubt.

The Conservative Peer, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead CBE initiates the report’s chastisement of the Church Commissioners with a surprisingly vituperative introduction. Fulminating that the Church of England has “allowed itself to be grabbed by so many dubious activists and, worst, to inflict upon itself such moralist guilt”, he ascribes its motivation as wanting “to be on the cool side of history” and damns its “scandalous over-reach”.

As a non-religious historian, I am less interested in the report’s hyperbole or indeed in its wider-ranging political and theological arguments against the Commissioners’ plan. (Although I must admit to being perplexed by the repeated implication that the Church of England’s ‘sin’ of engaging in slavery is somehow mitigated by the fact that other individuals and institutions also engaged in it.)

I am more concerned by the allegation that the Commission proceeded without caring ‘about facts and evidence’ to produce recommendations that are ‘historically uninformed’. This is not true.

The Commissioners employed a group of forensic accountants and specialist historians to begin the painstaking process of archival research and scholarly literature review in 2019, with the aim of helping it understand their £10.4 billion fund’s ‘historic links to African chattel enslavement’.

Sewell associates these accountants and historians with ‘activists’ who “have distorted the facts around transatlantic slavery to build careers, hustle grants and seek false compensation”. Allegations of historical malpractice run like a poisonous seam through this report.

The professional researchers’ work was overseen by the retired bishop David Urquhart and Church Commissioner Alan Smith, an ex-banker with HSBC. Neither they nor the accountants involved are any kind of ‘activist’. Sewell’s “sense … that the Church and its leadership had no concern about facts or historical rigour” is entirely misplaced.

The privately funded, ‘anti-woke’ lobbying company History Reclaimed has been in the forefront of the opposition to the Commissioners’ plan and its own activism underpins this report. It contains nothing they have not already said about the Church.

Alongside Sewell’s introduction, it consists of three different but overlapping essays, the first by Charles Wide KC, who draws on a blog by History Reclaimed’s Lawrence Goldman and Robert Tombs, the second by History Reclaimed co-founder, Anglican priest and newly minted Conservative Peer, Nigel Biggar, and the third by History Reclaimed contributor and director of the ‘advocacy group’, Don’t Divide Us, Dr Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert.

There is an important difference between the way that the accountants and historians working for the Church Commissioners went about their work, and the way that both History Reclaimed and Policy Exchange go about theirs. It is one that I hope the Church Commissioners will bear in mind as they consider their response.

When the Church’s accountants and historians’ research project began, they knew neither what it would reveal nor how it might inform the Commissioners’ response. They had no predisposition either to maximise or minimise the Church’s complicity in slavery. Their purpose was simply to uncover the facts as far as the archival sources and other historians’ studies would allow.

Policy Exchange is a right-wing think tank that has taken the lead in waging the culture war over Britain’s colonial past. It maintains a rolling ‘call for evidence asking museum directors, curators, teachers and the wider public to share their experiences and concerns about the ways in which the representation of history is being revisited’. Although it claims that its purpose is impartial monitoring, it invariably casts the examination of colonial violence and racism as woke and anti-British. Its publications are explicitly intended to shape ‘the policy agenda.’

Picking up the cudgels on behalf of History Reclaimed, this report is driven by an antipathy to reparative social justice. Whatever merits that antipathy may have, it serves as quite a different motivation for historical research than the Church researchers’ more disinterested pursuit of the facts. To attack the policies that the Commissioners adopt having considered the historical evidence is one thing. To attack the evidence itself is quite another, and the problem with this report is that it tries to do both.

Despite impugning the reputation of the Church’s researchers, much of Policy Exchange’s castigation deflects from their work. Biggar’s essay is about a book by Michael Banner that he takes ‘as representative of the arguments for reparations’ in general. It was published in 2024, however, and had no bearing on the accountants and historians’ research between 2019 and 2023. Even if they had been able to read it, it is unlikely they would have relied on it, since their task was far more directed.

Banner himself writes that “There is a very full and sorry history” of the Church’s broader relationship with slavery, including its missionary wing’s ownership of plantations and direct purchase of enslaved people, and the surprising number of clergy awarded compensation for the enslaved people they had owned after emancipation, “but the Church of England seems to have begun its reckoning elsewhere, … with a Report on the more direct, or perhaps more readily quantifiable, matter of the origins of some of its current assets”.

Wide’s essay also embarks on a deflection, but at least to a more proximate issue: the ‘controversy concerning the memorial to Tobias Rustat in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge’. Rustat was one of the college’s most significant donors and an investor in slave trading.

Supported by the Bishop of Ely, the college wanted to move the memorial from the site of worship to a place nearby but were opposed by a group led by History Reclaimed’s Lawrence Goldman. When the case came before the church’s Consistory Court, it supported Goldman and rejected the college’s application.

Wide exults that in this case the “exaggerated, ahistorical assertions” of those wanting the memorial moved “had collided with the facts and lost — the important factor being that there was an impartial tribunal to decide between competing contentions”. His inference is that we should prejudge the Church Commissioners’ case based on the Jesus College case, dismissing the historical evidence gathered in both cases as ‘false’.

The Consistory court, in the form of Deputy Chancellor David Hodge QC, rejected Jesus College’s application to move Rustat’s memorial for a number of reasons, however, none of them related to the evidence supplied by researchers.

The historians commissioned by both parties in the dispute agreed that Rustat was “an investor, a lender, and an ‘Assistant’” in two companies that traded enslaved people, lasting from 1662 to his death in 1694, including at the time of his donation to the College in 1671.

They also agreed that, twenty years after making those donations, he sold his shares in the slave trading ventures to realise his assets. Hodge formally agreed with the entire substance of both expert historical reports. For this reason, the college historians’ report was removed from debate and discussion. It was not disputed history that informed the judge’s decision.

In an article in The Critic, Wide summarised the college’s case: “that this commemoration of a man who was involved in the slave trade ‘creates a serious obstacle to the chapel’s ability to provide a credible Christian ministry and witness to the college community and safe space for secular college functions and events’”.

But for Hodge and Wide, it seems not to have been Rustat’s involvement in slavery per se that really mattered. It was more a matter of how much money he had made out of his investments in it, and whether the money donated to the college could be directly identified as having been acquired through those particular investments. Hodge’s decision rested in large part one of the expert’s calculations that Rustat was making a loss from his slave trading concerns at the time of his donations.

There was another element in Hodge’s decision that has a bearing on the Policy Exchange case against the Church Commissioners. It was not the evidence supplied by the experts that got Hodge’s goat, but other petitioners’ misinterpretation of that evidence.

Hodge felt that exaggeration of Rustat’s financial reliance on slavery by some witnesses and commentators created an unjustifiably hostile ‘sentiment’ against the man. He objected that “it had been put about by campaigners that Rustat had amassed much of his wealth from slavery and that this was the source of the money he had given to the college … Therefore, the sentiments on which the college had heavily relied, ‘were founded upon [an] entirely false narrative’ which the college had done nothing to correct”.

His decision was that the memorial should stay where it was, in the hope that Rustat would be “viewed in the context of his own time and his other undoubted qualities of duty and loyalty to his King, and his considerable charity and philanthropy”.

Shocked and disappointed by the judgement, Jesus College could only reiterate that “widespread opposition to the presence of his memorial in the College Chapel is the result of this involvement in the slave trade and not any false narrative allegedly created by the College about the sources of Rustat’s wealth”.

The Jesus College case does serve as a precedent, but not in the way Wide suggests. There was nothing wrong with the historians’ work on it, but it seems to have emboldened History Reclaimed and Policy Exchange to try similar tactics against the Church Commissioners.

If they could persuade an Anglican Consistory Court that reparative measures are justified not by the immorality of investments in slave trading per se, but only by the certainty that they were substantially profit-making, and if they can establish that people adjacent have distorted and exaggerated the experts’ findings, then perhaps they can secure victory against the Church Commissioners too.

Amidst all the general arguments against reparations, the substance of the Policy Exchange challenge to the Commissioners is focused on the contribution that slave trading made to Queen Anne’s Bounty. This was the fund that fed directly into the endowment fund managed by the Commissioners today. The historical experts found that “Queen Anne’s Bounty … invested significant amounts of its funds in the South Sea Company, a company that traded in enslaved people”.

Drawing on the objections already published by the victor in the Jesus College case, Lawrence Goldman, Wide airs four objections: i) that Queen Anne’s Bounty obtained shares in the South Sea Company only because they were converted from short term government securities, meaning the fund’s managers had no deliberate intention of engaging in the slave trade; ii) that at the time it obtained these shares, the trade in enslaved captives was suspended because of war with Spain; iii) that Queen Anne’s Bounty came to hold more South Sea annuities than Company shares, the difference being that annuities attracted guaranteed government interest payments, while shares partook of the profits made by the trading wing of the Company; and iv) that the shares and annuities were obtained “on terms which”, in the short term, “turned out to be disastrous and resulted in serious loss”.

These objections all strike me as disingenuous. The South Sea Company was indeed established to help the government manage its debt, but it did so through a monopoly on the trafficking of enslaved Africans to Spanish-held colonies in the Americas.

The separation between shares and annuities was not a firewall shielding annuities holders from any implication in slavery. As the Commissioners explained, “the very structure enabling the annuities rested on the profits generated through this inhumane system”. The ‘trade’ in captives was disrupted at times by warfare but proceeded uninterrupted for most of the period in which Queen Anne’s Bounty held shares and annuities.

The author on the South Sea Company, Richard Dale, whom Wide and Goldman both cite as saying that Queen Anne’s Bounty managers may have deliberately avoided investing in slave trading by opting for annuities over shares, indicates that the choice was more likely the result of prudent asset management: “they chose to avoid the risks and rewards of the commercial business and invested, instead, in what were essentially government-backed debt instruments”. Dale affirms elsewhere that “because of the South Sea Company’s dominance as a financial institution, its annuities represented the obvious choice for investors with a low-risk preference”.

It is true that Dale objects to the idea that Queen Anne’s Bounty’s managers knowingly and willingly invested in slave-trading voyages, preferring to see themselves as investing in government securities.

But there is no evidence that they knowingly and willingly avoided the slavery business either. They can hardly have been ignorant of the Company’s well known slave trading activities. Had antipathy to slave trading been important to them they could have chosen to have nothing to do with either the trading branch of the Company’s shares or its associated annuities branch.

Finally, even if we accept, as Hodge and Wide seem to, that the calculus of complicity depends on profitability rather than the fact of “any financial involvement in this vile practice” (the Commissioners’ words), it is worth noting that the initial loss made upon take-up of shares was amply compensated thereafter.

From 1723 to 1777, Queen Anne’s Bounty’s funds that were not used to purchase land to augment clergy income or pay for its running costs were invested almost exclusively in South Sea annuities. By the time it ceased its slaving activities in 1739, the Company had trafficked 34,000 enslaved people and accumulated investments in annuities with a value of around £204,000, equivalent to about £443 million in today’s terms.

Although Queen Anne’s Bounty did not benefit from any capital appreciation on its annuities, about 30% of its income “was derived from interest and dividends from its South Sea Company investments”. At the same time, “roughly a third of benefactions to Queen Anne’s Bounty came from individuals thought likely to have had ties to African chattel enslavement”.

In the end, Goldman has to admit that “the Bounty managers seem to have acquiesced in this traffic”, resorting to the supposed mitigation that “the Bounty’s involvement was remarkably limited at a time when religious bodies of many kinds … gave slavery moral sanction”.

After trying out the same mitigation, the best that Wide can do is follow Goldman again, emphasising the Church’s accountants’ self-declared uncertainties. He suggests that “the words ‘considered’, ‘likelihood’, ‘potentially’, and (the slippery) ‘linked’ used by the Commissioners’ researchers should raise doubts in the mind of the reader”.

The fact that “the forensic accountancy is subject to explicit caveats about its assumptions’ (Goldman’s original version) merely affirms a careful and ethical approach to research. Historians weigh up probabilities based on fragmentary evidence.

As Hilary Mantel put it, history is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it — a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth”. That is why researchers driven by the quest for truth and acting in good faith qualify their assertions. Far from meaning their findings are wrong, it should give confidence they are more likely to be right.

Nowhere in their attack on the Commissioners’ plan have the contributors to the Policy Exchange report or the History Reclaimed activism underpinning it been able to demonstrate flawed historical research. They complain of the Commissioners’ “campaigning ethos”, but I see nothing other than that in their response.

This post was originally published on this site