Do Commonwealth demands for £18 trillion of slavery reparations stack up?

The report does not deduct food and accommodation from the figure, as some previous estimates have. It does however stick to just a twelve-hour working day – the average for manual labourers of the time – rather than assuming slaves worked 24 hours a day as some other sources do. For the 1.2 million slaves who died in transit, the academics simply applied a “lost-earnings” calculation across the whole estimated lifespan if they had lived. The rest of the figures came from loss of liberty (£8.9 trillion), personal injury (£4.8 trillion), mental pain and anguish (£18.7 trillion) and gender-based violence (£9.2 trillion). What are the problems with the analysis? The main issue, cited often in the report, is a lack of “direct historical estimates” of compensation throughout the period. This means that many of the calculations are based on current payments adjusted for slavery victims with broad assumptions. For example, the “personal injury” payment is based on the fact that personal injury victims of the 9/11 attacks received one tenth of the amount paid to those who died. The researchers then assume that all slaves faced personal injury, and add a tenth to the “loss of earnings” bill. Similarly, the...