All institutions come with the baggage of history, but good can still be done
There are no easy answers – and none that will satisfy everybody – to settling historic ‘bills’ for involvement in the slave trade.
Under pressure for a number of years, Lloyds of London announced yesterday a £50m investment in diversity and inclusion initiatives that it hopes will open the door of the insurance market to future talent from more diverse backgrounds.
It also published a report which said what we all knew: Lloyds, as the insurance market at the heart of maritime shipping, was of course a central part of a miserable part in Britain’s, and indeed the wider world’s, history.
The report is the culmination of 18 months of research that sought to determine the depths, rather than the very thingness, of the connection. Indeed, Lloyds formally apologised for its role in the slave trade in 2020.
Some of the choice unsavoury findings that came out of the research was evidence that Lloyd’s members had facilitated relationships between slave ship captains, shipowners, and insurance underwriters. They had also taken it upon themselves to actively protest against the abolition of the slave trade across the British empire in 1807.
The move to review their role in the slave trade follows similar moves by other prominent institutions, including The Church of England and The Guardian. The insurance market was immediately criticised for ‘reparations washing’ by campaigners, thus proving the point somewhat that one is never going to keep everybody happy.
But in opening up the books to independent historical researchers, apologising and putting a significant amount of cash into forward-facing, rather than backward-looking, programmes, it has shown a welcome way forward.
Frankly, once one starts to delve, it is almost impossible to find a single historic institution that has not at some point dallied in the distinctly unpalatable.
Where does one stop?
There is not, so far as we’re aware, a campaign for us to stop buying Volkswagens. Nor are people queuing up to berate any number of high-end fast fashion retailers for their previous treatment of foreign workers.
Where pressure is useful is to encourage, just as Lloyds has now done, changes that can impact the workplace and world of today and tomorrow. Credit then to Lloyds for not burying their history; credit too for not giving in to the most extreme, and most headline-grabbing, demands.