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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.