"The Value of Reparations, or the Values of Reparation"

The first of our "Urgency of the Past" Lecture series

Join us for a talk given by Stanford's Dr. Priya Satia, the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History.

Specializing in modern British and British empire history, Dr. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, ideas and practices of development, and the anti-colonial responses they inspired in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.

Abstract: Anticolonial thinkers such as Gandhi and Fanon saw repair at the level of the self, for both colonizer and colonized, as necessary to decolonization. This lecture reflects on the British backlash against reparations in terms of the failure of this collective shift in consciousness. It explores how attachment to colonial-era values has fueled both neocolonialism and persistent objections to reparations for colonialism and slavery on practical grounds - such as the difficulty of precisely calculating the colonial drain of wealth. Such objections--and the past itself--turn out to be red herrings in discussion of reparation in our time of climate crisis.