And while the monarchy may now only play a peripheral or titular role in its former colonies - its central role in the trans Atlantic slave trade certainly does leave something owing.
When slavery was abolished in 1838 - compensation was given to the business interests who formerly held slaves - but nothing was given to the enslaved persons!
Bolland said that rather than ask the Prince for an apology, we need to ask him to pay up for some reparations:
Jules Vasquez
"He may be king some day if the monarchy continues but he should come here with an apology because blood may not be on his hands but there is the taint and should the British monarchy apologize for it's role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaving the ancestors of people throughout the Caribbean?"
O. Nigel Bolland - Historian and Author
"I think more important than that, they should pay up. The issue of reparations is enormously important, let me tell you one thing about Belize and how it compares to other western colonies. In that compensation money, slave registers were to be drawn up by the slave owners through the British Caribbean colonies in order they can ascertain this was worth so much, this one was more skilled, this one was older, this was a young one who would be in working shape for a few years, all of this kind of thing. In Belize because there weren't plantations like this, it was done in one register, the slave register of Belize in 1834 and I found that in the archives in Belize, it's now in Belmopan when I found it it was in the Bliss Institute under a pile of dust but this was a list of all the enslaved people in Belize, it gave family relationship where there was some, it gave the age, the gender and it gave the kind of skill, some of them axe men, hunts men, highly skilled workers, there were domestic workers, all the work was done by these people anyway. The interesting thing is this, when you compare the compensation not given, there was a great deal of difference from one slave to another within any specific colony but if you look at the average in Belize, the average compensation given per slave was over 50 pounds. If you compare that to Barbados, it was 20 pounds, in Jamaica it was 19 pounds. Now there are various reasons for this but one of the things this indicates to is that slave register is telling us something about how much that slave labor meant to people who monopolize the land in Belize in the middle of the 19th Century. An apology, that's fine, it's deserved, it would be a humane thing to do and I'd love to hear such a thing. I think Prince Charles said many years ago, you can say slavery was an atrocity, it was but give us some compensation for this, the slave owners got compensation."
