Respected historian and researcher Louise Mathurin-Serieux has reignited the reparations debate with a powerful reminder that Britain compensated slave owners after emancipation while those who endured slavery walked away with nothing—a historical injustice she says Saint Lucia cannot afford to forget.
Speaking at the Cultural Development Foundation’s 2026 Emancipation Day Lecture, Mathurin-Serieux challenged Saint Lucians to reclaim control of their economic future by confronting the colonial systems that continue to shape the island’s development. Her presentation, Building a Future from Freedom: Economic and National Development in Post-Emancipation Saint Lucia, formed part of this year’s Emancipation observances under the theme Understanding Our Past to Create a Pathway to the Future.
Addressing an audience at the GIS Studios, the author of On the Shoulders of Peasants: The History of Saint Lucia’s Economy from Emancipation through the 20th Century argued that reparations are not a new or radical concept. Instead, she pointed to the Emancipation Act of 1834 as evidence that Britain had already accepted the principle of compensation—only the payments went to enslavers rather than the people who had suffered under slavery.
She explained that British slave owners received compensation from a £20 million fund, with Saint Lucian plantation owners receiving thousands of pounds for more than 13,000 enslaved people. According to Mathurin-Serieux, the debt incurred to finance those payments was so significant that British taxpayers continued repaying it until 2015, while the formerly enslaved received nothing beyond their freedom.
Against that backdrop, she insisted that calls for reparatory justice should no longer be dismissed as unrealistic or extreme. During a question-and-answer session, she maintained that meaningful justice requires former colonial powers to address the structural inequalities created through slavery and colonialism.
Mathurin-Serieux also warned that many of the systems established after emancipation—including restrictive land policies, export duties and vagrancy laws—were deliberately designed to keep formerly enslaved people economically dependent. She cautioned against accepting inherited systems simply because they have existed for generations, describing that mindset as dangerous for a former colony seeking genuine development.
Calling for greater economic self-determination, she encouraged Saint Lucians to pursue what some may consider “radical” action if it means securing ownership of the resources essential to the nation’s future. She argued that there is nothing radical about wanting a country that controls its own economic destiny.
Drawing on Saint Lucia’s history, Mathurin-Serieux highlighted how emancipated people built thriving farming communities through cooperative traditions such as koudmen and sou-sou, expanding into cocoa, coconut, lime and banana production despite overwhelming obstacles. However, she cautioned that dependence on foreign markets repeatedly left local industries vulnerable to decisions made overseas, with colonial authorities often shifting blame onto local farmers rather than acknowledging external causes of economic decline.
She urged researchers and citizens alike to challenge colonial narratives that have long distorted Saint Lucia’s history, arguing that the country’s story must be written from its own perspective rather than through the lens of former colonial powers.
Closing her lecture, Mathurin-Serieux stressed that sustainable national development must benefit all citizens, pointing to the historical example of sharecroppers who pooled their resources to purchase land and establish schools for future generations.
