King Charles III begins an eight-day tour of the Caribbean on Tuesday, visiting Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas and Guyana, according to Dagens Nyheter. Buckingham Palace says the trip is meant to celebrate the communities, cultures and nature of the Commonwealth. The visit comes as demands for reparations for slavery grow louder, and the palace has made clear that no formal apology will be issued.
Why it matters
The tour puts the British monarchy face to face with a region whose governments are pressing for both a reckoning and material compensation. According to Dagens Nyheter, the palace's position is that an apology is a matter for the government, not the Crown. That distinction will be tested over the coming days, as Charles meets leaders and publics for whom the question is far from settled.
The contrast with earlier royal visits is stark. Dagens Nyheter recalls Queen Elizabeth II's 1966 tour, when she was greeted in Georgetown by 10,000 dancing children as part of a six-week Caribbean journey. The Colonial Office produced a colour film of the trip showing crowds bowing and curtseying, with bouquets piled in the queen's arms. Few expect a repeat of that reception now.
A history the palace cannot avoid
Dagens Nyheter notes that Britain led the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, transporting roughly three million Africans to its Caribbean colonies to work on sugar, tea and coffee plantations. Most died from violence, malnutrition and disease. The monarchy, the paper reports, was deeply involved: royals lent their ships to slave traders and kept enslaved people themselves.
"They put their royal seal on this business — and literally on people's bodies," historian Brooke Newman, author of this year's book "The Crown's Silence," told The Guardian, as cited by Dagens Nyheter.
Buckingham Palace has promised that Charles will not shy away from what it calls the "horrific cruelty" of slavery during the trip. But it rules out a formal apology.
When slavery was abolished in 1833, 700,000 enslaved people remained alive in the Caribbean, according to Dagens Nyheter. In the intervening period, income from the colonies helped make Britain the world's wealthiest country and London a cultural and financial capital. The paper notes that physician Hans Sloane, who married a wealthy heiress to a Jamaican plantation owner, used his collection of Caribbean artefacts to lay the foundation of the British Museum.
The Commonwealth — 56 independent states, most of them former British colonies — is what remains of the empire. Several Caribbean members have long demanded that Britain atone for slavery and compensate the descendants of those it enslaved.
Dagens Nyheter cites economist and Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis, who argued in 1939 that Britain had taken "200 years of free labour" from millions of men, women and children — a "black debt" that had to be acknowledged and repaid.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley made a related point in a 2021 interview: "The slaves got nothing — it was the slave owners who were compensated." Dagens Nyheter confirms that when slavery was abolished, Britain paid millions of pounds in cash to slave owners for lost income.
Mottley is a leading figure in the group of Caribbean leaders who launched a new reparations manifesto in June. During a 2023 visit to London, she said nations that owned slaves and exploited the region's natural resources owed Barbados the equivalent of thousands of billions of Swedish kronor.
Britain's answer: no apology, no payment
London has rejected the demands. In September, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Britain would not pay reparations, describing the transatlantic slave trade as abhorrent while insisting the country continues to look forward. The statement came after a Jamaican delegation filed a claim in a British court, according to Dagens Nyheter.
The paper reports that the current Labour government leans on a legal argument rather than a moral one: laws cannot be applied retroactively, and slavery was not illegal at the time it was practised. A common objection to reparations more broadly is that today's generations should not pay for the wrongs of earlier ones.
The debate in the House of Commons has grown sharper, and at times has been turned on its head. Robert Jenrick, an MP for the right-populist Reform UK party, has argued that former colonies owe Britain a debt of gratitude for the institutions and infrastructure the empire left behind. His party colleague Suella Fernandes went further this summer, saying those countries should pay reparations to Britain — not the other way round.
Charles must navigate that accumulated resentment and grief during his stay. Dagens Nyheter recalls that when Prince William and Kate made a similar trip four years ago, they were met by protesters chanting that royals belong in fairy tales and singing protest songs demanding a British apology. Jamaica's Prime Minister Andrew Holness told a visibly uncomfortable Prince William on camera in Kingston that there were unresolved problems, "and you know it." On the same occasion, Holness announced that Jamaica intended to become a republic.
The paper's framing of the coming week is blunt: Charles will be received with salutes, motorcades and flag-waving, but no one expects the festivities of 1966.
What to watch: whether Charles's speeches go beyond acknowledging the "horrific cruelty" of slavery toward language that Caribbean governments regard as a step toward atonement, and whether the reparations claim filed in a British court advances while he is in the region.
