Birmingham academic Dr Robert Beckford is back on Channel 4 next week with his latest hard-hitting documentary.  In The Empire Pays Back, Dr Beckford looks at how much Britain profited from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and consults a team of experts to put a monetary figure on the amount owing to the descendants of slaves. Dr Beckford argues that Britain should repay its debt to the descendants of slavery. 

To find out how much slavery was worth to the British Empire, Robert assembles a team of an actuary, compensation lawyer and an economic historian specialising in the slave trade.  Drawing on other modern-day compensation cases, the team will be taking into account the unpaid wages, pain and suffering of the slaves; the unjust enrichment of British industry; and the loss of earnings to future generations due to the legacy of racism which followed slavery.

Dr Beckford would like to see the government offer an official apology when the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery is commemorated in 2007.  He argues that any reparations should be to benefit Africa, the Caribbean and the Afro-Caribbean community in the UK through funding in education and local infrastructure, rather than to individual descendants. 

The German government and companies who benefited from Nazi slave labour recently paid a settlement to survivors. In America, the bank JP Morgan Chase having uncovered a link to slavery in its own archives, took the unprecedented step of funding a $5million scholarship for African-American students.

Dr Beckford is a lecturer in African Diasporan Religions & Cultures at the University of Birmingham.  He presented Channel 4's God is Black, Who Wrote the Bible? and The Gospel Truth.