The fallout, says Laura Trevelyan of her family’s decision to apologise for its slave-owning past, and her personal move to hand over £100,000 ($174,000) in reparations, has been both “overwhelming”, in terms of its scale, and odd.
“Every time I wake up, I have another 150 email messages,” she says. Some are from the media worldwide, demanding interviews like this one. But others are from “families in similar positions, descendants of slave owners, some of them with far more significant holdings than us,” explains Trevelyan. “They want to talk about how to handle their own past, how to handle this very fraught, moral question of apology and reparations.”
