Ta Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait

Some weeks back Ta Nehisi Coates wrote a piece on reparations for descendants of African and American slaves.
I felt it insightful; but not quite aware of how much of that money would have to come from
Great Britain.
The English grew magnificently rich from American slave colonies for more than 150 years.
In the 87 years between the end of the American Revolution and the Emancipation Proclamation,
we shouldn't kid ourselves. British concerns collected funds from American enterprises.
Doesn't the Queen own land in California, at least, even now?
Many Americans begged the British, face to face, right in Parliament, not to turn their colonies into
what they left behind in Europe, the landed gentry and everyone else out of work.
But the British knew they'd either have to grow as rich as France, Spain, and Portugal were getting,
or risk losing a war with those countries if they began to seek more land, more seaports, more
industries across the Channel.
The British also knew their merchants and banks and insurers were looking to make back the money
they'd spent fighting off the Indians and French the New World colonists had neither the money, nor
expertise to handle.
Mr. Chait, in an answer written for The New Yorker magazine to Mr. Coates' article, used a sweeping hand to go from slavery to emancipation, to civil rights legislation.
We descendants of slaves in this country endured so very many deadly scourges between those named
events, they are nearly too many to list. And every one of them cost us many many bundles of gold.