Lloyd’s of London’s debt
‘It has come to our attention that your company was built on the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors.’ So began an open letter by rapper T.I., published on 17 July 2020. As a ‘representative of the descendants of the enslaved Africans’, he had placed the Lloyd’s of London insurance marketplace on notice for its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, by insuring ships and their human ‘cargo’.
Nine months later, on 17 May 2021, protesters gathered outside the transnational’s headquarters in London. Tiny against the backdrop of the gargantuan building, they carried signs bearing statements such as: ‘Lloyd’s insures incineration of our Earth’, drawing attention to how Lloyd’s is estimated to account for around 40 per cent of energy market insurance.1
Insurance is a crucial pillar of the fossil-fuel industry’s life-support system and, in part as a result of this, Lloyd’s of London made $2.5 billion in profits in 2019. A number of syndicates in the Lloyd’s marketplace provide insurance and reinsurance that support, enable and cover some of the world’s most polluting projects, including coal mines, tar sands pipelines and new oil and gas exploration – all incompatible with keeping climate change under 1.5°C.
Governed by the Lloyd’s Act 1871, Lloyd’s of London’s colonial history and its current complicity in contributing to climate change are inextricably linked. The colonial economic system built to control movements of people and resources was not only economically and socially devastating for colonized peoples; it has also allowed the Global North to build its economies in ways that have been foundational for the climate crisis we are experiencing today.
As of 2015, the Global North was responsible for 92 per cent of excess global CO2 emissions.2 It has been calculated that in order for a country like the UK to do its fair share to limit global warming to 1.5°C, it would have to reach net-zero by 2030 and support at least the same level of emissions reductions in low-income countries, in addition to helping countries to withstand climate impacts and repair loss and damage.3
Hard to ignore
The links between seemingly disparate phenomena: capitalism, racialized exploitation, colonialism, ‘free trade’, and the climate crisis were drawn out in Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal, a collection published in early 2021 by Harpreet Kaur Paul (co-author of this article) and Dalia Gebrial, a researcher at the London School of Economics.4
The collection brings together a range of perspectives from people in the Global South and descendants of colonized people, laying bare ‘the legacies and impacts of slavery, colonialism, discrimination and neoliberal policies that contribute to a deepening of climate change impacts’.
As the book explains: ‘Colonial practices (such
