Thinking about repair

s reviews of Lucky Valley: Its particularly valuable for an historian to be able to reflect on the comments of two sociologists and a political scientist.We share a concern with questions of race/racisms, colonialism and capitalism across past and present from our different disciplinary perspectives.Both Bhambra and Bufkin raise vital questions about repair and reparation.Bhambra has argued elsewhere for a 'reparatory sociology' (Bhambra et al. 2024).Bufkin asks how do we move beyond new narratives?Redress and repair, the particular repair owed for the moral and political legacies of New World Slavery, has emerged as a matter of public concern in the UK, especially since the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the eruption of Black Lives Matter, and the sinking of the slave trader Edward Colston's statue in the Bristol docks: a moment which brought past histories and present concerns together in a dramatic way.The wrongs have been done and cannot be put right: men and women died in the Atlantic, lives were blighted on the plantations, the descendants of the enslaved live with the legacies of colonialism and empire in the Caribbean, with racialized and gendered inequalities in the UK.But there can be an effort to repair, to acknowledge harm and challenge the inequities of the present.Lucky Valley aims to contribute to this work by 'undoing', as Smith puts it, by unpicking Edward Long's legitimations of slavery and his insistence on the 'natural' and 'essential' qualities of racial difference, reading both with and against the grain of his racialized logic, exposing the gaps, contradictions, silences and erasures that characterize his writing and his thought.Long used the power of his history writing to sustain and vindicate an enslaving colonial world.His work was to make race.