British slave owners

British slave owners

“The #FridayFact was not only wrongly judged, in numerous respects it was just wrong.” < link >

THE LONG ROAD TO ABOLITION
■ In 1807, parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, effective throughout the British empire.
■ It wasn’t until 1838 that slavery was abolished in British colonies through the Slavery Abolition Act, giving all slaves in the British empire their freedom
■ It is estimated about 12.5 million people were transported as slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean between the 16th century and 1807.
■ When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, there were 46,000 slave owners in Britain, according to the Slave Compensation Commission, the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners
■ British slave owners received a total of £20m (£16bn in today’s money) in compensation when slavery was abolished. Among those who received payouts were the ancestors of novelists George Orwell and Graham Greene.

References

• Capitalism and Slavery By Eric Williams (1944) (reissue: Penguin Books Limited, Feb 24, 2022) < GoogleBooks >
• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 1994. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469619491_williams. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.
• TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE DATABASE < link >
• Atlantic slave trade at Wikipedia
• The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed (2015) A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell. < link >. “… The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission. …”
• Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery < link > “ Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present.”
• Category:British slave owners at Wikipedia
• Slavery in Australia In the nineteenth century there were also many beneficiaries of slavery practised overseas who came to the Australian colonies or who financed settlement of the colonies. Historians have shown that the wealth made from slavery helped finance the colonisation of Australia,[89] in particular the colonisation of South Australia[90] and Victoria.[91] Among others, Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales; James Stirling, founding Governor of Western Australia; Edward Eyre Williams, Supreme Court of Victoria judge; and Reverend Robert Allwood, vicar of Sydney's St James' Church and later University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor (1869-1883), were all given wealth and opportunities thanks to money generated by slavery in the British West Indies.[92]
• Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/