Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition

[Coyotl]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-colonial-shame-slaveowners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition-8508358.html

Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition

The true scale of Britain's involvement in the slave trade has been laid bare in documents revealing how the country's wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished. .... there are now wealthy families all around the UK still indirectly enjoying the proceeds of slavery where it has been passed on to them. Dr Draper said: "There was a feeding frenzy around the compensation." A John Austin, for instance, owned 415 slaves, and got compensation of £20,511, a sum worth nearly £17m today. And there were many who received far more.

Academics from UCL, led by Dr Draper, spent three years drawing together 46,000 records of compensation given to British slave-owners into an internet database to be launched for public use on Wednesday. ....
.....

The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.

A total of £10m went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain. The biggest single payout went to James Blair (no relation to Orwell), an MP who had homes in Marylebone, central London, and Scotland. He was awarded £83,530, the equivalent of £65m today, for 1,598 slaves he owned on the plantation he had inherited in British Guyana.

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[malaise]

1. Then British Guiana

Yes our ancestors owners were given the compensation while the likes of Carlyle wanted to remove pumpkins because they ate them rather than work for the savages who owned them.

Funny how they called us the savages - they've been projecting for centuries

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Shocking -- and yet, Britain banned slavery in its colonies in 1833

In the long term, that's the important fact.

[MichaelMcGuire]

3. Beat me to it, was about to post.

The rich peddling in the misery of others who would have thought? You know that lot even now claim benefits and handouts with even millions in their banks.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. This doesn't seem all that shameful, somehow

in the context of the times? Compensating slave-owners for the loss of their property was probably the only way abolition would have had enough support to succeed. The important thing is that Britain abolished slavery. And the United States did the same thing when slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia; slave owners were compensated an average of $300 for each slave...around $7000 in current dollars.