When they were widowed, many women inherited enslaved people and relied solely on them as assets for their income. Some of the most urgent pleas for compensation came from widows, such as Hannah Barnes in Devon: I am much in want of money. Perhaps most surprisingly, the records detail a number of children born to plantation owners and enslaved women who inherited their father's slaves.
A striking example is politician John Stewart, the son of a slave-owner and one of the first ethnic minority MPs.
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He inherited his father's sugar plantations in the West Indies and received considerable compensation for the enslaved people there. He spoke in parliament on several occasions in defence of slavery. Find out how many slave-owners lived in your local area in , and how the profits of the slave-trade impacted the region.
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Enslavement and Industrialisation
Dozens of these railway lines are still in use today, including the Grand Junction, now part of the West Coast Main Line. The slave trade relied on systems of credit and insurance, leading to the development of London's financial industries. High street banks RBS, Barclays and Lloyds were formed when smaller local banks, many in port-towns and cities where they financed slavery, were consolidated. Brits developed a taste for a new variety of foods from across the Empire, including tea, coffee and chocolate. The market for sugar grown on slave plantations boomed. Sugar consumption doubled between and and quickly became a staple of the British diet.
We see voyagers and traders, such as John Hawkins in the s, becoming some of the first British men to make massive fortunes from this trade in kidnapped Africans. By the late 17th century, we see the British coming to dominate the slave trade, having overtaken the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. Half of all the Africans transported into slavery during the 18th century were carried in the holds of British ships.
From the 15th to the 19th centuries, more than 11 million shackled black captives were forcibly transported to the Americas, and unknown multitudes were lost at sea. Captives were often thrown overboard when they were too sick, or too strong-willed, or too numerous to feed. Those who survived the journey were dumped on the shores and sold to the highest bidder, then sold on again and again like financial assets.
Mothers were separated from children, and husbands from wives, as persons were turned into property. Slaves were raped and lynched; their bodies were branded, flayed and mutilated. Many slave owners, in their diaries, manuals, newspaper writings and correspondence, readily admitted the punishments and violations they exacted on black people on the cane fields and in their homes.
Take, for example, the unapologetic recollections of violence and predation that comprise the diary of Thomas Thistlewood , a British slave owner in Jamaica in the mids. Thistlewood recorded 3, acts of sexual intercourse with enslaved women in his 37 years in Jamaica. In his 23 July entry, he described punishing a slave in the following manner: In Barbados, the British established one of the first modern slave societies.
Slavery had certainly been practised in many parts of the world since ancient times. Beginning in , the enslaved were put to work in the intense cultivation of sugar cane, working in chain gangs in shifts that covered a hour production cycle. In one of the greatest experiments in human terror the world has ever known, this system of plantation slavery expanded over the following centuries across the Caribbean, South America and the southern United States.
The trade in slaves, and the goods they were forced to produce — sugar, tobacco and eventually cotton — created the first lords of modern capitalism. Britain could not have become the most powerful economic force on earth by the turn of the 19th century without commanding the largest slave plantation economies on earth, with more than , people enslaved. And the legacy of such large-scale, prolonged slavery touches everything that is familiar in Britain today, including buildings named after slave owners such as Colston Hall in Bristol; streets named after slave owners such as Buchanan and Dunlop Streets in Glasgow; and whole parts of cities built for slave owners, such as the West India Docks in London.
The cultural legacy of slavery also infuses British tastes, from sweetened tea, to silver service, to cotton clothwork, to the endemic race and class inequalities that characterise everyday life. This narrative often begins in the pews of Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, where the cherubic William Wilberforce worshipped. Today, he can be seen on the stained glass above the altar of that church, giving the news of the abolition of the slave trade to a black woman who kneels before him. Around Wilberforce coalesced a group of Church of England social reformers, known as the Clapham Saints, who led the campaign against the slave trade, and then pressed onward to fight for the abolition of plantation slavery in Over the past few decades, scholars have also stressed the ways in which the antislavery movement depended on expanding democratic participation in civic debate, with British women and the working classes playing a crucial role in the abolitionist ranks.
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British parliamentarians were inundated with thousands of petitions from ordinary people pressing them to pass laws that eventually brought slavery to an end. To encourage their fellow citizens to look into the face of the enslaved and see fellow human beings, British abolitionists distributed autobiographies of people who had experienced slavery, such as works by Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince.
If only the British public could hear the voices of black people through their writing, then they could empathise with their oppression. It would then become possible to look into the eyes of the enslaved and see a person staring back.
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But narratives of abolition cannot be reduced to a story of angelic white benefactors gifting freedom to their black wards. There are 32 images of William Wilberforce in the National Portrait Gallery, but just four images of black abolitionists and antislavery activists from the same period. In Britain, the popular narrative too often ignores the fact that blacks on the plantations were convinced of their own personhood long before anyone else.
Rebellions were endemic to slavery, and by the s and 20s, many slave societies in the British Caribbean were experiencing insurgencies. Shortly after Christmas , an audacious rebellion broke out in Jamaica. Some 60, enslaved people went on strike. They burned the sugar cane in the fields and used their tools to smash up sugar mills.
The rebels also showed remarkable discipline, imprisoning slave owners on their estates without physically harming them. The British Jamaican government responded by violently stamping out the rebellion, killing more than black people in combat, and later with firing squads and on the gallows. The uprising sent shockwaves through the British parliament and accelerated the push for the abolition of slavery.
Not only did blacks mobilise for their own liberation, but by the s slavery was also beginning to clash with an economic principle that was becoming an article of faith for British capitalists: Eric Williams, a historian of slavery who also became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad in , has argued that slavery in the British empire was only abolished after it had ceased to be economically useful. Many British merchants involved in selling Cuban, Brazilian and East Indian sugar in Britain wanted to see an end to all duties and protections that safeguarded the West Indian sugar monopoly.
British capitalists also saw fresh possibilities for profit across the globe, from South America to Australia, as new transportation and military technologies — steamships, gunboats and railways — made it possible for European settlers to penetrate new frontiers. The economic system of British slavery was moribund by , but it still needed to be officially slain.
B y , debates were raging in the British parliament, and in the public sphere, about ending slavery. The powerful West India interest — a group of around 80 MPs who had ties to Caribbean slavery — opposed abolition. Beyond parliament, many thousands of Britons across the country — slave owners, West India merchants, sugar refiners, trade brokers, ship owners, bankers, military men, members of the gentry and clergymen — actively championed the principle of compensation by attending public rallies organised by various West India Committees.
When slaves were emancipated in northern US states in the years before , no compensation to their owners was paid. Only in the s did the British government take the unprecedented step of paying compensation to Spain, Portugal and some West African states to solicit their cooperation in the suppression of the slave trade. The attempt failed, however, as Spain and Portugal pocketed British money and continued their slave trading until the later 19th century. British slave owners nonetheless demanded, in the s, that this international precedent be applied to them.
The argument for slave-owner compensation relied on perverse logic. Under English law, it was difficult to claim compensation for the loss of chattel property, since rights to movable things — such as household possessions, or tools, or livestock — were considered inherently unstable, expendable and ambiguous.
So, the West India interest in parliament, led by the likes of Patrick Maxwell Stewart, a rich London merchant who owned slaves in Tobago, made fanciful arguments to align the enslaved more with land or buildings, or even with body parts, than with human beings. According to one line of argument, because the government paid money to landowners when it took over fields for public works such as docks, roads, bridges and railways, so too it had to pay slave owners for taking over their slaves.
Many mainstream abolitionists felt uncomfortable about the compensation of slave owners, but justified it as a pragmatic, if imperfect, way to achieve a worthy goal. Some activists even demanded that compensation be paid to the enslaved. Many antislavery members of parliament, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton and William Clay, spoke out vociferously against slave-owner compensation.
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The decision to compensate slave owners was not just an inevitable expression of the widespread beliefs of those times. Political decisions reflect who is in the room when the decisions are being made. The Reform Act of drastically transformed the British electoral system and extended the franchise, to the detriment of the West India interest.
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But even in the reformed House of Commons, scores of MPs still had close financial or family ties to slave ownership. On the other hand, it bears remembering that the first black Britons were not elected to the House of Commons until near the end of the following century, more than years later.
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Other slave-owning states, including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Brazil, would follow the British example of compensated emancipation in the coming decades. But the compensation that Britain paid to its slave owners was by far the most generous. Britain stood out among European states in its willingness to appease slave owners, and to burden future generations of its citizens with the responsibility of paying for it.
The owners of slaves in British society were not just the super-rich. Recent research by historians at University College London has shown the striking diversity of the people who received compensation, from widows in York to clergymen in the Midlands, attorneys in Durham to glass manufacturers in Bristol. Still, most of the money ended up in the pockets of the richest citizens, who owned the greatest number of slaves.
Among the descendants of the recipients of slave-owner compensation is the former prime minister David Cameron.
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