Why did Britain compensate the descendants of slave owners until 2015? After all, the slaves living in the British Empire were almost completely emancipated by the 1830s; the trade itself was outlawed more than two decades before that, in 1807. The question is becoming increasingly popular among the nation’s critics, both inside and outside the media and Parliament, who insist that this is somehow shameful, supposing further that Britain is still somewhat sympathetic to or even venerates its colonial age. This is, of course, pure folly.
Representatives of the British government in 1835 convened with two of Europe’s wealthiest men—Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore—to discuss the opportunity to receive a loan of £15 million, eventually rising to £20 million. The loan remains one of the largest ever granted in history and is the equivalent of around £2 billion today ($2.5 billion). The purpose was to enable the British government to purchase the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire, as had been prescribed by the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, rather than use centralized force to demand their arbitrary release.
Although imperfect, the British government considered it the best course of action. It was high time, too. Britain and slavery had long been incommensurate. The nation prohibited the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic a generation earlier, in 1807, as aforementioned. The West African Squadron, tasked from 1808 onwards with patrolling the Atlantic and African coasts to obstruct any further transportation, was widely celebrated for its achievements, and the rapid movement towards societal improvement was in full swing.
The 1833 Act, which emancipated more than 800,000 slaves across the British Empire, was not passed in isolation. On the contrary, Britain’s government and society were undergoing a vast transformation. The Great Reform Act was passed one year before, uprooting the parliamentary franchise that had existed since 1689. The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed four years earlier, and the Factory Act improved conditions for industrial workers, limiting the number of hours children and young adults could work after the ramifications of rapid industrialization were becoming evident. As a result of these changes, writes the historian Izhak Gross, “People were more inclined than ever to get rid of a system [slavery] which they thought not only cruel, inefficient, and objectionable from a religious or moral point of view, but also unnecessary for the national interest.”
However, it was far beyond the authority of Parliament or the Crown to confiscate private property, which the slaves, alas, were. Despite what is often attributed to places like Britain and America before the 1960s, the British had a robust sense of liberty and private property long before the 19th century. It would have been unthinkable for the government to make such arbitrary demands on its own subjects. The result would have been to remove the slave owners’ source of income as well as the slaves’ only source of sustenance and survival, for that was a major concern for the British.
The government recognized the inevitable social unrest that would be caused by the former slaves if they were merely emancipated without any social programs or support to ensure they could indeed embrace freedom. Even William Wilberforce, the effective leader of the abolition movement, who had made manumission his ultimate political goal since entering Parliament in 1780, saw this. As he argued, “It would be wrong to emancipate [the slaves]. To grant freedom to them immediately would be to insure not only their masters’ ruin, but their own. They must [first] be trained and educated for freedom.”
The result was to transition slaves into so-called ‘apprenticeships.’ Yet these were a failure, merely putting lipstick on a pig, for they were slavery in all but name and were quickly abolished in 1838. The move did, however, buy enough time for the British government to receive and start distributing the loan.
What of the slave owners themselves? The British government, having lost the 13 colonies within living memory as a result of peremptory governance, wanted at all costs to avoid another revolt in the Caribbean and the rest of the Empire. What more could it expect and deserve if otherwise? The loan, therefore, encouraged plantation owners to give up their private property without mass social upheaval and removed any risk of ubiquitous resentment from both sides. This was without question a far better solution to the problem of emancipation than, say, what occurred in the United States three decades later, when the country launched into one of history’s bloodiest civil wars, costing the lives of some 600,000 men, with bitterness and acrimony enduring ever since.
The British government avoided this outcome by compensating slave owners, even at the expense of its own taxpayers, for generations. Britons not only covered the cost of emancipating slaves through taxation, further indebting themselves at a time in which poverty was rampant, but also effectively subsidized the deployment of vast resources over the next several decades to enforce abolition—capturing and releasing around 200,000 African men, women, and children, in many cases liberating them from fellow Africans as well as slave-trading European ships. The effort required thousands of sailors and 30 navy vessels, which amounted to around half of the force’s annual expenditure. Over 5,000 men died in so doing.
Critics forget this or, worse still, ignore it. It’s very easy to sit almost two centuries later, after all the battles have been fought and won, and cast a denigrating eye upon the memory of those who made our present blessings possible, posthumously telling them how they would have done things better had they lived at the time.
Yet the history of societal progression is stained with toil and blood. There are very few examples of drastic societal transformations within one or two generations without chaos ensuing. Fortunately, Britain’s 19th-century manumission is one of them. The loan taken out by the British to compensate slave owners ought to be remembered as an unprecedented triumph of diplomacy, property rights, and commitment to atoning for past mistakes. And the fact that the British government indebted itself so heavily that it took nearly two centuries to pay off the loan can only be remembered as an intergenerational commitment to support freedom across the world.
The Small-Mindedness of Armchair History
Slave Trade (1814), print based on oil painting by John Raphael Smith (1751–1812), located in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Image is licensed under licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0.
Why did Britain compensate the descendants of slave owners until 2015? After all, the slaves living in the British Empire were almost completely emancipated by the 1830s; the trade itself was outlawed more than two decades before that, in 1807. The question is becoming increasingly popular among the nation’s critics, both inside and outside the media and Parliament, who insist that this is somehow shameful, supposing further that Britain is still somewhat sympathetic to or even venerates its colonial age. This is, of course, pure folly.
Representatives of the British government in 1835 convened with two of Europe’s wealthiest men—Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore—to discuss the opportunity to receive a loan of £15 million, eventually rising to £20 million. The loan remains one of the largest ever granted in history and is the equivalent of around £2 billion today ($2.5 billion). The purpose was to enable the British government to purchase the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire, as had been prescribed by the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, rather than use centralized force to demand their arbitrary release.
Although imperfect, the British government considered it the best course of action. It was high time, too. Britain and slavery had long been incommensurate. The nation prohibited the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic a generation earlier, in 1807, as aforementioned. The West African Squadron, tasked from 1808 onwards with patrolling the Atlantic and African coasts to obstruct any further transportation, was widely celebrated for its achievements, and the rapid movement towards societal improvement was in full swing.
The 1833 Act, which emancipated more than 800,000 slaves across the British Empire, was not passed in isolation. On the contrary, Britain’s government and society were undergoing a vast transformation. The Great Reform Act was passed one year before, uprooting the parliamentary franchise that had existed since 1689. The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed four years earlier, and the Factory Act improved conditions for industrial workers, limiting the number of hours children and young adults could work after the ramifications of rapid industrialization were becoming evident. As a result of these changes, writes the historian Izhak Gross, “People were more inclined than ever to get rid of a system [slavery] which they thought not only cruel, inefficient, and objectionable from a religious or moral point of view, but also unnecessary for the national interest.”
However, it was far beyond the authority of Parliament or the Crown to confiscate private property, which the slaves, alas, were. Despite what is often attributed to places like Britain and America before the 1960s, the British had a robust sense of liberty and private property long before the 19th century. It would have been unthinkable for the government to make such arbitrary demands on its own subjects. The result would have been to remove the slave owners’ source of income as well as the slaves’ only source of sustenance and survival, for that was a major concern for the British.
The government recognized the inevitable social unrest that would be caused by the former slaves if they were merely emancipated without any social programs or support to ensure they could indeed embrace freedom. Even William Wilberforce, the effective leader of the abolition movement, who had made manumission his ultimate political goal since entering Parliament in 1780, saw this. As he argued, “It would be wrong to emancipate [the slaves]. To grant freedom to them immediately would be to insure not only their masters’ ruin, but their own. They must [first] be trained and educated for freedom.”
The result was to transition slaves into so-called ‘apprenticeships.’ Yet these were a failure, merely putting lipstick on a pig, for they were slavery in all but name and were quickly abolished in 1838. The move did, however, buy enough time for the British government to receive and start distributing the loan.
What of the slave owners themselves? The British government, having lost the 13 colonies within living memory as a result of peremptory governance, wanted at all costs to avoid another revolt in the Caribbean and the rest of the Empire. What more could it expect and deserve if otherwise? The loan, therefore, encouraged plantation owners to give up their private property without mass social upheaval and removed any risk of ubiquitous resentment from both sides. This was without question a far better solution to the problem of emancipation than, say, what occurred in the United States three decades later, when the country launched into one of history’s bloodiest civil wars, costing the lives of some 600,000 men, with bitterness and acrimony enduring ever since.
The British government avoided this outcome by compensating slave owners, even at the expense of its own taxpayers, for generations. Britons not only covered the cost of emancipating slaves through taxation, further indebting themselves at a time in which poverty was rampant, but also effectively subsidized the deployment of vast resources over the next several decades to enforce abolition—capturing and releasing around 200,000 African men, women, and children, in many cases liberating them from fellow Africans as well as slave-trading European ships. The effort required thousands of sailors and 30 navy vessels, which amounted to around half of the force’s annual expenditure. Over 5,000 men died in so doing.
Critics forget this or, worse still, ignore it. It’s very easy to sit almost two centuries later, after all the battles have been fought and won, and cast a denigrating eye upon the memory of those who made our present blessings possible, posthumously telling them how they would have done things better had they lived at the time.
Yet the history of societal progression is stained with toil and blood. There are very few examples of drastic societal transformations within one or two generations without chaos ensuing. Fortunately, Britain’s 19th-century manumission is one of them. The loan taken out by the British to compensate slave owners ought to be remembered as an unprecedented triumph of diplomacy, property rights, and commitment to atoning for past mistakes. And the fact that the British government indebted itself so heavily that it took nearly two centuries to pay off the loan can only be remembered as an intergenerational commitment to support freedom across the world.
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