Bailing Out Slavery: The Expensive Emancipation of 1833
When Britain’s role in the slave trade is discussed (which is rare enough in itself), often the British state - comprised as it was by thousands of direct beneficiaries of the Atlantic slave trade - is lauded for ‘peacefully’ abolishing slavery, without the same kind of revolutionary upset as in the United States or, God forbid, Haiti.
Whilst this narrative often focuses on the valuable efforts of Wilberforce and other brave abolitionists, we fail to mention: the British government did not abolish slavery - it bought slavery out.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act was itself the culmination of almost half a century of piecemeal, halfway-house legislation and legal rulings which variously failed to address the fundamental abuses which slaves themselves, black Britons and abolitionists sought to consign to the dustbin of history. This is, of course, no accident - the British slave-owning class had successfully fought a rearguard action against emancipation, and were only convinced to accept the 1833 Act by a crucial component: compensation.
As per the term of the act, the British state paid out ‘the Sum of Twenty Million Pounds Sterling’ to the slave-owning élite, who were variously creole families in the West Indies, or prominent members of metropolitan high society. The magnitude of this sum cannot be overstated: £20m in 1833 was 5% of Britain’s entire GDP; such a sum would be equivalent to £100bn in 2016’s economy. It was 40% of the government’s entire annual budget for 1833.
At root, the compensation paid to slave owners belies the fact that the British élite still saw men, women and children of African descent as productive property to be owned rather than as human beings - an attitude which persists throughout the nineteenth century, birthing bitter children, well after slave rebellions and metropolitan disgust had forced the formal end of slavery. It also demonstrates the ruling class’s tenacity in maintaining structures of capitalist oppression which centralise and concentrate wealth in the hands of a minority.
Understood in this way, the struggle of black slaves for their own emancipation, and the bitter success they won with their blood in the century spanning 1750 to 1850, is all the more worthy of commemoration.
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