www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-colonial-shame-slaveowners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition-8508358.html
Documents showing Britain's involvement in the trade of enslaved people, and mostly, the huge amounts of money that was given to slaveowner after abolition.
Tracing this money has shown that a lot of Britains' wealthy today gained their wealth through this deal where 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".
Obviously nothing was given to those people who were enslaved, and most of those were forced to work as 'apprentices' for room and board for some time after abolition (only children under 6 were freed straight away). This further information has resparked off the reparation debate (if not to individuals at least more to appropriate community groups) and consideration of whose hard work the wealthy really got wealthy off of.
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New documents showing the reparations given to slaveowners after abolition is major part of today's upper classes's wealth, sparking off new debate in reparations.
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BigSpork · 25/02/2013 13:09
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