That slave owners were compensated so highly in Britain

[tinypony]

I never realised till i read this article the extent of slavery in the UK till i read this. The fact that when slavery was abolished the slave owners were compensated by (in today's money) by millions of pounds, 40% of the ENTIRE government expenditure for 1834. If it wasn't for the fact they were getting compensated so highly we'd never have known the names of all these slave owners. But the lure of the big money drew them out of the woodwork.

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed

How bloody hypocritical and contradictory to abolish slavery on the one hand (presumably because of the immorality of it) but on the other hand give massive compensation to those affected.
It's just another case of the elite being looked after, where was the compensation for the slaves and their families. I'm disgusted.

I am very proud of what the UK did in abolishing slavery and compensating people who lost out for that is a very important part of a civilsed and law abiding society where we do not confiscate property and we treat business people fairly. I am also proud of the efforts being made now in 2017 in rolling out the Modern Slavery Act.

Slavery could never be described as civilised. It would have been civilised to compensate the slaves not the people who were rich anyway off the backs of people who toiled for them for nothing. There was something obscene about slave owners getting compensation.

we treat business people fairly
well if that's how you want to describe them.

Meanwhile in the present day children are still dying of starvation and preventable disease. Maybe focus your anger on that where you can make a difference rather than a compensation scheme that occurred 200 years ago!

Just to go slightly off topic (sorry OP), slavery is still a big problem in the UK. Last year there was a total of 3805 recorded victims of modern slavery in the UK, a 17% increase on the year before Link.

These people came from all over the world but the top three nationalities where, Albania, the UK and Vietnam.

Most clothing shops can't guarantee that child labour or slave labour hasn't been used somewhere in there supply chain. According to Unicef an estimated 170 million children are engaged in child labour around the world working in awful conditions to produce clothes for us to buy cheaply.

We still profit from slavery in the UK look at how cheap our produce and clothing is! We don't get these prices without exploitation.

Slavery could never be described as civilised. It would have been civilised to compensate the slaves not the people who were rich anyway off the backs of people who toiled for them for nothing. There was something obscene about slave owners getting compensation.

Huge number weren't that rich though... lots of widows invested in slaves in the same way they invest in premium bonds now. If we found out tomorrow premium bonds gained interest by funding factories laboured by exploited individuals, and all premium bonds were to be confiscated as compensation to the victims I think more than a few people would see that as unfair. If only premium bond owners could vote do you think the bill abolishing them would pass?

iwant what makes you think i'm not angered by that. I still get angered by the holocaust, should i not be because of present bad things? bad things that are happening today doesn't mean we shouldn't be indignant and outraged about past outrages. Btw i haven't mentioned any compensation scheme. I merely said i was angered that the owners got compensated at the time and not the slaves. I'm not talking about compensation in the present times.

You can't compare premium bonds with human lives. Of course it would be unfair if they were confiscated. But totally fair to have slaves confiscated off you. Slavery was evil and as such the owners who got rich off their backs did not deserve a penny.

I actually just checked my family name out of interest (it's very uncommon and I've traced my tree before back to a single area in Scotland) and two of my ancestors were jointly compensated "£170 16S 4D [7 Enslaved]". Which would be about £100k in today's money I think? Not that anyone in my living memory has directly benefitted- I grew up on a council estate! But i guess society benefited as a whole on the backs of slaves. Awful, awful thing to have happened but I don't personally feel guilt for something I didn't do.

You can't compare premium bonds with human lives. Of course it would be unfair if they were confiscated. But totally fair to have slaves confiscated off you. Slavery was evil and as such the owners who got rich off their backs did not deserve a penny.

You're juding a historical situation by todays standards. Of course you can't compare premium bonds to human lives in 2017. But my example wasn't very different if you considered the hypothetical premium bonds only made money on something "immoral", which is what I was saying.

I'm not sure that slaves were seen as human, or if they were they were lesser beings. They were not 'fine upright' Christians like the majority of slave owners liked to think of themselves, they were uneducable pagans. Likewise the peasant who stole from their master was wicked and must be punished accordingly by shipping to Australia or imprisonment. I think religious beliefs had quite a lot to do with attitudes as they do today in some religions. Hypocritical they may have been but that's how it was. This attitude is possibly why there are still proportionately more black men in prison now.

I am a business person in 2017. I don't think we should be criticised just because I didn't choose to become an intern at Oxfam instead or join the local convent. I do agree that we should concentrate on helping the current slaves (to some extent even housewives count in that - see countless threads on mumksnet where they stay with a man because he feeds and keeps them because they gave up their jobs!) More important,ly we have the work being done today on the Modern Slavery Act and need to watch very closely for people brought or smuggled into the UK with a promise of a better life who are then in brothels and the like.

It was a different time in the old slavery days. Men had a legal right to beat their children (ooopps they still do - must get smacking totally banned in my view) , wives and servants. We realised it was wrong in the UK and people fought very very hard to ban the trade and we did. Like most countries we have things we did which were not right. Gradually we get more and more enlightened. There may come a day when killing a fly is illegal or even hurting certain plants (although I don't agree that that is better or more developed).

Interesting thread. Unfortunately a large part of the reason that slavery was abolished (in the British Empire) wasn't because of a sudden realisation that it was immoral, but because of changing economic circumstances - the rise of waged labour associated with the industrial revolution. In this context slavery began to make less economic sense.

Barbarian 40% of the entire government expenditure? why so much, these families were already very rich.

Not all of them were rich plantation owners, some were people who had 'inherited' a slave in the Caribbean but lived in England and the slave was their 'income'. A spinster or widow who owned 1 slave would become destitute without compensation.

I'm not saying it is right, owning people isn't but I do think you need to apply a lens of what was typical then.

Indentured labour was common as were 'pauper apprentices' ie children who worked and were provided with food and lodging but no pay.

Apprentices often had no pay and in some cases the apprentices parent actually paid the 'master', apprentices often took the name of their master when they left the apprenticeship which is why Smith, Taylor and other occupation names are so prevalent.

To be fair William Wilberforce did have a strong influence on the abolition for moral reasons

It doesn't make sense to judge the past by today's norms. They would find a lot of what we do very horrifying, too, after all.

I'm reading this book. (I may finish it, finding it a bit heavy!!)

By our standard's it's shocking that the govt had a huge role in protecting property, but no role in protecting quality of life. Slavery and compensation for lost slave cargo is a big story line.

About the ordinary working class in a pit village (not slaves), of course girls & boys went down the pits from age 7yo. Ordinary kids rarely learnt to read or write. There's a scene with boys age 10&12 washing coal dust off selves with cold water, they only spent time above ground in daylight hours on Sundays.

If you imagine a society where 7-8yos went to work to support the family (parents had the right to make them do that) where laws were much more about protecting property not protecting any human rights, then the compensation in 1834 makes sense. We can't make sense of them, they couldn't make sense of us.

'. A spinster or widow who owned 1 slave would become destitute without compensation.
If she was to become destitute if not given compensation, how would it be any different if she'd been allowed to keep the slave. The slave would have done all the menial work for her but she must have been destitute anyway. A cow or a goat would at least be able to provide milk that she could sell, what could the slave have produced apart from "work"

I'm not sure I'll ever understand MN's preoccupation with being outraged and livid. Nor me

Anyway the main point of my thread being the injustice of the slave owners being paid so much compensation (40% of the entire government expenditure) and the slaves receiving nothing.
If the majority on here think it was right that the slaves received nothing while the owners (many already very rich) were handsomely rewarded then it seems iabu. I'll still carry on thinking the same though.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand MN's preoccupation with being outraged and livid. Nor me
Just as i'll never understand MNs lack of concern and indignation by huge injustices just because it never affected them.

Why would they compensate the slaves who were seen as property of the owners?

once slavery was abolished they weren't seen as property at all.

Although I agree with others on this thread that there isn't much point getting angry about the past where different attitudes prevailed, I do think that we should learn more about the British involvement with the slave trade. We studied slavery at school, but only from an American perspective, it's only because my DP is Jamaican and therefore his ancestors were slaves owned by Scottish people that I know much about the British side of things. One of DPs closest friends is from a family who were very very involved with slavery in the U.K., he often wonders if any of his relatives were owned by his friends family. They were extremely wealthy at the time and the family are still incredibly wealthy, and yes they have some interests in current industries are questionable. It's a strange dichotomy but they enjoy discussing the issues surrounding slavery and the repercussions that affect black people even now.

It's easy to dismiss because of course white people now don't consider themselves to have benefitted from slavery, but we have and we have to educate ourselves and learn from our mistakes. I do believe that the descendants of slaves should have some form of compensation, but it will never happen sadly.

I've been mulling over this thread for a day or so trying to work out what makes me so deeply uncomfortable about the "you can't judge the past by the standards of the present" argument, and I've finally worked out what it is. The majority of people affected by the slave trade (assuming that no slave owner owned less than one slave and many owned several, in the case of plantation owners, hundreds, and thus that the slaves outnumbered the owners) did not think slavery was a good thing, even at the time. This majority of people affected being the actual slaves themselves.

To say "you can't say slavery was wrong because most people at the time didn't see it that way" is tacitly to assume that only the voices of the owners count as the voices of people: the actual slaves themselves are written out of the historical account.

So for me, at any rate, the argument that "it's the past, they just had a different moral outlook" is way too glib and superficial.

I agree that it's unreasonable to demand that the descendants of slave owners should feel guilty on behalf of their ancestors - but at the same time, I do think there's a very strong case, at a collective level, for paying financial reparations to communities who still struggle with the poverty and institutional racism which are the long-term legacy of slavery.

You are making the mistake of judging historical matters from today's point of view.