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.

Ps, thanks for the website ref. Been scrolling through, really fascinating.

Orlanda - Lee owned slaves, and although he considered himself up the paternalistic end of the scale, nonetheless had his slaves punished harshly for attempting to run away. The wikipedia entry is quite thorough on the conflicting historical evidence, but he certainly wasn't an abolitionist - in fact he viewed abolitionists as a threat to states' rights. (He was also, interestingly in the light of Charlottesville, opposed to building statues post war, because he thought they would be dangerously divisive).

Indeed. Were it not for the death of the 1m in Ireland at the hands of the English and the famine I would not be here. The fact we were driven out of Ireland between 1820 snd 1860 has been a massive benefit. Thank you English.... is one view point.

I never look back. I never regret anything. I always look forward and that seems to keep me very happy and mentally good. I am not sure what point regrets have. That does not mean that we cannot apply the lens of today to teach our children that particular actions in the past were wrong and also that a good few we take as the norm today will be viewed as wicked in the future (eg I think all smacking of children is a wick wicked thing and I exhort all mumsnetters never to raise a hand to their child and yet every day on here a mother will be doing it) - things change and our views on things change.

I never look back. I never regret anything. I agree. Although I think the parents of transitioning children may feel differently in time. The scandal of the 21st century.

I think a version of the test the historian Barbara Tuchman uses in her The March of Folly is a useful one. She analyses acts of supreme stupidity (mostly in pursuing stupid wars) - and her test is that to be included in the book, at least some of the historical actors must have been able to see it was stupid at the time. I think a similar test can be applied to slavery - did some of the actors at the time find it immoral? And the answer (even if one only looks at the white people in the story) is yes.

If one widens the focus to the black people involved, I would imagine pretty much of them (barring the slave traders in Africa who trafficked and sold them in the first place) would have said it was an evil practice. It's just that, a few rare and relatively late sources like Ten years a slave aside, mostly they left no written history.

(It's a depressing feature of this thread that so many people seem to empathise with the slave owners who lost property. It feels like a lot of people can all too easily put themselves in the position of the white people of the time who never even entertained the thought that their possessions were human beings, and so few people are trying to make the imaginative leap into the mind and experience of what it must have been like to be enslaved).

Before the Civil War there were proposals for compensated emancipation in America. That would have been open to the same objection as what Britain did in 1834 (which by the way turned Canada into a haven for runaway slaves) - but the various proposals would all have cost less than the money spent on the war - to say nothing of the lives lost in the bloodiest civil war the world had ever seen. It's an imperfect world and sometimes you have to go along with second best.

Prickly I think it's because most of own ancestors had it quite tough and life was difficult for most people in England unless you were very rich.

And I'm one of them - generations of Lincolnshire peasants on one side, fishing community on the other. Some of my ancestors were shipped off to Canada in the Highland Clearances.

Which still to my mind makes it puzzling. Why (other than race) automatically imagine yourself into the position of the slave owners, who were generally upper crust or middle class (one of the fascinating things about the compensation records is how many widows of relatively modest income owned slaves)? Why not imagine yourself into the position of the person in the hold of the ship?

What pisses me off is the way that stuff like this which has been common knowledge for years (the level of compensation was debated in Parliament FFS) is presented as some terrible secret that's been hidden away as somehow too terrible to mention. There's no secret about this. Any book on the abolition of slavery will tell you about it.

The hard political fact is that to abolish slavery, Parliament had to pass the necessary legislation, and the West Indian interest (which was very powerful at the time) would not give their votes unless they were paid in hard cash.

Still, they didn't get it their own way however. The compensation was only payable in London and for many slaveholders the cost of travelling to get it, was more than they would have been paid in the first place.

And many went bankrupt because the economics no longer worked. Tim Leunig at LSE sheds a fascinating lght on the economics of slavery in the US.

Yes, Lee was a slave owner, and less of a hero than he was portrayed. And content to live with the status quo, and harsh, and appears to have believed that if you were black you were a lesser person. So by no means all good. But he did recognise that slavery was "a moral and political evil in any country," and whatever the rights or wrongs of his father in law's death, he did go through the ultimate manumission, it appears, whereas some heirs refused to and were not forced to.

Failure of imagination? There are some excellent accounts on Gutenberg. Harrowing.

I now declare something that will out me to some: as a child one of our servants had been a slave. ( we weren't in the US) He found it a more secure life than being a servant because when famine came, as it did in that area, your value meant you were still fed. If you were a servant you were dismissed to starve. Spare girls were sold to be slaves and then if they were lucky they became concubines, perhaps even wives. The alternative for them was prostitution which they regarded as far worse.

I'm not claiming any of this is good, excusable. Just pointing out that slavery, indentured servitude which is pretty similar, and being a servant take different forms in different places across the globe, with different view points. We need to ensure that people are treated well and have been real freedom to make real choices. The choices of destitution are no choices.

OP you do sound as though you have quite a bit of difficulty understanding that the norms and values we hold today are nothing like the ones we held 200 years ago.
Even the people who fought to end slavery would be considered to be incredibly racist by today's standards. Abraham Lincoln openly stated he believed that the black race was inferior and he was against the introduction of any sort of equality between the races.
The fact is that in order to pass the bill freeing slavery a compensation payment to slave owners was necessary. Essentially the government was confiscating the property of private citizens (yes I know how awful considering human beings as property is). Paying former slaves compensation would have been unthinkable, both to those who opposed the abolition of slavery and those who campaigned for it.

I don't have any difficulty at all understanding the reasons the slaves weren't given compensation. As i mentioned earlier the elite were as well looked after then as they are now. Even after slavery was abolished slaves had to work 4 more years doing 45 hours a week without being paid, so in a way they were the ones paying compensation to the people who had owned them. The values we hold today are hardly any different to then. Some families were paid the equivalent of what would be £40 million in today's money. Disgusting.

Surely the point of this thread is that the op is angered that the values were so different? I think pricklyball has the most valid point in the fact that the majority of people affected by the slave trade did believe that slaves were people because they were in fact the slaves. Of course you can judge history by modern standards, you can think "that was completely wrong that we did that" but you can also simultaneously understand why it happened the way it did.

The Values we hold today are hardly any different to then.

In relation to what? Do we view race the same way? Class? Sexuality? Religion? women? The views we hold today are massively different. If you really don't see that, I imagine you really struggle with any kind of critical thinking.

In relation to money. It stays with the same families, and that's the way it'll stay.

I think i've made my feelings clear, so you must be struggling if you still having grasped that.

but it's no different to us thinking it's okay that a person in a far off land be paid pennies to the dollar, so that we can have fancy what ever. fancy stuff that the maker of the product could never afford. same slave labor just that it is off shore and not in your face.

VisaVasLagas, once an adult, you make an ACTIVE choice whether it not to benefit from ill gotten gains! People are not passive recipients of wealth and privilidge. Believe it or not, a lot of aristocrats and heirs quietly walk away and turn their back on wealth that has been ill derived in past generations, it's not all that uncommon. So you're full of shut with your plea to "not blame" privileged wealthy families for their great grandparents sins. If you chose to directly benefit from it beyond childhood, that is an ACTIVE not passive choice! At least own it don't play the victim of unfair judgement!

I feel guilty because of the behaviour of my ancestors

I think that's bloody ridiculous. No-one can help where and to whom they were born. What we can influence is how we treat people in this life.

In terms of the payment, we have plenty of HUGELY unethical companies trading today, cashing in in slavery (still a thing), profiteering from wars, killing the planet etc, do you really think it's easy to tell huge rich organisations like that to just cease trading? and play nice? Slave Traders were like today's multinationals - bigger and more powerful than individual governments. They were NOT going to stop unless there was something in it for them!

Arms trade should be illegal!!! Enough for a country’s own military not a bullet or tank sold elsewhere.

I wasn't talking about the slave traders though.

I think those on the thread who are saying 'I don't feel guilty as my ancestors were poor/didn't own any slaves; I therefore never benefitted from slavery' misunderstand the point about the wider institutional legacies of transatlantic slavery. It's not about whether you benefitted on an individual level.

Britain's industrial revolution - which arguably put it into a globally strong economic position which it enjoys even today - was directly financed by the profits of the slave trade. Many key banking and insurance companies (e.g. Barclays and Lloyds) have their roots in the slave trade. Those of us who live in the U.K. continue to benefit from the economic institutions and systems which arose from the slave trade. It's got nothing to do with whether your own individual family owned slaves.

Not everyone reaped the benefits. The slaves and their descendants certainly didn't, the ones who actually created these "benefits to society".