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.

If the compensation had gone to the freed slaves and not to the slave owners, the history of the world would have played out very differently. It is often to see how this would have played out in the UK but it is possible to see how it could have worked in other places. Brazil is a perfect example 'The Redemptress' Princess Isabel was the heir to the throne of Brazil and she pushed for the abolition of slavery. She was pushing for small plots of land to be given over the freed slaves so they could be become self sufficient. These plots would have come from the farms of their former owners. The farms and plantations were thousands of acres and yet the land owners fought against this, mainly because they planned to continue employing their former slaves for very low pay and thus keep them in a life of poverty and servitude. Her radical views and the powers that be opposed her succession to the throne and Princess Isabel spent the following 30 years in exile in France.
If she had been successful the rise of Brazil would have been very different, the mass migration of the poor in the northeast to the cities in the southeast and consequently the rapid growth of favelas, crime and poverty may not have happened as slaves owning small plots of land would have lessened the gap between rich and poor.
The large compensation paid to slave owners in the UK possibly had similar, if less obvious, consequences. It almost certainly had a knock on affect on life in the UK today.

Lessons can be learnt from history. Being aware of the injustices in history and educating the population about them is crucial in making that population able to spot current injustices from taking place today. So it's not just about being angry about things you can do nothing or ignoring it because 'didn't affect me and mine'. It is important to learn about history and discuss it.

Great post lino, the legacy of the evil of slavery can still be seen today in the huge gulf between the rich and the poor. No good could ever come out of such evil.

Most of the roads in Liverpool city centre are named after wealthy merchants who made their money in slade trading.

There was a campaign the other year to change names to not reward them so too speak.

It was decided it would be too much to effectively rename half the city roads. So i stead they payed a huge compensation fund. I am unsure where it went though....

Thanks to this post I’m watching the timeline documentary. Very interesting indeed.

Elfinpre, you may think it's ridiculous and logically I agree with you. But emotions don't always conform to logic. Particularly when you are surrounded at work and/or home by the descendants of those who suffered under the system and are still struggling.

You might also have bothered to notice what I said I did to assuage my guilt, rather than swearing at me.

That sort of "guilt" sounds incredibly self-indulgent to me.

I will only take responsibility for things occurring while I was a voting adult. Iraq, etc.

Why should we even take responsibility for that? I always thought the Iraq war was utterly, clearly, blitheringly stupid, and hadn't voted for Blair in 2001.

Why?

Suppose, for the sake of argument and this is completely hypothetical but could easily be true, your cleaner had the same surname as you, quite a usual western name, Campbell or Johnson, let's say, She -almost certainly a she - comes from the Caribbean. You know that your ancestors had estates in the Caribbean which they may or may not have run well. They also operated trading fleets out of Liverpool or Glasgow . You know that she is well below the poverty line, is just about existing on benefits and a low paid job. She's a single parent, relatively low levels of education, lives in a poor area where the schools have improved but the statistical probability of her children going on to tertiary education is lower than the national average . You discover, somehow, through the register and her family traditions, that her ancestors were slaves on your ancestors' estates. You don't know whether they came out on your other ancestors' ships but there's a chance.

Your background means that your ancestors' money cane in from the estates and also the ships and that since the early 19c all the men who were capable of picking up a spoon have gone to university and since the early 20c most of the women too.

Don't you think you might feel just a slightly complex emotion about the disparity and the causes? Perhaps a tiny bit of shame or guilt and/or some enhanced level of responsibility/ determination to redress the balance? Or that you could imagine or understand doing so?

I agree it could be - not is - self indulgent if you don't do anything about it. You'll note that I try to.

I'm also not saying everyone should feel guilty. But it's understandable and not necessarily self indulgent.

But in any case, as I said, emotions and logic are not always hand in hand, as you may discover.

Oh dear. I could go on about the differences between delegation and representation, about collective responsibility, about taking joint responsibility for the team's behaviour in a match if you are a player in that team, but it would make no difference. I assume - perhaps wrongly - that you think there is no such thing as society, just individuals?

What would have happened if we had never gone to Africa. Where would the Caribbean woman be now. Would she be worse or better off?

If she had avoided being enslaved by Arab traders and if the colonial powers had not divided up Africa between them with some of the consequences of warfare she would probably be in a state of poverty in comparison with the western world but not necessarily with her context and peers.

If tribal warfare had broken out, or there were famine/ natural disaster, she would indeed be in a poor condition with no or limited underlying social security net, as far as one can see, and yes your point is good.

But she would be less likely, imo, to have to deal with a sense of inferiority and victimhood, a long tail of wretchedness caused by inequality and poor treatment.

Of course the same is true not just of people who suffered under slavery. I don't come from a mining background, worker or owner, but can see similar issues arising; I have catholic friends who feel strongly about how their co-religionists were treated.

Anyway, I've been contentious enough, so will leave this.

Thank God for this thread , I was running out of things that have nothing to do with anything that I could be outraged at

Woodhill

I wonder what America in particular would be like as it's so built on slavery and so many of the challenges and culture arise from it . No Malcom X , no rosa parks , no lynching , no KKK

I can't even imagine

UnderCrackers5

Interesting thread.

Orlanda, most of our downtrodden virtually slave like white English or Scottish ancestors are no more responsible for the slave trade than blacks in Britain today and no way shoudl we have to take responsibility and cry into pillow just because we share the same skin colour as the white slave owners just as all those black African tribes who went in for slavery in Africa do not pass responsibilty down to blacks in Britain today.

I certanily agree that learning a lot about world history is really important and I encourage all children to take both history and geography GCSE for example if not A level. It is really useful and important and to read widely. We should also always reflect on the wrongs of the world now and in the past. I remain proud of the Britons who fought so hard to abolish the slave trade. It was a very brave thing to do at the time.