When the United Kingdom abolished slavery in 1833, the government of the day paid out £20m in compensation -- not to slaves, but to their owners. What happened next to that money has been tracked by a team of historians from UCL, whose new site, Legacies of British Slave Ownership, launched today.
Building upon the work of historian Nick Draper -- who spent three years researching the name of every slave owner in the British Caribbean at the time of slavery's abolition -- the UCL team have spent another three years following the money from the point of compensation. The hope is to shed light on the real impact of slavery on the history of the UK in all spheres of life, seeing the immediate impacts on the physical, cultural, artistic and political spheres of British society.
Speaking to Wired.co.uk, researcher Keith McClelland said: "40 to 50 percent [of the £20m] stayed in the UK, and was distributed amongst about 3,000 people. There were a total of almost 47,000 people who received compensation, so the money that stayed in Britain was disproportionate to the number of people claiming.
There were some who received a great deal of money, but there were also ordinary middle class people who made claims for relatively small amounts of money, relative to the total. Interestingly, if you look at all of the claims, in the Caribbean roughly 40 to 50 percent of the claimants were women. We have this tale of women not owning property, but in fact there were significant numbers of women owning slaves as property. About 25 percent of the people in Britain who received compensation were women."
The £20m payment represented 40 percent of the British government's budget at the time, and translates to around £16.5bn today. One high-profile individual who received compensation was George Hibbert, one of the founders of the West India Company, who received more than £63,000 across 19 claims -- an amount worth more than £49m in today's money. Another was John Gladstone, father of prime minister William Gladstone, who received more than £105,000 for his nine claims, more than £83m if awarded today. He invested much of that money in railways around the UK, as well as in funding the construction of the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, a part of which survives today as Liverpool College independent school. Hibbert amassed a huge art collection, including works by artists such as Rembrandt and Rubens, and also greatly expanded his country house on his estate in Hertfordshire, a building which still stands today. "The Royal Bank of Scotland had its foundations in part in the slavery business, but there are many companies that are connected in some way," McClelland said. "A lot of City companies,
[and] a lot of people who put their money where we can see where it's going aren't putting it in the industrial economy, things like cotton, but in insurance and shipping, things like that." Much of the money was invested in the then-new railways, which were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution -- it's perhaps hard to argue that there wasn't anyone in the UK who didn't benefit from that investment.
Tracking down this information was a challenge -- while the site represents the full records of everyone who received compensation from the government, McClelland said it was difficult to match those records with others available. He said: "Ideally, you would do this with financial papers, but of course they don't exist for ninety-nine percent of people, but there are sources like the London Gazette where you can find people making investments in banks and insurance companies. Railway companies published lists of people investing in the railways in the 1840s and you can track them. Sometimes you can't be sure it's the same person but you can be reasonably confident." "One of the things we've done is public workshops in various cities in Britain at which people came along to help -- you get family historians, people who are interested because either they had ancestors who were enslaved people, or you get people whose ancestors were slave owners. We want this to be a public resource and people can contribute to it." There's a facility on the site for people who wish to make corrections or additions. The site's database was designed by McClelland, and built by web designer Mark Hadley. "We want it to be comprehensive, particularly for the absentee owners living outside of Britain, but is it? Probably not,"