They are many. Records from the 1830s show that 46,000 individuals, including two of my three-times great-grandfathers, received British governmental compensation for “giving up their slaves” at abolition, which was completed in 1838. Some put the money into land, or into shares in railways and the other tech startups of the British industrial revolution. That huge injection of cash seeded new fortunes: some of those families remain among the richest and most powerful in our country today.
It wasn’t additional capital. It was a change in the form of it. Any of those people could have sold their slaves whenever, then invested in the new businesses. So, that they got cash which they invested is not a result of the end of slavery.
My ancestors profited from slavery. Here’s how I am starting to atone for that
The Guardian is having a normal one, I see.
“I can’t feel guilty about something I had no part in, but I do feel shame,” such people say. There’s much to feel ashamed of, then and now. But there is atonement of a sort available.
The obvious thing is to ask people who are descended from those who were enslaved what we should do. In my experience, the first answer is almost always “apologise”.
The second answer is usually: “gibs me your phone and your wallet innit.”
What a soppy self-hating twat. Give him a badge, and turn him loose in South London.
What a soppy self-hating twat.
Exactly Sam, stole the words straight off of my keyboard. I can’t be bothered to fisk his article it is too pathetic.
That byline photo – surely a pastiche of the ageing, angry, lambswool leftie!
‘We’ve tried to listen and learn from the descendants of those who were enslaved. Today, we launch a new lobbying group’
So you’ve seen how much they make out of it, so now you want your share of the loot?
UK GDP in 1833 was £495 million. Government expenditure was £50.6
million – of which £28.3 million (i.e. 56%) was interest payments. The
national debt was £783 million. (Source: B R Mitchell, British
Historical Statistics).
46,000 slave owners (or c.02% of the population of 25m) were paid a
total of £20.2 million or a mere 4% of annual GDP – at a time when the
UK government was spending c.£9 million pa (out of a defence budget of
£14.3 million) in suppressing slavery. This average of £9 million pa was
spent for 55 years while the payment to slave owners was a one-off payment.
The compensation to the slave owners amounted to an average of £435
each (c. £53,000 in 2021 £s). This was to compensate them for loss of a
capital asset and for the income from it; but let’s assume that the
average payment of £435 was purely capital compensation. Now, assume
that the annual profit from using slave labour was 5% (which it probably wasn’t)
and that these profits were all spent in the UK (which they weren’t).
This suggests that on average slave owners were receiving c.£22 pa each
or about £2650 pa each in 2021 £s. Such sums were too small to change
the British nation.
That IS the way you abolish slavery. You buy the slaves, then liberate them. Has this moron absolutely no congnisance of history?
Boganboy nailed it – look at the virtue sharks circling around this latest grift. There’s money for columnists, charities pressure groups and middlemen of all sorts on this bandwagon – hey there’s likely a public intellectual in Ely working on sustainable slavery accounting
Guyana, once one of the richest of the British sugar colonies, is now among the poorest countries in the northern hemisphere.’
Haven’t they done well since independence!
Smug middle class prat, descended from multiple generations of middle class and upper class ancestors, feels bad for what some of them did in the past. Sniff! Boo-hoo! Don the sack cloth and ashes. It’s all virtue signalling bollocks.
The title of his previous Guardian article demonstrates what it’s all about “We whose ancestors owned slaves want to make amends – but nations must also pay their due”. This is why he’s trying to broaden the responsibility to include any historic business which sold goods that were purchased by the slave owners, to give them secondary and tertiary responsibility and, presumably, any lowly worker in their factories. He wants us all to be culpable.
How much will he be getting in “expenses” and for “advising” this new “Heirs to Slavery” organisation.
How much will he be getting in “expenses” and for “advising” this new “Heirs to Slavery” organisation.
Yep. As ever. Follow the money.
Any of those people could have sold their slaves whenever, then invested in the new businesses.
A slight quibble. Not particularly good practical economics. Presuming a disincentive for slave owners to continue keeping slaves, any slave owner wishing to sell will be doing so into a market with few buyers. So the value of slaves tends to zero. Hence the compensation scheme.
You can always think about the compensation payment as ransom if you prefer. The desire was to free the slaves and that was achieved with undue delay or bloodshed. Was it politically possible to free the slaves when they did without this payment? I’ve no idea. As said above, the sums paid amount to very little in the context of the last couple of hundred years of state incompetence, graft and special pleading. A better way to honour those who suffered in the past would be call out those whose continue to enslave people today.
A better way to honour those who suffered in the past would be call out those whose continue to enslave people today.
What a remarkably Guardian statement. And cancel their social media accounts?
Surely a better use of compensation money would be financing a military expedition to shoot slave traders in Africa.
As always, our forebears tended towards practical solutions rather than modern wankery.
Why has it taken this long for him to feel guilty?
Anon: There was no benefit/virtue/kudos/social credit in doing so until recently.
BIS,
“What a remarkably Guardian statement.”. Well yes, my response was aimed at the Guardian reading types who are going on about this and suggesting what they could do.
My own suggestions would include a boatload of SBS, trade embargo’s, seizing of assets of those responsible, as well as the odd harsh tweet. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine how much treasure and blood they wish to sacrifice to go around the world and try to civilise it.
I doubt we’d achieve much for the costs we’d incur, though it might be worth a try. Though to achieve anything we’d need to actually address the issue and not be distracted by the historical grievance blob.
I think better to call out those who claim to care about historical injustices but readily ignore the current state of affairs.
My ancestors profited from slavery. Here’s how I am starting to profit from that
FTFY.
Reading the guff – as much self-serving as it is self-pitying – from cunts like Renton leans me towards favouring reparations, as long as they are only paid by arseholes raddled with performative guilt.
I’d suggest he makes a will in favour of the citizens of Guyana (maybe pick one village and divide it between the inhabitants) and then open a vein. Regardless of whether the villagers invest it or spaff it on rum and ganja, it will be better with them than in Renton’s sweaty palms.
Wealth and privilege seeps down the generations, and British slavery ended only 185 years ago: there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Britons whose lives are touched by the money it generated.
I’d imagine there must be an equal number of people in Africa whose lives are also touched by it and who would probably treat your suggestion that at 2 centuries remove they compensate the descendants of it for their ancestors actions with the contempt it so richly deserves.
Today, we launch a new lobbying group – Heirs of Slavery. We hope to support the existing movements asking nations and institutions for apology and discussions about repair. First on that list is the Caricom group of nations and its 10-point action plan for reparative justice
After all there seems to be a dearth of unproductive and parastic left wing lobbying groups. Always room for one more. What the devil is ‘reparative justice’ about?
Acknowledgement, repair and reconciliation: these are good things to work for in modern Britain. We hope more heirs will join us.
I believe in a place called hope.
I know many people who have had a big shock after looking through it, their notions of their family history and of themselves turned upside down.
Well that’s an explanation of why there’s labour shortages across every single sector of the Uk economy outside the Public Sector grifting industry I suppose.
One of the most contemptible non- trans articles I have ever read in the rag. I would say shocking but these type of people dominate public life. Abandon hope….
If this unendurably smug hypocrite wants to make “reparations” for slavery, he could go to any of a number of African shiteholes and use his non-trivial wealth to – drum roll – buy a few actual slaves?!
Then he could do something more direct and which would require a bit of actual effort on his part: he could then get them educated and give them the slight possibility of a life. He could perhaps even put them up in his home (or hand over a second home, if he has one, to them).
‘I’d imagine there must be an equal number of people in Africa whose lives are also touched by it and who would probably treat your suggestion that at 2 centuries remove they compensate the descendants of it for their ancestors actions with the contempt it so richly deserves.’
Yep, V-P.
Of course to us, they’d probably say, ‘We dumped all our murderer, thieves, rapists, loafers and general no-hopers on you suckers. And you PAID us to take them away.’
It wasn’t compensation. It was the least cost option to emancipate the slaves. The alternative would have been military intervention, sending an expeditionary force across the Atlantic to invade the Caribbean islands which were self-governing and after centuries of disputes over ownership (French, British, Dutch, Spanish) were heavily fortified against the sea.
The cost in lives and money would have been huge, and possibly not successful.
“What the devil is ‘reparative justice’ about?”
It’s about a “modest, market-conform recompense” for his efforts in bringing the Word to the People and Defending the Faith, of course.
“Guyana, once one of the richest of the British sugar colonies, is now among the poorest countries in the northern hemisphere.”
I recently sold a digital piano that was made in Indonesia, thinking about it I didn’t really know where that is. Feeling curious I did a little googling and discovered that Indonesia, a string of islands north of Australia, is a former Dutch colony. It reminded me that colonialism was a thing in the Far East as well as in Africa. Former colonies in the Far East tend to have successful modern economies and so don’t bang on about colonialism quite as much.
I started reading the Grauniad article and saw the claim that slavery accounted for 11% of British GDP
What?!?
No slaves in Britain so how could they account for even 0.00011% of Gross *Domestic* Product?
“two of my three-times great-grandfathers”
There are 16 male relatives at that level in a family tree, so you feel bad because 12.5% of your male blood line benefitted from that buy-out of their chattels. That’s probably an exceptionally high % this far removed. Dilute with females, and subtract the % of national income and your other not-slave owing relatives labour devoted to enforcing abolition and you might still be just above a rounding error so do this: sell your house to a black person at 12.5% below market price or whatever you feel is the appropriate discount level.
Twat.
Our mistake was in not copying the Arabs. They’ve got no problems with blacks in Saudi etc despite being the premier slave traders. They castrated their male slaves -ok it cost them a large percentage of the slaves who died from the hacking off of their bollocks, but it was a good move in the long run. For a start it would have saved us from Dianne abbott.
@John 77
11%? Of Guardian GDP, quite likely.
Grift derived profit.
Feeling curious I did a little googling and discovered that Indonesia, a string of islands north of Australia, is a former Dutch colony. It reminded me that colonialism was a thing in the Far East as well as in Africa.
Java (and many of the associated islands that make up modern Indonesia) was Dutch for over three centuries, during which time Jakarta was known as Batavia. They are not well-regarded as colonisers, and Dutch visitors to Bali are advised to self-identify as German.
Half of the payments went to slave owners in Africa and the West Indies. Presumably, that explains why these places nowadays are famous for their wealth.
@Stonyground
A Malaysian women my wife met: “My mother thinks well of the British.”
Herself: “Why?”
M.W.: “Because she can remember the Japanese.”
@Charles: “Half of the payments went to slave owners in Africa”. That’s interesting; it was long before there was much British colonisation in Africa. Did the money mostly go to Boers?
I know a few North Africans that are not overly fond of the French to say the least and I’m sure claiming to be Belgian in the Congo isn’t a good idea given the history there
‘It was the least cost option to emancipate the slaves.’
John B. I do remember reading (in Fortescue of course) that the West Indian slave owners pushed to have their slaves, that had been recruited as soldiers, returned to them after the Peace of Amiens. The governor of Jamaica very sensibly bullshitted until the war started up again.
I don’t know what happened after 1814, but it would have been really stupid for the British government to have tried to re-enslave lots of armed soldiers, and their women and children. Perhaps this served as a trial run for the final emancipation?
BniC. I’ve always sympathised with the heroic Froggies who conquered North Africa. After all the North Africans conducted slave raids against US!! And the Frogs stopped this without it costing us a man or a shilling.
But maybe I was just influenced by P C Wren’s Foreign Legion stories??
@dearieme – “Did the money mostly go to Boers?”
From https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/research: “Almost all the men and women awarded compensation under the 1833 Abolition Act are listed in what is called a Parliamentary Return, an official reply by a government body to a request from an MP, in this case Daniel O’Connell, the Irish MP. The return is often referred to as the Slavery Abolition Act: an account of all sums of money awarded by the Commissioners of Slave Compensation while its full title is Accounts of slave compensation claims; for the colonies of Jamaica. Antigua. Honduras. St. Christopher’s. Grenada. Dominica. Nevis. Virgin Islands. St. Lucia. British Guiana. Montserrat. Bermuda. Bahamas. Tobago. St. Vincent’s. Trinidad. Barbadoes. Mauritius. Cape of Good Hope.”
So I’d guess it probably did.