Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition
David Cameron's ancestors were among the wealthy families who
received generous reparation payments that would be worth millions of
pounds in today's money
Sanchez Manning
Sunday 24 February 2013
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The true scale of Britain's involvement in the slave trade has been
laid bare in documents revealing how the country's wealthiest families
received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation
after slavery was abolished.
The previously unseen records show exactly who received what in
payouts from the Government when slave ownership was abolished by
Britain – much to the potential embarrassment of their descendants. Dr
Nick Draper from University College London, who has studied the
compensation papers, says as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian
Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy.
As a result, there are now wealthy families all around the UK still
indirectly enjoying the proceeds of slavery where it has been passed on
to them. Dr Draper said: "There was a feeding frenzy around the
compensation." A John Austin, for instance, owned 415 slaves, and got
compensation of £20,511, a sum worth nearly £17m today. And there were
many who received far more.
Academics from UCL, led by Dr Draper,
spent three years drawing together 46,000 records of compensation given
to British slave-owners into an internet database to be launched for
public use on Wednesday. But he emphasised that the claims set to be
unveiled were not just from rich families but included many "very
ordinary men and women" and covered the entire spectrum of society.
Dr Draper added that the database's findings may have implications for the
"reparations debate". Barbados is currently leading the way in calling
for reparations from former colonial powers for the injustices suffered
by slaves and their families.
Among those revealed to have
benefited from slavery are ancestors of the Prime Minister, David
Cameron, former minister Douglas Hogg, authors Graham Greene and George
Orwell, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the new chairman of the
Arts Council, Peter Bazalgette. Other prominent names which feature in
the records include scions of one of the nation's oldest banking
families, the Barings, and the second Earl of Harewood, Henry Lascelles, an
ancestor of the Queen's cousin. Some families used the money to
invest in the railways and other aspects of the industrial revolution;
others bought or maintained their country houses, and some used the
money for philanthropy. George Orwell's great-grandfather, Charles
Blair, received £4,442, equal to £3m today, for the 218 slaves he owned.
The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that
owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was
abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a
staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in
today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.
A total of £10m went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and
Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain.
The biggest single payout went to James Blair (no relation to Orwell),
an MP who had homes in Marylebone, central London, and Scotland. He was
awarded £83,530, the equivalent of £65m today, for 1,598 slaves he owned on the
plantation he had inherited in British Guyana.
But this
amount was dwarfed by the amount paid to John Gladstone, the father of
19th-century prime minister William Gladstone. He received £106,769
(modern equivalent £83m) for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine
plantations. His son, who served as prime minister four times during his
60-year career, was heavily involved in his father's claim.
Mr
Cameron, too, is revealed to have slave owners in his family background
on his father's side. The compensation records show that General Sir
James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late
1700s, was Mr Cameron's first cousin six times removed. Sir James, who was the
son of one of Mr Cameron's great-grand-uncle's, the second
Earl of Fife, was awarded £4,101, equal to more than £3m today, to
compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange Sugar
Estate in Jamaica.
Another illustrious political family that it
appears still carries the name of a major slave owner is the Hogg
dynasty, which includes the former cabinet minister Douglas Hogg. They
are the descendants of Charles McGarel, a merchant who made a fortune
from slave ownership. Between 1835 and 1837 he received £129,464, about
£101m in today's terms, for the 2,489 slaves he owned. McGarel later
went on to bring his younger brother-in-law Quintin Hogg into his hugely
successful sugar firm, which still used indentured labour on
plantations in British Guyana established under slavery. And it was
Quintin's descendants that continued to keep the family name in the
limelight, with both his son, Douglas McGarel Hogg, and his grandson,
Quintin McGarel Hogg, becoming Lord Chancellor.
Dr Draper said:
"Seeing the names of the slave-owners repeated in 20th‑century family
naming practices is a very stark reminder about where those families saw their
origins being from. In this case I'm thinking about the Hogg
family. To have two Lord Chancellors in Britain in the 20th century
bearing the name of a slave-owner from British Guyana, who went
penniless to British Guyana, came back a very wealthy man and
contributed to the formation of this political dynasty, which
incorporated his name into their children in recognition – it seems to
me to be an illuminating story and a potent example."
Mr Hogg
refused to comment yesterday, saying he "didn't know anything about it". Mr
Cameron declined to comment after a request was made to the No 10
press office.
Another demonstration of the extent to which slavery links stretch into modern
Britain is Evelyn Bazalgette, the uncle of
one of the giants of Victorian engineering, Sir Joseph Bazalgette and
ancestor of Arts Council boss Sir Peter Bazalgette. He was paid £7,352
(£5.7m in today's money) for 420 slaves from two estates in Jamaica. Sir Peter
said yesterday: "It had always been rumoured that his father had
some interests in the Caribbean and I suspect Evelyn inherited that. So I heard
rumours but this confirms it, and guess it's the sort of thing
wealthy people on the make did in the 1800s. He could have put his money
elsewhere but regrettably he put it in the Caribbean."
The TV
chef Ainsley Harriott, who had slave-owners in his family on his
grandfather's side, said yesterday he was shocked by the amount paid out by the
government to the slave-owners. "You would think the government
would have given at least some money to the freed slaves who need to
find homes and start new lives," he said. "It seems a bit barbaric. It's like
the rich protecting the rich."
The database is available from Wednesday at: ucl.ac.uk/lbs.
Cruel trade
Slavery on an industrial scale was a major source of the wealth of the British
empire, being the exploitation upon which the West Indies sugar trade
and cotton crop in North America was based. Those who made money from it were
not only the slave-owners, but also the investors in those who
transported Africans to enslavement. In the century to 1810, British
ships carried about three million to a life of forced labour.
Campaigning against slavery began in the late 18th century as revulsion against
the trade spread. This led, first, to the abolition of the trade in slaves,
which came into law in 1808, and then, some 26 years later, to the Act
of Parliament that would emancipate slaves. This legislation made
provision for the staggering levels of compensation for slave-owners,
but gave the former slaves not a penny in reparation.
More than
that, it said that only children under six would be immediately free;
the rest being regarded as "apprentices" who would, in exchange for free board
and lodging, have to work for their "owners" 40 and a half hours
for nothing until 1840. Several large disturbances meant that the
deadline was brought forward and so, in 1838, 700,000 slaves in the West
Indies, 40,000 in South Africa and 20,000 in Mauritius were finally
liberated.
David Randall
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-colonial-shame-slaveowners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition-8508358.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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