‘Dependent on precarious subsistences’: Ireland's Slave-owners at the Time of Emancipation

Abstract

When the United Kingdom Parliament abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, it provided £20 million to compensate the slave-owners. At least half of the compensation payments for the Caribbean were made to absentee owners and creditors living in Britain and Ireland. While slave-ownership was only one way in which the Atlantic slave-economy came home to Ireland, the records of such payments, now digitised and available online at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ , allow analysis of the structure of slave-ownership in Ireland at the end of the colonial slave-system. In contrast to England and, especially, to Scotland, slave-owners of Irish origin showed a much lower propensity to return home as absentees. Nevertheless, both in Ireland and within the Irish diaspora in London, Liverpool and Glasgow are striking instances of slave-owners whose legacies helped shape Ireland's commercial, cultural and physical fabric in the early nineteenth century.