'Possessing Slaves': Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the time of Emancipation 1834 40

Abstract

This article examines the ownership of the enslaved in the British Caribbean colonies at the time of Emancipation. Through a systematic investigation of the records underlying the work of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, who were charged with distributing the twenty million pounds in compensation granted to the slave-owners under the 1833 Act, it seeks to map comprehensively the recipients of the major awards of compensation by geography, function and gender, and to identify the beneficial owners behind each such award. It demonstrates that while absentee ownership varied significantly between colonies, nevertheless across the Caribbean colonies as a whole more than half the compensation awarded can be traced to owners or other recipients in Britain. It acknowledges the widely-recognized importance of mercantile interests in London, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow as beneficiaries of compensation, both as owners and creditors, and emphasizes that new entrepreneurial capital continued to flow into highly profitable areas of the slave economy even after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Through tracing the flows of compensation payments, the article also identifies a hitherto neglected but material component of rentier slave-ownership, both large-scale ownership of the enslaved on colonial estates among sections of the British aristocracy and gentry, and smaller-scale ownership of the enslaved among the urban upper middle-classes in centres of polite leisured society along the south coast and in towns such as Bath, Clifton and Edinburgh. Within this rentier ownership, ‘property’ in the enslaved had been transformed in the years prior to Emancipation into an array of financial assets which were then managed by the established means of transmission and control of property between generations and genders, through marriage settlements, entail, annuities and legacies, thereby disseminating ownership more broadly within sections of British society. The article shows that the slave owners of the metropole, numbered in their thousands, appear disproportionately influential, being relatively heavily represented both in the unreformed and reformed House of Commons as well as within county society, for example as sheriffs. Slave-owners who received compensation were also concentrated in newly assertive Anglican organizations and activities of the period, including the subscribers to the funding of King’s College London in the late 1820s. The article goes on to explore the discourses adopted by the metropolitan slave-owners in their dealings with the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, noting the gendered languages deployed, of entitlement by male slave-owners and of entreaty by female owners. The article seeks to raise two overarching issues. One is the extent to which traditional narratives of Emancipation require revision to incorporate more fully the role of compensation in securing the end of slavery in the British colonies, given the apparent continued influence of slave-owning and slave-owners within British society into the 1830s. The second is to suggest that, while more work is required to complete the tracing of the recycling of the compensation money into the British economy, notably the railway boom, nevertheless the work already done clearly highlights the existence of a number of families and firms still prominent in Britain which benefited directly from slave compensation, and that these historic linkages need to be weighed in any discussion of reparations for slavery.