The self-purchase of “freedom”, a reparative history of the abolition of Caribbean slavery, 1832–1833

Abstract

ABSTRACT The discovery that loans for the payment of slave abolition compensation had not been repaid by British taxpayers until 2015 took many by surprise. But it is the financial contribution of British Afro-Caribbeans towards the emancipation of their own ancestors that is most significant, calling for a re-examination of abolition historiography. By using Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield as analytical constructs, each July 1832 to February 1833 Colonial Office abolition proposal can be analysed against the greatest good of the greatest number principle. The result involves re-conceptualising abolition as an exercise in administering distributive justice through maximising freedom within a community of enslaved, enslavers, and British taxpayers. Here, freedom is the product of policy choices over who would bear the cost of financing abolition. In addressing these issues, this essay is written as reparative history, drawing parallels between the exclusions of 1832/1833 and Afro-Caribbean historiographical diasporic exclusions within the British academy.