Following the money: Who profited from the slave trade?

Historians at University College London have launched a major new project researching the impact of slave-ownership on the development of modern Britain. Here researcher Dr Nick Draper explains how the project will uncover and determine exactly who Britain’s slave-owners were on the eve of emancipation.

When colonial slavery ended in most of the British Empire following the 1833 Abolition Act the UK government paid £20 million to the slave-owners. This was an enormous sum equivalent to 40 per cent of state expenditure, which today would amount to £200 billion. The enslaved people themselves received nothing.

By scouring documents recording the British state’s distribution of compensation to slave-owners at the National Archives at Kew, London we are aiming to trace the imprint these slave-owners left on British business, politics, culture and society.

These records are a unique census of the slave-owners and others who benefited from slavery, including merchants and bankers who lent money secured on slaves. The records give us the chance to recreate the entire structure of British slave-ownership and reveal a feeding frenzy among sections of the British elite in pursuit of the compensation money.

The discovery of involvement in the slave compensation process of both Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the European banking dynasty, and James Williams Freshfield, the founder of the major international law-firm Freshfields have already drawn wide media attention. In both cases, the firms subsequently issued statements expressing regret at the historical linkages with slavery and reaffirming their commitment to human rights.

“It is not the objective of the project to name and shame firms or families still active today” said Dr Keith McClelland a historian on the research team. “However, such identification will be an inevitable by-product of the kind of name-by-name work we’re doing. It’s important then to contextualise the discoveries we make, so people don’t assume, for example, that Rothschild made his money from slavery. He clearly did not. But we see in his case confirmation of how pervasive slavery had become for Britain’s elites.”

By identifying comprehensively who owned slaves and the role of slave owners in Britain, the project will provide an empirical base of research in which we can root the debate about Britain’s debt to slavery, a debate which too often is polarised between those who deny colonial slavery played any part in shaping modern Britain and those who assert that Britain was built on the blood of slaves.   

The results are likely to define a complex series of linkages between individuals and institutions that were directly or indirectly connected with slavery. 

“The economic benefits of slavery were widely dispersed in British society” explains Professor Catherine Hall, who leads the project. “The language of slavery entered the fabric of everyday life and the cultural effects of being a society that accepted slave-ownership as a ‘normal’ form of property-ownership ran very deep. But this does not mean that it was the only, or indeed the key factor in the making of a modern industrial capitalist society.” 

Early results indicate that the impact of slave-ownership spread beyond London and the major ports to most regions of the UK, and that for example Scots played a disproportionate role in the slave economy.

Clearly, the project’s findings will play into the discussions about reparations for Britain’s historical role in slavery, discussions that have already been taking place in Caribbean and West Africa as well as the African-Caribbean community in the UK. 

In particular, the work may provide a new and firmer basis for explorations of restitution, the surrender of proceeds of wrongful enrichment in the past. The compensation payments were by definition legal but in the US a few firms and institutions have recently taken some responsibility for their involvement in slavery and even seen fit to attempt some restitution. It remains to be seen what will happen in Britain in the years to come. 

More details of Legacies of British slave-ownership are available on the project website www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs or from the Project Administrator Rachel Evans at ucrarme@ucl.ac.uk