Britain’s Slave Owner Compensation Loan, reparations and tax havenry

It’s hard to believe but it was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished ‘paying off’ the debt which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners in 1835 because of the abolition of slavery. Abolition meant their profiteering from human misery would (gradually) come to an end. Not a penny was paid to those who were enslaved and brutalised.

The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.

The slave owner’s compensation, and absence of any compensation for the enslaved remain at the heart of inequalities in Britain today. That compensation provided further enrichment opportunities to slave-owning families, some of whom remain at the top of the tree in Britain, with generations still being born into that inherited wealth.

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Britain’s Slave Owner Compensation Loan, reparations and tax havenry

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