When Britain ended slavery in 1834, it paid 46,000 slave owners and gave the 800,000 people they had owned nothing. How the payout worked, and who got the money.
Britain likes to remember that it abolished slavery. It talks much less about how. When Parliament ended slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, it did not pay the people who had been enslaved. It paid the people who had owned them.
The sum was £20 million, about 40 per cent of everything the government spent in a year. It went to some 46,000 slave owners, from absentee aristocrats and bankers in London to clergymen, widows and small investors across Britain. The roughly 800,000 people who had been held in slavery got nothing, and most of them were forced to keep working for their former owners without pay for another four years.
This page explains how the payout worked, who received the money, how you can look up any name yourself, and where in Britain you can still see what it paid for.
By the early 1830s the campaign against slavery had won the argument in Britain, and enslaved people in the Caribbean had shown they would not wait. The great rising in Jamaica at Christmas 1831, led by Samuel Sharpe, convinced many in government that slavery could not last. But the West India planters and merchants were powerful in Parliament, and the idea that property could be taken without payment was unthinkable to most MPs. Enslaved people were legally property.
The compromise was the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Slavery would end on 1 August 1834 in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape Colony, and owners would share £20 million. The figure had first been proposed at £15 million and was raised during the negotiations. Territories run by the East India Company, including India, were left out.
A Slave Compensation Commission in London worked out how much each owner should get, colony by colony, based on the market value of enslaved people in the years before abolition. Owners, and the banks and merchants who held mortgages over them, sent in their claims. Many of the biggest claimants lived in Britain and had never seen the people they were paid for.
On 1 August 1834 the formerly enslaved did not walk free. Under the Act, everyone over the age of six became an "apprentice". They had to go on working for their former owners for about 45 hours a week without wages, in return for food, clothing and housing. Field workers were to serve until 1840, domestic workers until 1838. Punishments carried on, now handed out by special magistrates.
People resisted from the first day. In some colonies they simply refused to work; Antigua and Bermuda skipped apprenticeship altogether. Under pressure from the islands and from campaigners in Britain, the colonies ended the system early. Full freedom finally came on 1 August 1838, still celebrated as Emancipation Day across the Caribbean.
In other words, the owners were paid twice: once in cash from the British taxpayer, and again in four years of unpaid labour from the people they had owned.
The University College London research found that the money went far beyond a few plantation families. Claimants included peers, MPs, bankers, clergy, widows and spinsters living on small inheritances, and merchants in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and many smaller towns. A large share went to people living in Britain itself, and much of it was invested in railways, banks, insurance, land and country houses.
After slavery ended, some owners, Gladstone among them, brought indentured labourers from India to work their plantations instead, under conditions that critics called a new system of slavery.
To raise the money, the government borrowed £15 million in 1835 through a loan underwritten by a syndicate led by the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore. The rest was paid in government stock. Over the next century the loan was rolled into other government bonds. In 1927 what remained was folded into an undated bond, the 4% Consolidated Loan, and that bond was finally redeemed on 1 February 2015, when the government cleared out its old undated debt.
In February 2018 HM Treasury posted a "Did you know?" message on social media, saying that British taxpayers had helped pay to end slavery until 2015. It was deleted after an outcry, because it left out the point: the money was paid to slave owners, not to the people they had enslaved. Nobody knows how much of the original loan was still outstanding in 2015.
Every claim the commission dealt with is now searchable online, for free. The Legacies of British Slavery database at University College London lists the claimants, the number of people claimed for, the sums paid, the plantations, and where the owners lived in Britain. It also traces what they did with the money: the firms, buildings, charities and art collections it went into.
You can search by surname, by colony or by town in Britain. Many people have found their own ancestors in it, on one side or the other. Many Caribbean and African families also use the plantation records to trace their own ancestors, whose names often survive only in the owners' lists.
The contrast between paying owners and paying nothing to the enslaved lies at the heart of the modern call for reparations. The Caribbean Community, CARICOM, set up a reparations commission in 2013 and has a ten-point plan asking Britain and other European states for a formal apology, debt relief, and investment in health, education and cultural institutions.
Successive British governments have expressed "deep sorrow" or "regret" for the slave trade but have refused to apologise formally or pay reparations. Some families have acted on their own. In 2023 descendants of John Gladstone travelled to Guyana to apologise, and the Trevelyan family apologised in Grenada. A group of descendants of slave owners, Heirs of Slavery, now campaigns for reparative justice. Opponents argue that people today cannot be held responsible for what was done nearly two centuries ago; supporters reply that the wealth and the harm both still have living heirs.
The money is still visible in stone. These places tell the story openly:
Guided walks in London, Bristol and Liverpool and day trips to the great houses are an easy way to see this history with someone who knows it. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
The people Britain's slave owners were paid for, or their parents and grandparents, were taken from Africa. Their story starts on the West African coast:
Equiano, Cugoano and the Africans who fought the trade from inside Britain.
Where the money went.
A castle finished as the compensation arrived.
Where Britain's slave trade began.
All our pages on the links between Britain and Africa.
Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:
Search our Network. Start here.