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When slavery was abolished in parts of the British Empire in the 19th century, the families of English slave owners were compensated. Nearly 200 years later, a family seeks to make amends to a community that has benefited from forced labor.
Members of the Trevelyan family established a £100,000 ($119,479) fund aimed at researching the economic impact of ongoing slavery in the eastern Caribbean, and established a reparations research fund at the University of the West Indies. bottom. The fund will be formally launched in Grenada on 27th February by Sir Hilary Beckles, Chairman of the Caribbean Reparations Commission.
According to the Center for the Study of English Slavery at University College London, in 1835 the Trevelyan family received £26,989 (equivalent to $3.2 million today) in compensation for the abolition of slavery by the British government. slave ownership.
A descendant of the Trevelyan family, John Dower conducted a genealogical investigation when he discovered that he was co-owner of a family that owned 1,004 slaves on his six plantations in the former British colony of Grenada. I was doing “I didn’t know. Turns out no one in the family knew about it. It was erased from the family history,” Dower told The Guardian. “I was more upset than shocked. I felt like a benevolent family of civil servants.”
The Trevelyans also apologized to King Charles III for the royal family’s involvement in the slave trade and urged the British government to begin negotiations for reparations with the former Caribbean colonies.
How the British Government Compensated Slave Owners
The British Empire abolished slavery in most of its colonies (except present-day Sri Lanka and St. Helena) with her Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 enacted the following year. This law included a plan to compensate slave owners for their lost “property.” The government borrowed from banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the bankers his £20 million (equivalent to his $2.4 billion today), a staggering 40% of his budget at the time. rice field. Moses Montefiore.
One of his supporters of slaveholder compensation was Sir John Gladstone, British MP and former president of the West India Society, who helped calculate compensation for slaveholders in the British colonies. Gladstone, himself a slave owner, received the bulk of the compensation of over £93,526 (equivalent to $11.5 million today) for his 2,039 slaves. His son, William Gladstone, was elected prime minister of the country decades later.
His £20m debt was paid off in full in 2015, according to the UK Treasury.
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