Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain by Catherine Hall et al. (review)

For a long time, Britain had a curious amnesia about its long and highly successful history as a slaveholding nation. The fact that Britain was the first nation to end the Atlantic slave trade and that it abolished slavery a generation before the United States (and without a devastating civil war) were points of national pride, which allowed it to forget how significant slavery was in the making of the modern British nation. As the authors of this outstanding collection of essays on British slave ownership and its legacy state, “Slave ownership is virtually invisible in British history” (p. 1). The division in how British history is understood, with the history of the British archipelago artificially separated from the history of the British and their overseas possessions, has contributed to this historical amnesia. Also important is that after slavery was abolished, the beneficiaries of slave-derived wealth, both individuals and institutions, tried their best to ignore the origins of their economic good fortune. Slavery was something that happened elsewhere. And now that it was ended, it could be forgotten about. It was particularly easy to ignore slavery because the region in which slavery was concentrated—the Caribbean—became, in part due to the abolition of slavery itself, an increasingly marginal and neglected part of the world. As the world moved on, the importance of slavery to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain could be quickly elided. As the authors note, slavery became incidental rather than central to stories of Victorian Britain.

But slavery was far from incidental to Victorian Britain. In 1834, just before Victoria ascended the throne and two years after the Great Reform Act, which provided one of the impulses for the end of slavery, the government of Britain distributed £20 million to slaveholders in the colonies and in Britain. That amounted to fully 40 percent of government expenditures in that year. Paying off slaveholders for their enslaved property was equivalent to conducting a small-scale war in financial terms. That money cascaded through British society, boosting merchants and banks, allowing for reinvestment in other parts of empire, and funding important cultural institutions. Slave owners correctly insisted that they were big losers from the emancipation of slaves, as they received but the partial value of their slave property. But that they received anything at all—Southern planters did not in 1865—was remarkable. To get this money, slave owners had to submit details of their slaveholdings and provide personal information. The records created out of the decision to give slave owners financial compensation are a rich resource through which to explore the multiple ways in which West Indian slavery percolated throughout British society. Not everyone, everywhere, of course, was a slave owner, even among Britain’s elite. The authors estimate that perhaps 5–10 percent of Britain’s wealthy individuals derived some of their money from slavery or slaveryrelated activities. But among those who made money out of slavery were many of Britain’s most influential people. William Gladstone, the son of a major Demerara slave owner, Sir John Gladstone, is the most conspicuous beneficiary of West Indian slave-derived money.

These essays come out of the Legacies of British Slaveholding Project, a well-funded research project emanating from University College, London, which is undoubtedly one of the most significant historical projects of this century. The authors are all associated with it and have been heavily involved in the laborious but necessary prosopographical task of finding information about the roughly three thousand slave owners resident in Britain when slavery was abolished. Their findings are truly important. They show that Peter Cain and A. G. Hopkins were onto something when they described British imperialism as a form of “gentry capitalism.”⁵ Not allslave owners were gentry, but few were involved in industry. Most were English, with heavy...