The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (review)

Among the many issues surrounding Parliament’s outlawing of British Caribbean slavery in 1833, the £20 million raised by the British government to compensate slave owners for the loss of property in people has attracted the greatest outrage, not least because the enslaved received no compensation. Controversial as it has been among modern scholars interested in issues of human rights and restorative justice, the compensation given to slave owners was not much of a concern to most contemporary supporters of abolitionism. By the 1820s, the primary issue was not whether compensation should be paid to owners but how much they should receive and by what means. Moreover, whatever the morality of the process, the resulting arrangements provided a remarkable body of information about the nature of British slave ownership and its implications for British society in the age of abolition. This information lies at the heart of Draper’s analysis of slavery and British society. The richness of the data and the quality of analysis that Draper brings to bear on them make his book extremely important for those who seek to understand the relationship between slavery and British history or to pursue other agendas, including reparations.

At the core of Draper’s study is his analysis of the 30,000 awards by the compensation commission to owners of slaves in the British Caribbean during the 1830s and, more specifically, the 4,730 awards, contested and uncontested, of more than £500, which accounted for 80 percent or more of the total slave-compensation payments. Research of other records allowed Draper to identify 96 percent of those who claimed awards exceeding £500 and to begin to explore their life histories, as well as that of their ancestors and their descendants. This research will inform other projects, including one about the legacies of slavery in British society.

From this evidence, Draper is able to expose patterns in British slave ownership and slave compensation c. 1830 that challenge existing assumptions and advance new understandings. Among other things, he shows that proportions of compensation larger than previously assumed were paid to absentee owners in Britain, including rentier as well as mercantile interests; that slave owners and others identified economically with slavery comprised a significant proportion of the most wealthy people in Britain; that widows and other female relatives of slave owners, as well as former slaves, were recipients of compensation; and that owners of slaves in Jamaica and British Guiana received more than 60 percent of the payments. Exploration of these findings and the detailed personal life histories of slave owners that underlay them occupy much of Draper’s study, including the seventeen appendixes that comprise almost one-quarter of the book. Draper’s study of slave ownership in British society is by far the most comprehensive that has appeared to date. It will undoubtedly call into question many of the assumptions about slavery’s impact on British history.

The significance of Draper’s book, however, extends beyond its immediate remit; it deserves attention from those interested in other issues, as well as in interdisciplinary approaches to historical research. Most obviously, the book provides ammunition for those who focus on the history of human rights or on efforts to right “historical wrongs.” Those who study the politics of reform in nineteenth-century Britain will find food for thought in Draper’s discussion of the balance between vested interest and ideology in the voting behavior and other activities of mps with connections to slavery. Given the scale of the funding and number of claimants involved in the compensation scheme, those who research the historical evolution of bureaucracies and the state will also find valuable material in Draper’s assessment of the efficiency of the compensation commission’s organization and operation.

Overall, Draper’s book is a vital reminder not only of the importance of slavery to British social history through the 1830s but also...