Legacies of British Slave-Ownership
In a classic and disturbing case of “blame the victim,” Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland begin Legacies of British Slave-Ownership by revealing how the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) referred to slave owners as “vulnerable and the real victims of slavery,” victims because abolition forced them to relinquish their “property” (Hall, Draper and McCelland 2). Before the mention of compensation, slave owners tried to distance themselves from slavery. As they became separated by distance and time, it was easier to feel unconnected to slavery. Many slave owners were or became the British elite and went on to build capital in Great Britain using the money they earned in the West Indies with their free labor force and then later the compensation for abolition. Why were slave owners given money instead of the slaves? The answer is that the British government conceded to the slave owners, many who were property owners and members of parliament. Money took the sting out of their “victimhood.” This compensation was then reinvested in Great Britain in the railroads, religious institutions, schools and the financial institutions in London. In this twisted way, slave owners not only profited when they owned slaves but also when they had to free them.
The money slave owners made when they owned slaves helped them to become wealthy and to begin their legacies, but the compensation money helped them to build those legacies. In Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, Hall, Draper and McClelland describe the different ways legacies were obtained and how they exist today or at least did exist into the twentieth century. Legacies include the “direct, causal relationship between slave-ownership or other financial ties with slavery and the subsequent activities of those who were recipients of slave compensation,” a “less direct connection where . . . slave-ownership shaped, but did not determine or cause . . . the activities and bearings of people who were constitutive of nineteenth-century Britain,” and “the activities of those descendants of slave-owners in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first centuries who continued to shape Britain” (Hall, Draper and McCelland 3). Some compensation money went directly into investments resulting in greater wealth for the investors and for Great Britain. Other compensation money supported widows and children left in financial difficulty after abolition. Some compensation money was exhausted by the twentieth century, but it had left the heirs with a reputation as the elite of Britain. George Orwell is an example of this type of legacy. Orwell’s father spent the inherited compensation money but the family retained, the social and culture capital that the money had given them despite their lack of wealth (Hall, Draper and McCelland 3-4). Orwell is now associated with a famous British writer rather than an aristocratic family.
Families from the first type of legacy managed to avoid their direct connection to slavery and become wealthy land owners in Britain as well as investors in financial, social and cultural institutions without ever being denied because of their association with their source of wealth. Katie Donington writes about the Hibbert family, two of which in 1790 gave evidence to a committee investigating the slave trade. George and Robert Hibbert suggested that £70 million had been “invested by merchants and planters in the plantation economy” and that it “would be irredeemably lost were the source of labour and therefore cultivation to be brought to a halt” (Donington 214). After the slave trade was abolished in 1807, George assumed the next institution to fall would be slavery itself. “He argued that people of respectable position were maintained by the system of slavery; they therefore deserved compensation for the dismantling of their economic stability” (Donington 214). To George Hibbert, slaves were a commodity.
Commodities are considered property. The Hibberts were eventually awarded a total of £103,000 in compensation for the slaves they gave up (Donington 214). Donington explains the Hibberts transformed themselves from cotton merchants to the landed elite. They purchased homes, estates and properties with the wealth they made from owning slaves in the West Indies. “These estates brought the social, political, civic and cultural power. The enabled the Hibberts to cultivate an identity in the traditional mode of paternalistic land ownership. . . . They also became involved in the social, moral and spiritual fabric of the area” (Donington 225). The Hibberts donated money to hospitals, churches, and schools—money earned from trading in human beings.
Some of the Hibbert’s money supported the London Institute that educated in the arts and sciences “with an eye to increasing the productivity and efficiency of commerce and industry both at home and out in the empire” (Donington 231). The Hibberts founded or sponsored other British institutions as well. They became a respectable family among the elites supporting these causes. In order for the Hibberts to rank high in the social hierarchy, they could not really be too closely connected with the slavery. So, when the Hibberts realized that slavery was going to be abolished, they began to distance themselves so they could maintain their position in society, but recent research shows that their legacies are tainted.
The Hibberts were not the only British slave owners who created this distance for the sake of their reputation. The British were often quite removed from slavery since most of it occurred in the British West Indies. Besides distancing themselves both physically and morally from slavery, slave owners commercialized slavery to the point that it seemed just another run-of-the-mill industry. Nicholas Draper in History Workshop Journal says, “Slave-ownership had become commoditized, converted into financial property and conveyed between generations and genders by the full range of available techniques of management and control governing other types of property” (Draper 77). Slaves were inherited and the heirs often lived in Great Britain not in the West Indies where the slaves lived. That distance made it easier for slave owners to “forget” that they were supported by an immoral industry. However, when the compensation was offered, those who had distanced themselves were more than happy to claim the ownership and the money.
Finally, the main reason British slave owners were able to create the legacies they did with the compensation money was because they were the people who got to decide who would receive the money. “Over a hundred MPs who sat in Parliament between 1820 and 1835 have been identified in the records of the Compensation Commission, of whom some two-thirds were owners and the remainder trustees or executors” (Draper 90). This fact probably best answers the question of how it came to be that the slave owners were compensated for their losses rather than the slaves, and how they were then able to invest that compensation into some of the institutions of Great Britain that make it a powerful and wealthy nation today. Many of the distant slave owners who lived in Great Britain were far removed from the actual practice, and it may not have even occurred to them that their wealth came from slavery, but it certainly occurred to them when they were offered money to compensate for the loss of it. The legacy now is the shame that their descendants must bear.
Works Cited
Donington, Katie. "Transforming capital: slavery, family, commerce and the making of the Hibbert family." Hall, Catherine, et al. Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 203-243. Print. 21 October 2019.
Draper, Nick. "Possessing Slaves': Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the Time of Emancipation 1834-40." History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 74-102. JSTOR. 21 October 2019. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472936 >.
Hall, Catherine, et al. "Introduction." Hall, Catherine, et al. Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 1-9. Print. 21 October 2019.
