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6 European Countries That Paid Millions in Reparations to Slave Owners When Enslaved Black People Were Freed

Posted byBy A Moore | Published on: | Updated on January 31, 2017 CommentsComments (26)

emancipaton

Britain

In 1833 Britain’s Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. The slave trade had been abolished in 1807, but it took another 26 years to effect the emancipation of the people who were enslaved. The British government paid out £20 million to compensate some 3,000 families for the loss of their “property” when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain’s colonies in 1833.

The monetary sum represented a staggering 40 percent of the treasury’s annual spending budget and, in today’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5 billion (US$27.8 billion). Half of the compensation went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain.

After the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the U.S., London reimbursed American Southern planters more than a million dollars for having encouraged Black people to run away from bondage in wartime.

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