- há 9 horas
When slavery was abolished in Britain, its government made the extraordinary choice of compensating slave-owners for their loss of ‘property’. Historian David Olusoga uncovers the untold story of Britain’s slave trade – and an empire founded on its profits.
Categoria
📚
AprendizadoTranscrição
00:06For 200 years, slavery was a powerful engine that drove the British economy.
00:13It allowed Britain's slave owners to amass extraordinary personal wealth.
00:22The abolition of slavery in 1834 is often remembered as a great triumph of British liberalism.
00:35But new research, based on a vast collection of documents at the National Archives, is revealing a darker side to
00:43the story of abolition.
00:46For almost two centuries, these documents, these ledgers and these letters have been here in the archive.
00:53And for the most part, they've just been forgotten about, even by historians.
00:58But what they represent is the final record, the final act of accountancy of a system that turned people into
01:05property.
01:08The documents reveal that at the heart of the abolition settlement was an enormous compensation payment.
01:16But this money wasn't paid to the slaves.
01:23There are tens of thousands of pages, 46,000 individual entries.
01:28And the names in these books are the names of the slave owners.
01:32They were drawn out of the shadows by the lure of money.
01:36Money that was to be paid to them by the British government as compensation for the loss of their human
01:42property.
01:46The records show that the slave owners lived all over Britain.
01:51And the total settlement was the equivalent of 17 billion pounds today, to be shared between every slave owner who
01:59registered a successful claim.
02:02There's a compensation claim from the Reverend James Hamilton for 216 slaves, who were valued at 40,083 pounds.
02:13Here is Harriet Trevelyan, who's marked here as a widow, 4,499 pounds, 16 shillings.
02:20The new research is shining a light on how Britain's slave owners waged a decades-long battle against the forces
02:27of abolition.
02:30A struggle that involved fierce propaganda wars, slave rebellions and a moral crusade against brutality.
02:42And at the end of it all, the slave owners walked away with the biggest bailout in British history.
02:50To some extent, we've allowed the slave owners to remain hidden away in the shadows of history.
02:57And by not telling their stories, we've failed to fully confront the extent to which slavery and slave money seeped
03:04into the lifeblood of the nation.
03:07How it changed Britain and the extent to which it built the country we live in today.
03:12How it changed Britain and the extent to which it built the country we live in today.
03:42This is a unique record.
03:43It names every British slave owner who claimed compensation when slavery was abolished in 1834.
03:53Over 40,000 of the slave owners listed here lived thousands of miles away, spread around the British Empire.
04:00Over 3,000 of them lived in Britain, but they owned 50% of all the slaves.
04:08The compensation claims also reveal how much money each slave owner received.
04:16In this return, which is for the county of Middlesex on the island of Jamaica, and in the parish of
04:23Clarendon is a return for George Hibbert.
04:26This is for the Hulse Hall plantation, which is owned jointly, it seems, by several members of the Hibbert family.
04:32This plantation has 172 slaves that are valued at £3,523, 11 shillings and 9 pence.
04:42Together, they were awarded between them over £103,000, which is more than £80 million in today's money.
04:53The revelation that these enormous sums were paid out to compensate the slave owners is surprising enough.
05:04But new work by a team of historians from University College London is revealing more.
05:32how the wealth from slavery spread across the British Isles.
05:37And it's divided into four sections.
05:39And how the government's compensation payout helped transform the economy and culture of the nation.
05:47What we wanted to do was to look at all the different ways in which slave owners in Britain transmitted
05:53slavery into Britain through their activities.
05:57Through the wealth that they accumulated, but then the ways in which they spent the money in the UK.
06:05And that's why it's so important for the present to make people understand the way in which slavery figures in
06:12our collective history.
06:14Not just the history of white people, not just the history of black people, the history of all of us.
06:22The compensation records remind us how Britain abolished slavery.
06:27And they also reveal that the slave owners turned the threat of financial ruin into a multi-million pound handout.
06:45The debate about compensation began in the late 18th century,
06:49when Britain's abolition movement was campaigning to bring an end to the transatlantic slave trade.
06:59Clapham, in South London, was home to the abolitionist leader.
07:04He led them to their first victory in 1807, the abolition of the slave trade.
07:11He's become the most famous name in the story of slavery, William Wilberforce.
07:21These are the stained glass windows in Wilberforce's church in Clapham.
07:26And what they depict are the lives of the saints, not the biblical saints, but the saints of abolition.
07:32And Wilberforce is standing there with what you presume is the 1807 act,
07:36the act he spent most of his life fighting to push through Parliament.
07:42This church is rightly proud of the fact that William Wilberforce and the other abolitionists prayed and worshipped in these
07:49pews.
07:50But what's been forgotten is that sitting just a few metres away, listening to the same hymns, the same sermons,
07:57was another influential and prominent member of the congregation.
08:02George Hibbert.
08:05George Hibbert was a slave owner and a leading pro-slavery advocate.
08:11When the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, Hibbert argued that it was a dangerous assault on Britain's economic power.
08:20And he demanded compensation for the economic damage it would cause the slave owners.
08:28The abolitionists and the government rejected his appeal.
08:33He was told that if any compensation was due, it was due to the people of Africa.
08:39The abolitionists won this battle, but the war was far from over.
08:43Hundreds of thousands of Africans were still living in slavery across the British Empire.
08:49The abolitionists hoped that the end of the transatlantic slave trade would encourage slave owners to take better care of
08:57their slaves.
08:58But some were already campaigning for the abolition of slavery itself.
09:06The coming battle was to be fought in Parliament, but also in the churches.
09:10It was a battle of ideas, but it was also a struggle for British public opinion.
09:14For the slaves, 5,000 miles away in the Caribbean, it all too often became a violent struggle,
09:21of uprisings followed by brutal repressions.
09:24But to make sense of why it was that the slave owners were so determined to fight on,
09:30you have to understand just what it was that they were trying to defend.
09:47Guiana, on the Caribbean coast of South America, a late addition to Britain's colonial empire in the West Indies.
10:01After the trade in slaves from Africa was outlawed, British slave owners came here in search of an alternative source
10:08of slave labour.
10:12The Dutch had already been here for two centuries, growing cotton and coffee, and had built up a large slave
10:19population.
10:24The British spotted an opportunity to use the existing workforce to cultivate something far more lucrative.
10:35What drew the British here was what lies on either bank of this river.
10:39Thousands and thousands of acres of extremely fertile soil.
10:43Soil that was perfect for growing sugar.
10:45And it was this river that was to give its name to the very high quality sugar that came off
10:50these cane fields.
10:51Yes, Demerara.
10:55Demerara sugar offered an opportunity to make bigger profits than anywhere else in the British Caribbean.
11:02And slavery was the only way to maximise these profits.
11:05It was the only way to make bigger profits.
11:07It was the only way to make bigger profits.
11:14It was the only way to make bigger profits.
11:15Records held in the Guyana National Archives show how British slave owners managed to expand their business after the transatlantic
11:24slave trade had been outlawed.
11:26These are the legal and financial documents recording the sale of Dutch plantations to new British owners.
11:34Men who planned to turn the land over to sugar production.
11:39Professor Winston McGowan has been studying the economics of slavery in Guyana.
11:45So this is a sale conducted in Demerara.
11:4828th of June, 1815.
11:501815.
11:51So, not long after the slave trade's been abolished.
11:56Yeah, this is a document that gives assets to a plantation when it's been sold.
12:00And here it lists the slaves who are part of the plantation.
12:05The most valuable is Pompey.
12:073,000 guilders.
12:093,000 guilders.
12:10So they're still transacting in Dutch guilders.
12:13Then you have Adam.
12:14Adam is trying to 200 guilders.
12:17They have Pascal, 2,000 guilders.
12:20And that value is related to physical health.
12:23It might be related to skills they have.
12:25If somebody's a tradesman or somebody who works in a factory.
12:29So all the most expensive slaves here with the highest value of them are going to be young men at
12:33the prime of their lives.
12:35Yes.
12:35And down here at the bottom is Mary Ann.
12:38Yes.
12:39Who's only worth 150 guilders.
12:41So there would either be a child or a very old woman who is not considered to have much use
12:46on the plantation.
12:47So all the slaves on this plantation in Demerara are valued at 26,060 Dutch guilders.
12:54Yeah.
12:55And that's an important element in the assets of the plantation.
12:58And it also lists here the profit and the losses for the plantation.
13:02So whoever's buying this from his Dutch owner wants to know everything.
13:05And the new purchaser would seem to have increasing profits.
13:08So the British buyer of this plantation is hoping to earn far more than the 51,070 guilders that its
13:15Dutch owner has been making so far.
13:17And he certainly will make more than that.
13:18If he makes a change to sugar.
13:20Yeah.
13:20And that's the critical thing.
13:21Yeah, that's a very important thing then.
13:23What sort of picture do they paint of the financial state of Guyana in the early 19th century?
13:29The picture of Guyana is a very profitable place.
13:31It's an attractive place for investment.
13:33It also tells you too that Guyana managed to maintain its slave population.
13:40Even though the slave trade had been abolished.
13:43Because you could only have a profitable agricultural business if you had labour.
13:47Labour and capital were the two pivotal things.
13:49And Guyana had both at 1807.
13:57By 1820 there were over 300 British sugar plantations in Guyana.
14:03Worked by over 100,000 slaves.
14:11The compensation records confirm that a new generation of British slave owners became rich here.
14:18Long after the end of the slave trade.
14:24Among the investors who were pouring their money into Guyana in the early 19th century were a family of Scottish
14:30traders.
14:31They bought plantations including this place, which they would really struggle to recognise today.
14:37This is the modern incarnation of the Wales plantation, which was the property of John Gladstone.
14:43Now he was the father of William Hewitt Gladstone, who went on to become Prime Minister.
14:47This place made Gladstone a fortune.
14:51But what he worried about was what all the plantation owners here in Guyana worried about.
14:55Labour.
15:02Gladstone was right to be worried.
15:04Thirteen years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, the abolitionists' hopes that the slave owners would be forced
15:12to take better care of enslaved people had come to nothing.
15:17Brutality was hardwired into the slave system.
15:21This is the slave register for Demerara in Guyana, for all the plantations that run alongside the Demerara River.
15:29And here is the entry for the Wales plantation.
15:35And this register gives the whole number of slaves attached to the plantation Wales on the 31st of May, 1820.
15:43And it gives that number as 364.
15:46Now, three years earlier, the previous registration, the census of slaves, had taken place at the Wales plantation.
15:52And at that time, there had been 396 slaves living on the plantation.
15:58And as the register says, that means that 53 have died because only 16 have been born.
16:05So in three years, on the Wales plantation, there's been a mortality rate of 13%.
16:12And mortality rates like that aren't unique to this plantation.
16:17Many of the plantations in this book have similar or higher mortality rates.
16:22And what that tells you, what that proves, is that even in the 1820s, even after the end of the
16:28slave trade,
16:29slavery was still a system that consumed the lives of human beings at an appalling rate.
16:46The mortality rates were a reflection of the physical demands of sugar cultivation itself.
16:56You can get a sense of what it must have been like by visiting the fields of the Wales plantation
17:02today.
17:22This is a scene that really hasn't changed since the 18th century.
17:26I've got a collection of old prints from old Victorian and Georgian newspapers that show the harvesting of sugarcane by
17:33hand.
17:34And it's almost identical.
17:36It is possible these days to harvest sugarcane using machines, but these fields were all laid out during the age
17:43of slavery.
17:43So it's difficult to get the machines in here. Men still have to come into these fields with machete and
17:50cut the cane by hand.
17:53These guys are workers in a state-owned industry. They're relatively well paid. They're relatively well looked after.
18:02But to me, slavery and sugar are so intertwined that it's disturbing to see sugarcane being harvested.
18:10It just is so interwoven with the idea of slavery and the brutality of slavery.
18:21It's hard to imagine this as a 21st century scene in a 21st century industry.
18:28Everything about it belongs in the 18th century. The steel barges that even have oxen that pull the barges.
18:35Hearing these sounds, seeing these scenes, it seems like the rebirth, the ghosts of the slaves who worked these fields
18:43are still with us.
18:50Adam is 29. There's a cooper.
18:55Thomas, 33. Carpenter.
18:59Simon, 41. Fieldhand.
19:03Lavinia, 36.
19:04Thomas, 33.
19:06Rebecca, Samson.
19:08Charlotte, 38.
19:09And then every now and then you look through and you see a child, five.
19:14Catherine, two and a half.
19:18Joanna, just five months.
19:29The evidence of continued brutality revealed by the slave registers inspired a resurgence of the abolitionist movement.
19:38Its goal was now the abolition of slavery itself.
19:49Opposing the abolitionists were some of the richest and the most powerful men in the country.
19:53The men who had the most to lose from the abolition of slavery.
19:56And this group of slave owners and their supporters gathered in these streets in central London to plan the defense
20:02of slavery.
20:03And the man orchestrating this campaign of this pro-slavery lobby was the slave owner who shared a church with
20:10William Wilberforce, George Hibbert.
20:15Historian Kate Donington has been investigating the tactics used by the slave owners in this battle against the abolitionists.
20:27George Hibbert is the leading member of one of what was described as the first families in the Jamaica trade.
20:33He was involved with the sale of sugar.
20:37He was involved with the sourcing of insurance.
20:39But he was also a leading figure in the pro-slavery lobby itself.
20:42So by the 1820s a lot of his job is defending slavery, defending this institution in a PR battle really.
20:51That's right, we can think of him as I suppose a sort of forerunner of the spin doctor.
20:56The slave owners are gathering here because they're in a battle about the future of slavery.
21:01They're in a battle that's just about to explode and actually the pro-slavery lobby are very much a tactical
21:08lobby.
21:09They try to meet the abolitionists on the ground of humanitarianism and they present an image of the benevolent planter,
21:16the paternal planter,
21:17the planter who is invested in Christianising and so-called civilising the enslaved.
21:24What does it say about the character of black people to justify slavery?
21:28The enslaved are consistently represented as savage, uncivilised, brutal, childlike as well,
21:36in need of either, you know, the kind of the discipline of plantation life,
21:43or alternatively the guiding hand of civilisation, culture and Christianity.
21:55In the summer of 1823, rumours that abolition was being discussed in London reached Guyana.
22:05The slaves hurled themselves into the struggle for freedom.
22:17On the 18th of August, over 10,000 slaves downed tools.
22:28They torched the cane fields, seized dozens of plantations and imprisoned slave owners in their houses.
22:38This was a well-organised and largely non-violent protest.
22:46The reaction of the governor was the opposite.
22:49He called up the local regiment and a white militia and together they marched on the plantations.
22:55There they confronted the rebels using muskets.
22:58Most of the slaves only had swords and 250 of them were killed.
23:05The ringleaders were deported or executed.
23:10Their dismembered bodies left hanging to deter further disobedience.
23:19Back in Britain, the slave owners and their supporters cranked up the propaganda machine.
23:26In a series of public letters, John Gladstone denied that the slave owners were in any way responsible for the
23:33rebellion.
23:36Gladstone claims that the conditions in the colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Barbice,
23:41the three parts of Guyana, are in fact very good and that the slaves have no reason to rebel.
23:46He says they are supplied with more food than they can consume,
23:50that they are well provided with clothing suitable for the climate and their situation,
23:55that they have the Sabbath and other holidays to dispose of for the purposes of religion, if so inclined.
24:02But this same argument is perhaps more effectively applied in this.
24:07This is a satirical caricature by George Cruikshank, who was the great satirist of the early 19th century.
24:14The title is John Bull taking a clear view of the Negro slavery question.
24:20And this is an image of two halves, really.
24:23On the right is the Caribbean, luxuriating under a tropical sun.
24:28And on the left is Britain.
24:31Beside John Bull is poor Pat, who is an English labourer who is unemployed and hungry.
24:38And no one is taking any notice of Pat, because everybody in England, in Cruikshank's image, is focusing on the
24:45issue of slavery.
24:46Behind him is an abolitionist, a thin, humourless looking man, who is encouraging children to sign petitions.
24:53The petition was the favoured, the ingenious campaigning tool of the abolitionist movement.
24:58And here Cruikshank's implying that the people who are signing the petitions are young and naive, don't really understand the
25:05issues, and they can't vote anyway, so their opinions don't really matter.
25:09The only person in this painting who's not looking at the abolitionists is John Bull himself, who's looking through this
25:17telescope, which is, in theory, pointing towards the Caribbean.
25:21But what he's really seeing is a propaganda picture, a picture of a slave being whipped, that's being pushed in
25:27front of the telescope by another of the abolitionists.
25:30And John Bull is again, like everybody else, shocked at this supposed horror of slavery.
25:35But the reality that Cruikshanks wants us to consider, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Caribbean, is
25:41a world in which the black slaves aren't repressed or beaten or tortured or whipped.
25:47But they're cavorting under the sun, they've clearly been drinking rum, they're chubby and overweight because they're so well fed.
25:55What George Cruikshank is essentially saying is that, by becoming obsessed with the supposed horrors of Negro slavery,
26:04the country's taken its eye off the people that really should care about, which are the poor and the unemployed
26:10and the destitute of Britain itself.
26:14And that this vision, this image of slavery, that the abolitionists have pushed and rammed down everyone's throats, is a
26:21myth.
26:28By the early 1830s, despite all their attempts to dismiss the horrors of slavery, the slave owners were losing the
26:37battle.
26:37It was the abolitionists, inspired by their religious faith and humanitarian values, who had won the hearts and minds of
26:46the British public.
26:49They had deluged Parliament with petitions, over 5,000 of them, calling for abolition.
26:54They contained over 1.5 million signatures, a figure far higher than the electorate itself.
27:02And in 1832, the government finally began to draft plans for the abolition of slavery.
27:18The slave owners had lost the moral argument.
27:22They were facing defeat and economic ruin.
27:26So they turned to their other argument, compensation.
27:33Here at the Parliamentary Archives, you can see how they exploited the law to justify their case.
27:40Many of the acts in this room are about the same thing. Property.
27:45This act, as it says here, it was designed for the dividing, allotting and inter-closing of lands.
27:52Over here, I have one of the estate acts.
27:57This one was designed to give the Duke of Norfolk the right to make certain leases.
28:08Just over half of all the acts passed in Britain in the 18th century were, in one way or another,
28:14property acts.
28:16Property was sacred to the British.
28:18And the idea that the government or anybody else could deprive you of your property was abhorrent.
28:23So if you want to understand why it was that, in the end, the key to ending slavery was to
28:29compensate the slave owners,
28:31then you have to understand what these acts and what this room is trying to tell us.
28:36That property and the rights to property ran at the very heart of British culture and British law.
28:45The slave owners argued that the emancipation of the slaves amounted to the confiscation of their property.
28:54This, they claimed, was an assault on their legal rights
28:58that could also devastate the British economy.
29:01It was an idea that won widespread political support.
29:06Compensation was soon being presented as a non-negotiable precondition for emancipation.
29:15For the abolitionists, there was within this concept of compensation the most appalling dilemma.
29:22If the only way to end slavery was to pay the slave owners compensation for the loss of their property,
29:29then the abolitionists had to accept that the slaves were property,
29:34and that human beings, made by God, in His image, and endowed with an immortal soul,
29:39could somehow be made into property, into things.
29:42But that was the concept they'd spent half a century denouncing and campaigning against.
29:48At the very end of their moral crusade, in the last act of this great drama,
29:54they had no choice, they were given no choice, by the slave owners,
29:58but to abandon, just for a moment, their most cherished and fundamental principle.
30:17By 1833, it was clear that emancipation could only be achieved if it was linked to compensation.
30:31Nick Draper, an economic historian, has been studying how the government put a price on a system
30:37that involved over 800,000 slaves, spread across the British Empire.
30:43The economics of slavery are very different in the different colonies by this point.
30:48I can illustrate it by showing you this.
30:51The slave compensation commissioners, who were appointed to manage the compensation,
30:56tried to recreate, between 1822 and 1830, all the slave sales that they could find.
31:02And they calculated the averages.
31:03And you can see, for example, that Jamaica, the average value of an enslaved person,
31:09man, woman or child, was £44.15.
31:13In British Ghana, by contrast, it's £11.11 per head.
31:18And the slaves are more valuable in Guyana, because Guyana is a more profitable colony.
31:23Absolutely.
31:23And so when it comes to compensation, the slave owners in colonies like Guyana
31:27really want an economic reflection of the value of their slaves,
31:31not some sort of overall valuation of each slave equally.
31:34And that's exactly what they get.
31:39The government began by putting £15 million on the table, the equivalent of about £12 billion today,
31:48considerably less than the slave owners hoped for.
31:51But it was a far better deal than the one proposed for the slaves themselves.
31:56They would receive no compensation.
32:00And in order to appease the slave owners, the government proposed a transitional apprenticeship system.
32:08The slaves would be forced to continue working for another 12 years without pay.
32:15And then the abolitionists intervene.
32:17And Thomas Val Buxton, who's leading the abolitionist component in the House of Commons,
32:22comes back to the government and says,
32:24we can't do 12 years.
32:26And so the government does recalve it, they sit down again,
32:29and they raise the amount of the grant to £20 million,
32:32and they shorten the apprenticeship period to six years for agricultural workers,
32:36four years for domestic workers.
32:38And that, then, is the final package that is agreed.
32:45The Treasury now faced a new challenge.
32:48How to raise that £20 million?
32:51Britain in the 1830s is the most indebted it's ever been.
32:55It's more indebted than we are today, post the banking crisis.
32:58And that's something.
33:00Because, unlike today, there's no income tax in the 1830s.
33:04So, taxes raised primarily through consumption taxes.
33:08The lower your income, the higher a portion of that income it takes
33:12to buy any given commodity to pay the tax on it.
33:15So they hurt the poor the most?
33:17That's what they intended to do.
33:21£20 million.
33:22The equivalent of around £17 billion in today's money.
33:26It represented 40% of the total government national expenditure for the year 1834.
33:34So, no matter how you look at it,
33:36it's a vast amount of money paid to a relatively small number of people.
33:40The bank bailout is the closest that we've really come, I think,
33:44to seeing this form of state-sponsored transfer payment.
33:48And it's made for the same reasons.
33:50Again, the West Indian system, the slave system, supports networks of credit in Britain
33:55that are central to Britain's wellbeing.
33:58And the collapse of those credit systems would have been a very significant thing
34:03for the city of London and for Britain as a whole.
34:05So, like the banks, the slave owners, the slave system is too big to fail in the 1830s?
34:11It's too big to have it go down in an uncontrolled manner.
34:14There's no question about that.
34:22The slave compensation commission records include over 20 volumes
34:27documenting the tens of thousands of claims and counterclaims
34:30that came in from the slave owners across the empire.
34:36This represents the largest, most complex financial payout in British history.
34:43And this mammoth task was undertaken at a time when there was nothing that we would recognise as a civil
34:50service.
34:51It all fell to a team of just ten men.
34:56They were called the Slave Compensation Commission, and they worked in this building in Whitehall, now the Wales Office.
35:07The task that confronted the Slave Compensation Commission, the men who met in this building, was to find a way
35:13that was fair and transparent and efficient,
35:16distributing that £20 million, that £17 billion in today's money.
35:21The evidence of how they went about doing that can be seen in this document.
35:26This is a copy of the London Gazette, which is the official journal of the British government.
35:31This edition's from 1834.
35:33To somebody opening this, this was modern, it was shockingly modern.
35:38And the most modern aspect of this process is the fact that a claim is submitted through a form.
35:45Now, it's almost impossible to go a week of your life in the 21st century without having to fill in
35:51some sort of form.
35:52But this was a very new and radical idea in the 1830s, because what a form does is it standardises.
35:59Everybody, no matter who they are, fills in the details, puts numbers in columns, and these rules apply equally to
36:07everybody.
36:09This is a very bureaucratic process, being imposed upon a society in which the privileged and the influential are used
36:17to the idea that there's one rule for them and another for everybody else.
36:21To the late Georgian mindset, this was a real affront, a system that couldn't be negotiated with, that didn't care
36:28about influence or birth or wealth or privilege.
36:34Whatever objections the slave owners might have had to form filling, they were outweighed by the prospect of substantial compensation.
36:44In the months following abolition, claim forms started arriving at the commission in their tens of thousands.
36:52Bernard Tilliot.
36:53Boyd Alexander.
36:54Louis Ferrier.
36:55William Maxwell Alexander.
36:56Edward Miller Adele.
36:58William Barron.
36:59Every slave owner who came forward is recorded in the National Archives, all $46,000.
37:05Henry Blanche.
37:06From the wealthiest to the most humble, they're all listed, along with the amounts they were paid.
37:12This is a unique census of slave ownership at the very moment that slavery across the British Empire was finally
37:19abolished.
37:24In this return is a claim for the Gladstone family.
37:27John Gladstone claims 687 for the Vredenhu plantation in Guyana, on which there are 415 slaves valued at £22,443,
37:3919 shillings and 11 pence.
37:41But we know that when all his plantations were counted together, John Gladstone owned over 2,500 slaves and that
37:48they were valued at over £105,000.
37:52Now that's the largest compensation payout you're going to find in any of these registers.
37:56And in today's money, that equates to about 80 million pounds.
38:02In the returns for the island of Barbados, there is listed a claim at the other end of the scale.
38:09This is a return for the Reverend Wren Dixon Hamden, who owned a single slave in Barbados, and that one
38:16individual was valued at £1,18 shillings and 10 pence.
38:22This is the smallest claim that was awarded to any British resident slave owner in all of these ledgers.
38:34The team at University College London have been uncovering just how widespread slave ownership was.
38:43We were surprised by how many, quote, ordinary Britons owned enslaved people.
38:51It's not just London, it's not just Bristol, it's Scotland, it's Northumberland, it's everywhere that there are slave owners.
38:58And we were astonished at the numbers of women slave owners that there were.
39:06The historians have been finding other, more unexpected slave owners hiding within the records.
39:15At first glance, Richard Godson's claim for £5,018 doesn't seem particularly unusual.
39:23Until you learn that Richard Godson was an abolitionist MP.
39:27In 1832, he had claimed to scorn the idea of having property in his fellow subjects.
39:35This record is for John Stuart.
39:38He was awarded over £25,000.
39:41It turns out that he himself was of mixed race, the descendant of a slave mother.
39:50But even more remarkable are the thousands of slave owners' letters to the commission.
39:54Most of them attempt to justify or maximise their claims.
40:02These are the letters of a woman called Dorothy Little,
40:05who was a widow living in Clifton, which is the posh part of Bristol,
40:09and who in the 1830s was in her 70s.
40:12Dorothy had inherited 14 slaves from her husband, who died three decades earlier.
40:18And they lived in Jamaica.
40:19And through the labours and the pains of those 14 slaves, she derived most of her income.
40:27The letters show how Little tries to talk up the value of her slaves to get as much compensation as
40:34possible.
40:35To the commissioners of the West India Compensation Committee.
40:40Gentlemen, I have no relation or friend now in the island whom I can flatter myself will feel any great
40:47interest in my welfare.
40:48I am anxious to ascertain if there is any prospect of my getting a full and fair compensation for my
40:54unattached field labourers.
40:55I am fearful that they will be put down as inferior labourers, because out of the whole of their number,
41:0114, 10 are female.
41:04But from that very circumstance they have been more valuable to me than if they had been strong men,
41:10for they have more than doubled their original number, and of course doubled my income.
41:14So she started out with seven slaves who have reproduced and she now has 14.
41:20So she disagrees with the valuation principle that strong field labourers, men, are valued more than women.
41:26Her story is one of many, of people who have become trapped to some extent in the economics of slavery,
41:32but also they have got trapped in their minds in thinking about slavery,
41:36thinking about themselves and the slaves as existing on different moral planes.
41:40Dorothy, honestly, from her letters, believes or at least implies that she is the victim.
41:51Dorothy Little's attempts to influence the commission failed.
41:55She received no more than she was due, according to the same formula
41:59that was strictly applied to every slave owner.
42:07The work of the Slave Compensation Commission was an extraordinary feat of bureaucracy.
42:13In the space of little more than four years, they processed the vast majority of the 46,000 claims.
42:20By the end, just 50,000 pounds of the 20 million made available was left unclaimed.
42:28And the commission left behind a powerful legacy, a blueprint for the running of an efficient government bureaucracy,
42:36one of the foundations of the modern British state.
42:42Today, Number 19 Old Jewry in the City of London is home to the Bank of China.
42:48But in the 1830s, it housed the National Debt Office.
42:53The slave owners and their agents came here in their tens of thousands to collect their compensation.
43:04In one sense, this is where British slavery ends.
43:07A story that begins in the 16th century with English pirates off the coast of West Africa ends here,
43:14on this street and in the building that used to stand on this site.
43:17Because this is where the slave owners had to come to get their money.
43:21Slave compensation was paid out in the form of cheques,
43:24and those cheques were handed out directly to the slave owners or their agents.
43:28And there is this period between the autumn of 1835 and the spring of 1836,
43:34when this street was packed, was lined with queues of slave owners and agents,
43:38waiting to get inside and get their hands on their cheques.
43:42And despite all the bureaucratic efficiency, despite all the work of the slave compensation commission,
43:47there is, to me, something grubby about this part of the process.
43:52This doesn't feel like a country absolving itself of the great sin of slavery.
43:56This feels like a government handout.
43:58This feels like a bailout of a privileged minority.
44:01But there is an absolutely incredible irony about the fact that it was to this street that the slave owners
44:08had to come.
44:09Because, beside number 19, old jury, was the building that stood here at number 18.
44:15And in the 1780s, it was here that the abolitionist movement had rented their very first suite of offices.
44:22This is where the crusade against the slave trade and then slavery had first begun.
44:26But it's absolutely certain that that crusade would not have reached the point of victory in the 1830s
44:33if it hadn't been for the huge amounts of money that poured out of this building.
44:44The compensation records tell us precisely how much money was paid out to Britain's slave owners.
44:50What they don't tell us is what happened next.
44:56But the historians from UCL have picked up the paper trail.
45:01They've cross-referenced the names on the compensation records with financial archives and the lists of national institutions
45:09to reveal how the profits from slavery helped shape the nation we live in today.
45:25These documents are a list of the investors in the Grand Junction Railway.
45:29That was a new railway scheme of the 1830s that was designed to link the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and
45:35the Midlands.
45:36This is a list of persons holding 100 shares and upwards.
45:40So these are the big players, the big investors.
45:43And on the list, among the names, we find John Gladstone.
45:47He's bought 165 of the £100 shares and 102 of the £50 shares.
45:53And he's joined in this investment by his son, William Hewitt Gladstone, the future Prime Minister.
46:00Altogether, the Gladstone family's total investment in the Grand Junction Railway came to a figure that in today's money would
46:06be around £26 million.
46:08And that makes them one of the biggest investors in this line.
46:14Less than five years after receiving the equivalent of £80 million in compensation, the Gladstones were investing tens of millions
46:22in the building of Britain's infrastructure.
46:25The Grand Junction Railway is now part of the West Coast Main Line.
46:30It's just one of dozens of railway lines we still use today that were partly financed by profits raised by
46:38slavery.
46:39It's simply not possible to fully explain Britain's rapid industrialisation in the 19th century without acknowledging the part that slave
46:49money played.
46:53The UCL team has discovered evidence of hundreds of slave owners investing hundreds of millions of pounds in infrastructure and
47:01industry.
47:02While profits from slavery can also be found embedded in the world of finance.
47:12And by drawing slave owners out into the light, does the slave compensation process help us trace that DNA of
47:21slave money as it spreads into the wider economy?
47:24The 1830s is characterised by a whole series of new financial developments at the very end of slavery into which
47:31we can see slave owners diversify or evolve.
47:35George Hibbert's son, for example, George Hibbert Jr. is an early director of a company called Imperial Life.
47:40So the Imperial Life business as such no longer exists as a brand name or as a business, but it
47:45became part of the consolidation of the British insurance industry that took place in the 20th century and was one
47:51of the predecessor firms of what we now know as Aviva.
47:53From here you can see the NatWest Tower. NatWest is the combination of dozens and dozens of provincial banks. Those
48:02banks would have been part of the slave economy without a doubt in the 18th century.
48:07And in the slave compensation records we can see those predecessor firms, particularly Smith Payne and Smith was an important
48:12financial institution at the time.
48:14Embedded within both the physical structures and the business structures are the legacies of slavery.
48:24The slave compensation records also show how slave-generated wealth built many of the great estates that shape our countryside.
48:35And the UCL team have discovered that many of the members, fellows and trustees of Britain's national institutions can be
48:43traced back to the compensation records.
48:46The Royal Society, the National Gallery and the British Museum are among the many organisations with links to the slave
48:55owners.
49:01George Hibbert himself was co-founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
49:08I am going to meet one of his descendants at another of the Hibbert Legacies, the West India Dock in
49:14East London.
49:25You really do look like him.
49:27It's weird, isn't it?
49:29This is George Hibbert.
49:31That's it, yes.
49:31The great defender of slavery and your ancestor.
49:34Yes.
49:35The resemblance is remarkable. It's gone down the generations.
49:40A lot of people, when they began a journey into their own genealogy, into their family history, and they discovered
49:46that that journey was taking them to someone like George Hibbert, who was a slave owner, might have felt that
49:52they didn't want to know any more.
49:53That wasn't your reaction?
49:54No, because the subject is too important. It is important to millions of people on all sorts of different levels,
50:03whether they were involved in slavery or were a product of slavery, whether they were shipped across the Atlantic.
50:09There were some harrowing stories here, and there is absolutely no point in trying to bury them. This is truth
50:15and reconciliation time. The story has to be outed.
50:18When you read the many words that he left behind in pamphlets and in other documents, you must have come
50:23across passages that were very difficult to read, knowing that they came from someone whose blood you share.
50:29It was scary. Just knowing the number of people that were enslaved, the number that were sold through the headquarters
50:38in Kingston, the involvement, the money.
50:41In some ways, is what you've been working through in your mind as you've learned this history, really what Britain
50:46as a nation has been working through, is how do you deal with this crime, this terrible thing that happened
50:51in our past?
50:52I think there is a sort of collective shame here, and that needs to be acknowledged. I think what is
50:59known should be known by all.
51:11The slave compensation records shine a new light on how the profits from slavery helped build modern Britain.
51:19But the ideas propagated by the slave owners and the slave system also resonate today.
51:27Edward Long was a slave owner in Jamaica in the 18th century.
51:32But Long was also a writer. In 1774, he published his History of Jamaica.
51:40Long's History of Jamaica is a serious work of history, and it's still in print. There's still an awful lot
51:45which is valuable. I bought this copy last week.
51:48I mean, you can take this history with you and travel around to these places that he's describing, and it's,
51:55you know, it's like a travel guide.
51:57Three volumes, very, very, very substantial work, which established him as the authority in Britain on Jamaica and the Caribbean
52:08more generally.
52:09But buried in the second volume of that text is his defence of slavery and his absolutely unequivocal statements about
52:20the inferiority of the African.
52:23And he sees human physical difference, skin colour, as being the marker of the inferiority of the African that he
52:31calls the Negro.
52:32It's one of the marks. And that's why it's important that skin colour becomes significant. It becomes much more significant
52:39in the mid to late 18th century.
52:42So he talks, for example, when he's describing, and these are very hard things to read, when he's describing the
52:49African in what he calls Guinea or Negro land.
52:52Which he means Africa. He means Africa. Their particulars are black skin, a covering of wool instead of hair, the
53:00roundness of their eyes, the figure of their ears, tumid nostrils, flat noses, invariable thick lips, and general large size
53:08of the female nipples, as if adapted by nature to the peculiar conformation of their children's mouths.
53:15They have a bestial or fetid smell. And so he goes on. And then he considers their disparity in regard
53:24to the faculties of the mind.
53:26So he's very clear here that the physical differences, the physical deficiencies as he would see them, are markers, some
53:34of the markers, of an innate intellectual inferiority.
53:37Yes. I mean, he also spells out in graphic detail what damaging effects the African presence is having in Jamaica
53:48and the dangers of what it might do in Britain.
53:52But he's already talking in the kinds of terms that, you know, unfortunately, we're still all too familiar with, of
53:59the forms of pollution that can enter into the body politic.
54:04He fears racial mixing.
54:05He fears racial mixing very deeply. And of course, racial mixing was taking place on an extraordinary scale in Jamaica.
54:13There are incredible numbers of illegitimate children, the children of slave owners and enslaved women.
54:21I think he sets the paradigms that, really, we have still not entirely freed ourselves from, I would argue.
54:32But Edward Long isn't usually remembered for being a slave owner, or for the toxic ideas he propagated.
54:40Instead, he's celebrated as one of Britain's great Georgian writers and historians.
54:50So this is where he's buried.
54:53Oh, goodness.
54:55Edward Long, Esquire.
54:56Goodness me. That is quite affecting, actually.
54:59So here he is. And here's the memorial to him. And this is a pretty grand memorial.
55:05It is a very grand memorial, done by the premier sculptor of these kinds of memorials, Richard Westcott, who did
55:15the memorials to Wellington, to Nelson, to, you know, other very, very significant people.
55:20So you have to be a major player to be good.
55:23Yes. You know, I'm a historian. I think history is very, very important. It's the way we remember.
55:30And that's what this memorial is about, fixing a memory of a particular kind of historian and what he had
55:38to say about the Caribbean, which has carried on and on over the generations.
55:44His ideas are still powerful ideas. So it's a powerful thing to see it.
55:57The slave owners lost the battle over slavery in the 1830s.
56:08But in the years that followed, they won another battle.
56:13Although the slaves were freed, the racial theories unleashed by the defenders of the slave system outlasted slavery and outlived
56:21the slave owners.
56:26Those ideas seeped into British culture.
56:29They went on to influence the way Britain thought about the empire and her imperial subjects.
56:37The fact that those racial ideas were forged in the propaganda war over slavery was largely forgotten.
56:45But then, in the years after abolition, almost everything about Britain's 200 years as a slave-owning nation was forgotten.
56:58After the 1830s, the now former slave owners began to rewrite their family histories.
57:03Men like George Hibbert and John Gladstone were now remembered as having been West India merchants or planters, whatever that
57:11means.
57:11Across the country, thousands of families began to brush their links to slavery under the carpet.
57:17The only part of the story that was remembered was the story of abolition.
57:25But the research by the team of historians from University College London is bringing Britain's forgotten slave owners into the
57:33light.
57:36And the project has begun to make that information public.
57:41The team has converted the files from the National Archives into an online database.
57:48Now any of us can enter in our family names, the names of our towns, or the companies we work
57:53for, and, with the click of a mouse, discover if there are links between our lives and the most terrible
58:00chapter in our nation's history.
58:09All of us, in one way or another, have been touched by this history.
58:14Most of us, without knowing it, have benefited from the economic legacies that slavery left behind.
58:20The question is, what do we do with that knowledge?
58:23Might it be an opportunity for the country to rediscover a lost history and come to terms with the fact
58:30that slavery is part of our national story?
59:04You
Comentários