For some time I've been thinking that the abolishment of slavery was nothing more than a publicity stunt (and that slavery effectively has continued to this very day). The following suggests that abolishing slavery was a trick to send taxpayer's money to the slave drivers.
In 1833, the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery in most parts of the British empire and (in one of those great examples of protecting "free trade") required compensating the slave drivers for losing their slaves.
You might expect that this so-called “slave compensation” would go to the freed slaves but the money went exclusively to those "poor" owners of slaves. The British state has never paid any money, nor apologised, to the slaves or their descendants. Britain commanded the largest slave plantation economies on earth, with more than 800,000 people enslaved.
So on 3 August 1835, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore agreed to loan the British government £15 million, with the government adding an additional £5 million later, to finance the compensation payments for the slave drivers.
This was one of the largest loans in history, with the total sum equivalent to 40% of the government’s yearly budget and correcting for inflation amounts to some £300 billion today (in 2018 that is).
In reality slavery was not abolished in all parts of the British empire in 1833 but continued in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and British India, amongst others.
Besides that until 1838 the enslaved had to continue to work in unfreedom without pay, now called “apprenticeship” (instead of "slavery"). And after that they could work "in freedom" to pay for food and shelter (on the same plantations).
You can be forgiven for thinking that this is ancient history, but the 1835 £20 million sum was so large that the British taxpayer continued to pay off this huge compensation for 180 years until 2015!
So thanks to Britain, once again, the rich got even richer...
Other slave-owning states, including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Brazil, would follow the British example of funnelling taxpayer's money to the slave owners under the guise of "abolishing" slavery: https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...ainst-humanity
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