The Slavery Abolition Act

The Slavery Abolition Act. Twenty million pounds in compensation — roughly forty per cent of national government expenditure that year, raised on a public loan — disbursed to the people who had held the enslaved, for the loss of them as property. Over forty thousand awards, the ledgers still readable. Nothing to the freed, and the apprenticeship system then held most of them to unpaid labour for years.

Geometry, The ledger: A reading: the payment runs the wrong way, to the ones who held people, not to the people who were held.

In plain words

Britain abolishes slavery and pays twenty million pounds, about forty per cent of that year's government spending, to the slave-owners for their lost property; the freed get nothing, and most are held in unpaid apprenticeship for years. The letter's verdict: when the crime finally ended, the state made the wrongdoers whole.

The mechanism

RELEASE, AND THE DIRECTION OF THE PAYMENT — when the crime finally ended, the state's instinct was to make the wrongdoer whole. The loss that registered as compensable was the loss suffered by the ones who had done the wrong

How it was checked

• EvidenceT7 PRIMARY DOCUMENT / MEASUREMENT; Status: COMMITTED; a release
• Letter eraTHE SEAT MOVES TO THE BENCH 1713 to 1945
• SourcesPRIMARY DOCUMENT — the Act and the Slave Compensation Commission ledgers