Glasgow University to Pay Slavery Slavery Reparations
The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project's "database offers a unique snapsot of who the slaveowners were at the ending of slavery. There were approximately 46,000 claimants, although not all of them were successful in gaining compensation. Of the 20 million pounds paid out, nearly half of the money stayed in Britain. Unsurprisingly, some of the funds went to wealthy absentees, but the flow of money also highlights the importance of another class of compensation recipient: the British merchant. This merchant class was a vitally important cog in the machinery of transatlantic slavery. . . . Mercantile wealth derived from the profits of the plantation was one important way that slavery returned home to Britain. . . . The Hibbert family, for example, made claims as trustees, owners-in-fee, mortgagees, judgment creditors, devisees in trust and executors. Their ownership of enslaved people was based both on plantation ownership and on the complex system of credit relationships that characterized the West India trade. . . . [George Hibbert] consistently argued throughout his career that investment in the slave economy was legitimate and that respectable people would be ruined without payment for their loss of 'property.'" Katie Donington, A Society Built on Slavery, History Today (September 2015), 10-12. What role then did slavery in the building of the global economy?
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