Now Britons can find out if their Ancestors were slave owners by accessing database where details are listed for compensation was paid to the ‘Owners‘ for losing their ‘possessions!”
Recently there was a huge uproar in India when James Cameron, the British PM refused to apologize for Jalianwallabagh massacre.
I posted a blog observing that if the British were to embark on a process of Apologizing to all those who were wronged during their ‘Grab and Rule Period”, there will be no end !
The Story of Slave Ownership database.
Researchers at University College London spent three years compiling a searchable listing of thousands of people who received compensation for loss of their “possessions” when slave ownership was outlawed by Britain in 1833.
About 46,000 people were paid a total of 20 million pounds — the equivalent of 40 percent of all annual government spending at the time — after the freeing of slaves in British colonies in the Caribbean, Mauritius and southern Africa.
“This is a huge bailout,” said Keith McClelland, a research associate on the project. “Relatively speaking, it is bigger than the bailout of the bankers in recent years.”
Compensation for slave-owners was opposed by some abolitionists, who argued it was immoral, but it was approved as the political price of getting the 1833 abolition bill passed.
The database includes details on the 3,000 compensated slave owners who lived in Britain — rather than its colonies — and includes the ancestors of several present-day politicians and the writers Graham Greene and George Orwell. Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair, and the trustees of his great-grandfather, Charles Blair, were paid 4,442 pounds for 218 slaves on a plantation in Jamaica.
Not all the slave-owners were ultra-wealthy. Middle-class Britons up and down the country were paid compensation — evidence, the researchers say, of how far the tentacles of slavery spread through society.
http://www.reddit.com/tb/19dg3e
Recommended book:
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2702915/?site_locale=en_GB