Slavery Abolition Act 1833

Passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom under Earl Grey's Whig government and given royal assent on 28 August 1833, this law ended slavery across most of the British Empire from 1 August 1834. Freedom came by stages, through a period of "apprenticeship", and the state paid £20 million in compensation to slave owners, while the enslaved received nothing. Around 800,000 people were recorded in the compensation claims, chiefly in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius.

Lord Mansfield's ruling in the Somerset case of 1772 found that slavery had no basis in English law, encouraging a wider movement. A society to end the slave trade was founded in 1787, and William Wilberforce took up the cause in Parliament. The Slave Trade Act 1807 banned British participation in the Atlantic slave trade, and from 1811 trading became a felony, but slavery itself continued in the colonies. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, which according to one estimate captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans between 1808 and 1860, enforced the ban at sea. In 1823 campaigners including Thomas Clarkson, Thomas Fowell Buxton and Elizabeth Heyrick founded the Anti-Slavery Society to press for emancipation itself.

Through the 1820s the government favoured "amelioration", trying to make colonial assemblies legalise slave marriages, limit flogging and stop families being sold apart, but the planters largely resisted. Two events changed the politics. At Christmas 1831 a great revolt broke out in Jamaica, the Baptist War, begun as a strike organised by the Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe and crushed within about ten days; parliamentary inquiries into it strengthened the case for abolition. Then the Reform Act 1832 swept away the rotten boroughs through which West Indian sugar interests had bought seats in the Commons.

With Buxton threatening his own bill, Edward Stanley, colonial secretary from March 1833, put forward a government scheme. Officials had no model beyond the very different, and violent, example of the Haitian Revolution. The final plan bound freed people to their former owners as apprentices and compensated owners for their lost "property". The proposed apprenticeship was cut from twelve years to six, and compensation raised from £15 million to £20 million, a sum many expected Parliament to refuse. Instead members, anxious that uncompensated loss of legally held property might set a precedent for their own estates, approved it in full.

The Commons passed the second reading unopposed on 22 July 1833, about a week before Wilberforce's death. Children under six were freed when the act took effect in 1834. Older people became apprentices, owing up to 45 hours of unpaid labour a week in return for food, clothing, housing and medical care, until 1838 for domestic workers and 1840 for field workers. Antigua and Bermuda chose immediate freedom instead. Territories of the East India Company, Ceylon and Saint Helena were excluded, and slavery in British India was addressed separately in 1843.

Abolitionists attacked apprenticeship as slavery under another name, and a fact-finding mission in 1836 found evidence that planters were not operating the system fairly. Too few independent stipendiary magistrates were appointed to protect apprentices. As the campaign intensified, Barbados voted in May 1838 to end apprenticeship that August, other colonies followed, and Jamaica was the last to act, in June. As a result, apprenticeship ended in most of the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838, two years early for field workers.

The £20 million, roughly 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual income, was raised partly through a £15 million loan from Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore. Payments went to about 42,000 claimants in the colonies and about 3,500 in Britain, including absentee owners, trustees and creditors, who received around half the total. The debt was not formally extinguished until the government redeemed its remaining undated bonds in 2015. The act itself was repealed in 1998 as obsolete; slavery remains illegal under other laws.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show the British Empire before and after emancipation, including the Caribbean colonies and the Cape Colony.