The Abolition of Slavery Act 1833

The Abolition of Slavery Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73) was the single most important piece of social legislation in the history of the British Empire. The Act received the Royal Assent on 28 August 1833 and took effect on 1 August 1834, abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, in every colony in which it then existed. As Seymour Drescher has shown in Econocide (1977), the Act was the principal political product of the British abolition movement, and the founding document of the modern humanitarian legal order. As Catherine Hall has argued in Legacies of British Slavery (2014), the Act was also the founding document of the slavery-compensation system that distributed £20 million to slave-owners in the 1830s, and that shaped the political economy of the British Caribbean for the next century.

The Act was, in its immediate form, a compromise. It abolished slavery. It provided for an “apprenticeship” system that obliged the formerly enslaved to continue to work for their former masters for a period of years. It provided for the payment of £20 million in compensation to slave-owners (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/compensation-payments-slave-owners/]). It did not provide for any compensation to the enslaved. The compromise was the work of the parliamentary leadership of Thomas Spring Rice, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Edward Smith-Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, with the support of Thomas Fowell Buxton, Zachary Macaulay’s son-in-law, and the Anti-Slavery Society.

The Provisions of the Act

The Act provided for the immediate abolition of slavery in the British colonies from 1 August 1834. It defined slavery as “the Condition of Persons who are by Law denominated Slaves, and who are by Law subject to the same Powers and Authorities as the Masters of Slaves.” The definition was a legal restatement of the existing law; the change was that the legal status itself was abolished.

The Act provided for a system of “apprenticeship” — a transitional system in which the formerly enslaved would continue to work for their former masters for a period of years (four years for the “praedials” or agricultural enslaved, six years for the non-praedials), in exchange for a continuation of the slave-owners’ labour obligations. The apprenticeship system was, in its design, a compromise between the abolitionist demand for immediate freedom and the planters’ demand for compensation. It was, in its operation, a continuation of slavery by another name. As the labour historian William A. Green has shown, the apprenticeship system was the work of the planters’ lobby in Parliament, and it was the principal limitation of the 1833 Act.

The Act provided for the payment of £20 million in compensation to slave-owners, financed by a British government loan. The compensation payments were distributed among 46,000 slave-owners across the British Empire. The largest single recipient was the heirs of the Earl of Elgin, who received £26,292 for 1,643 enslaved people on five Jamaican estates. The compensation scheme was, in its design, a recognition of the principle that the enslaved were, in law, property, and that the slave-owners had a property right that the British government was bound to compensate. As Nick Draper has argued in The Price of Emancipation (2010), the principle was a substantial victory for the planters’ lobby, and a substantial defeat for the principle of universal human rights.

The Compensation Scheme

The 1833 Act provided for the appointment of a Slave Compensation Commission, with commissioners drawn from the principal slave-holding colonies. The Commission was chaired by Lord Cottenham, the Lord Chancellor. The Commission sat from 1834 to 1837, processing some 46,000 claims and distributing some £20 million. The Commission’s records, the Slave Compensation Commission Papers in the National Archives at Kew, are the documentary basis of the modern Legacies of British Slavery database.

The most important recent scholarship on the compensation payments is the work of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, established in 2013. The UCL Centre has published the Legacies of British Slavery database, which identifies the 46,000 slave-owners who received compensation under the 1833 Act. The database has been used by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and other historians to demonstrate how deeply implicated British mercantile, professional, and aristocratic families were in the slavery-compensation system. Catherine Hall’s Legacies of British Slavery (2014) and Nick Draper’s The Price of Emancipation (2010) are, by common consent, the leading recent works on the compensation scheme. The findings of the UCL Centre have, since 2015, been the subject of sustained public discussion in the United Kingdom, and have been the basis of a substantial revaluation of the relationship between British history and the history of slavery.

The Apprenticeship System

The apprenticeship system was the most controversial feature of the 1833 Act. The system was, in its design, a compromise; in its operation, a continuation of slavery by another name. The 1836 special magistrates’ report, which documented a substantial number of abuses of the apprenticeship system, was the most important single piece of evidence. The report described a system in which the apprentices were subject to the same labour discipline as the enslaved — flogging, the treadmill, the chain gang — and in which the special magistrates appointed to oversee the system were largely ineffective. As Drescher has shown, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the principal British abolitionist body of the period, campaigned systematically for the abolition of the apprenticeship system from 1835. The campaign was successful: the apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838, four years earlier than originally planned.

The Aftermath: 1833–1885

The 1833 Act did not end the British abolition movement. The campaign against the slave trade in East Africa, the campaign against the apprenticeship system in the British Caribbean, the campaign against slavery in the Indian Ocean, the campaign against forced labour in the Belgian Congo — all of these were continuations of the movement. The 1885 Berlin Conference, which committed the European powers to the suppression of the slave trade in East and Central Africa, was the international moment. The 1890 Brussels Convention was the legal foundation. The 1926 Slavery Convention of the League of Nations was the twentieth-century consolidation.

The 1833 Act was, in its long-term significance, the founding document of the modern British humanitarian legal order. As the legal historian Jenny Martinez has argued in The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (2012), the 1807 Slave Trade Act, the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, and the subsequent diplomatic instruments together constituted the first sustained effort by the British state to use its legal and military power for humanitarian ends. The 1833 Act was the foundation of the British humanitarian tradition that would, in the twentieth century, find expression in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the modern international human-rights regime.

A Primary Source: The 1833 Act

The 1833 Act contained the following preamble: “Whereas divers Persons are held in a State of Slavery within divers of His Majesty’s Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves, for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services: Be it therefore enacted … That from and after the First Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-four, all Persons held in Slavery within any of the said Colonies shall be, and the same are hereby, manumitted and set free, and the Slavery so abolished is hereby declared to be as fully and effectually abolished as if such Slavery had never existed.” The Act’s combination of universal language (“manumitted and set free”) and particular exception (“a reasonable Compensation”) is the most succinct expression of the political and moral compromise of which the Act was the product.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the 1833 Act has been transformed since the 1940s. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), treated the Act as a political event, the consequence of the decline of the West Indian sugar interest. Seymour Drescher, in Econocide (1977), challenged the Williams thesis and argued that the Act was a moral event, the consequence of a substantial humanitarian movement. The most important recent contribution is the work of the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, and the books by Catherine Hall (Legacies of British Slavery, 2014) and Nick Draper (The Price of Emancipation, 2010). The unresolved question is the relative weight of the economic and the moral in the 1833 settlement; the consensus, as Madge Dresser has argued in Slavery and the British Country House (2013), is that the answer is a question of the political standpoint chosen.

In this Section

Other Sections