The Slave Compensation Act 1837 was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom, signed into law on 23 December 1837. The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership was created to research its effects. Payments of the bonds to the descendants of creditors was only finalised in 2015 when the British Government decided to modernise the gilt portfolio by redeeming all remaining undated gilts. The long gap between this money being borrowed and its repayment was due to the type of financial instrument that was used, rather than the amount of money borrowed. After decades of campaigning, the Slavery Abolition Act had been passed in 1833. The plantation owners in the Caribbean, represented by the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants, had opposed abolition. This 1837 Act paid substantial money to the former slave owners, but nothing to the newly liberated people. The Act empowered the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt, under the direction of the Treasury, to either pay the compensation that was still owing to slave owners out of the West India Compensation Account, or to transfer a proportionate amount of 3½% government annuities. The various acts of William IV relating to slave compensation were to be considered, as far as applicable, to apply to this act. Slave owners were paid approximately £20 million in compensation in over 40,000 awards for enslaved people freed in the colonies of the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope according to a government census that named all owners as of 1 August 1834. University College London has set up a project Legacies of British Slave-ownership which aims to list the individuals who received compensation. They estimate that somewhere between 10-20% of Britain's wealthy can be identified as having had significant links to slavery. University College London has been pursuing the case with The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at the university. Dr Nicholas Draper from UCL, in his book, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery, states that “Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore led a syndicate underwriting the issue of three new series of securities to raise £15 million: we don’t know how much they distributed or sub-underwrote. A further £5 million was paid out directly in government stock. Since 2018 numerous freedom of information act requests have been sent to the British Government and Bank of England for the names of those who were paid with the bonds, of which all were denied.
