British (and Irish) Slave ownership: database

tac foley wrote: »

There can be very few institutions either in England or Ireland under British rule that did not benefit from the use of remote slavery in one form or another.

What institutions benefited from the use of slavery Tac?

The main benificiaries of the slave trade were private families with interests in colonial enterprises that relied on hundreds of slaves as their workforce.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

It depends how you define institutions I suppose.

Cork city did well as did waterford, thanks to merchants there servicing the slave ships. Irish traders also profited very nicely from the triangular trade.

Interesting article in the journal http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/irish-slave-traders-joe-oshea-murder-mutiny-mayhem-646357-Oct2012

An institution in this case I would take to be an organisation or company.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

What institutions benefited from the use of slavery Tac?

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

An institution in this case I would take to be an organisation or company.

The Church of England received compensation on the emancipation of slaves which it owned in (I think) Barbados. From memory, they had been left a plantation, plus associated slaves, and they kept it running and used the profits to support a bible college. (The college still exists; I think it's now a teacher training college.)

The East India Company both traded in and employed slaves, though it has to be said that this was a minor part of it's overall activities. And it also has to be said that in time it abolished slavery in the parts of India that it controlled. For most of its existence the Royal Africa Company existed largely for the purpose of paticipating in the slave trade. The infamous South Sea Company traded in slaves before it dawned on them that there was more money to be made in financial speculation. The Guinea Company traded in slaves, though this wasn't its main activity.

Very few companies which exist today also existed at the time when the slave trade was legal, so finding a company which itself owned slaves will be difficult. But a great many business which exist today were initially capitalised with funds amassed through slave trading or through the use of slave labour.

Barclay's Bank's main line of business, in the early days, was extending credit to the Liverpool slave trade. The same would be true of other, now largely forgotten banks, which have merged into todays existing banks. (Barclays did in fact end up owning slaves directly as well, when creditors defaulted on their loans and mortgages were exercised over plantations and their stock-in-trade, including the slaves. No doubt other banks also found themselves in this position from time to time. But the bulk of the profits that banks made out of slavery were not through owning slaves themselves, but through advancing capital to people who did.)

The British textile industry was heavily dependent on the slave trade. That didn't involve mill-owners owning slaves; it involved British-manufactured textiles being shipped to West Africa and exchanged for slaves, who where then shipped to American and the Carribean and exchanged for sugar, which was then brought back to the UK and sold, which is how the textile-producers got paid. Plus, a number of British textile producers had large and lucrative contracts for clothing slaves.

All Souls College, Oxford didn't, I think, own any slaves directly, but it received a very substantial endowment which represented, basically, the accumulated profits and capital value of a large slave plantation owned by the donor - the Codrington Library bears his name to this day. Other Oxford and Cambridge colleges would have benefitted similarly, if perhaps not on the same scale, and it's not impossible that some of them did own slave plantations directly as part of their endowments (which were considerable), but I don't know of any specific cases.

And of course lots of churches and charitable and civic institutions in towns like Bristol would have been paid for by wealthy locals whose money came from slave labour. Again, it's not impossible that some of them became slave-owners themselves, through legacies, or that they acquired an interest in slave-owning partnerships.

The bottom line is that Britain would probably have been a wealthy country even without any involvement in the slave trade or slave economies, through the production of food and wool, and its growing industrial base. But the link with slavery played a large part in leveraging Britain's natural wealth and turning the country into what was, in the 18th century, a global economic superpower. The industrial revolution relied on massive capital investment which was substantially fuelled with money earned in the slave economy, and most British economic and financial success stories of the time were very little removed from the slave trade, connected with it if not through their activities then through their source of investment capital.

Threads merged as they are similar, altered original name to reflect both.
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Ireland wasn't hugely connected with the slave trade, by comparison with Britain - not because we were any more virtuous, but because were were poorer. The "triangular trade" started with the British textile industry producing goods which could be exported to West Africa and (in effect) exchanged for slaves; Ireland produced few such goods. Plus, British navigation laws strongly advantaged British ports over Irish ports. And the Irish landed gentry, while prosperous compared to the peasantry, were mostly not prosperous enough to go out and buy slave plantations in Barbados (unless they also had income from interests in Britain, which of course many of them had.)

So I suspect we will find that comparatively little of the compensation paid on the emancipation of slaves went to Irish slaveholders, as opposed to British slaveholders - certainly much less than the relative populations of the two countries might suggest.