DID YOU KNOW? - 1833 Britain used 40% of its national budget to free all slaves in the Empire. The loan for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it was not paid off until 2015.

he Act provided for payments to slave-owners. The amount of money to be spent on the payments was set at "the Sum of Twenty Million Pounds Sterling".

 Under the terms of the Act, the British government raised £20 million (£16.5 billion in 2013 pounds, when calculated as wage values) to pay out for the loss of the slaves as business assets to the registered owners of the freed slaves. In 1833, £20 million amounted to 40% of the Treasury's annual income or approximately 5% of the British GDP (5% of the British GDP in 2016 was around £100 billion). To finance the payments, the British government had to take on a £15 million loan, finalised on 3 August 1835, with banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore. The money was not paid back until 2015.

Half of the money went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain.

The names listed in the returns for slave owner payments show that ownership was spread over many hundreds of British families,many of them (though not all) of high social standing. For example, Henry Phillpotts (then the Bishop of Exeter), with three others (as trustees and executors of the will of John Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley), was paid £12,700 for 665 slaves in the West Indies, whilst Henry Lascelles, 2nd Earl of Harewood received £26,309 for 2,554 slaves on 6 plantations. The majority of men and women who were paid under the 1833 Abolition Act are listed in a Parliamentary Return, entitled Slavery Abolition Act, which is an account of all moneys awarded by the Commissioners of Slave Compensation in the Parliamentary Papers 1837-8 (215) vol. 48