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Queen Victoria and the Emancipation of Slaves
DEAR EDITOR,
A letter in yesterday’s (29 November) KN from Mr. Rooplall Dudhnath is a sad example of the lack/inadequate teaching of our history.
Mr. Dudhnath wants us to keep Queen Victoria’s statue in the compound of the Law Courts because “It was during her reign as Queen of England that she abolished slavery and put an end to the undignified slave trade that some governments and monarchs started and enriched themselves with the exploits”.
Now, first of all Victoria did not end either the slave trade or slavery itself. By the time of Victoria’s reign, it was Parliament which made the laws. There is a saying, “The Queen reigns but does not rule” which expresses the role of the British Monarch. Parliament passes legislation, the Monarch signs each piece of legislation. He/she cannot refuse to sign legislation passed by the Houses of Parliament.
Even more incorrectly, Victoria did not even sign the legislation abolishing the slave trade and slavery. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed by Parliament in 1807. Victoria was born in 1819.
The Emancipation Act was passed in 1834 – again, before Victoria ascended to the throne. That Act specified that the slaves under the age of 6 would immediately be free, but older slaves had to serve a period of “apprenticeship” to prepare them for freedom.
Originally that was supposed to be seven years, but following various protest incidents in the West Indian and Guyanese colonies, apprenticeship was ended after four years – by which time Victoria was Queen, following the death of her Uncle, William IV.
The people who were the real emancipators of slaves were those like Wilberforce, Buxton, Sharpe and other members of the anti-slavery movement, and rising capitalist merchants in both the UK and Europe, who could not see why they had to pay wages to workers while slave owners could pay a one-time payment to own the slave for life, as well as the slave’s children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
And do not forget that the only way that the Emancipation Bill was passed was by Parliament agreeing to include payment to slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their “property” (i.e. their slaves). That money came from a loan from bankers and took over a century to be repaid. The ex-slaves were paid nothing for their years of labour.
If anyone wants to find out the payments made to individual slave-owners, there is a website set up following a detailed analysis of all those payments (information stored in the UK Archives). The research was done by a team from University College, London. The title is “Legacies of British Slave Ownership” and can be found at https://www.ucl.ac.uk>lbs
You can enter the name of a plantation and the colony, or the name of a slave owner and see how many slaves were claimed and the amount of compensation paid.
And as for Queen Victoria, she may have reigned for a long time, but she had nothing to do with the actual Emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. She may, for all I know, have approved that Emancipation, but she signed neither the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act nor the Emancipation Act, since she was not Queen when those Acts were passed; and in any case, her approval or disapproval had no bearing on the passage of either of those Acts. Parliament passed them.
Patricia Robinson Commissiong
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