These Georgian terraces in the heart of London conceal
a forgotten chapter in Britain's history.
A new study of a government archive from the 1830s reveals that
many of these houses were once the homes of Britain's slave owners.
This is number eight. This was the home of Tully Higgins.
He has 328 enslaved people on plantations in Demerara,
which is in the British colony of Guyana.
At number 12 we have Nathaniel Snell Chauncey.
Now, he owned slaves in Guyana, in Grenada, in Antigua
and on the islands of St Vincent and Tobago.
In all, he owned 3,000 slaves.
And further up the street, there's another cluster of slave owners.
John Edward, Samuel Ifill, Sarah Gaskin, John Briggs...
These records transform our image of the slave owner.
They reveal that thousands of them lived all over Britain.
And they show how the profits from slave ownership
ran deep into British society.
There are the powerful dynasties that amassed vast
fortunes by exploiting enslaved labour in distant lands.
But there are also lawyers, doctors and vicars who never looked a
slave in the eye or experienced the brutal realities of plantation life.
So that's put on to your leg and you can't run away.
You'll cut your other leg, never mind the weight.
For two centuries, slave labour was an engine of the British economy.
And before the system was finally abolished,
Britain's slave owners demanded even more.
When slavery was brought to an end in the 1830s,
a huge sum of money was raised by the British government.
That money, the modern equivalent of £17 billion was paid
out in compensation, not to the slaves, but to the slave owners.
The men who'd invented the slave system and grown rich from it
walked away with what was then the largest payout in British history.
The slave owners' compensation money seeped into every
corner of the nation and the Empire.
They invested it in industry, education, the arts and commerce.
Their money helped lay the foundation of our modern world.
These are Britain's forgotten slave owners.
The National Archives in Kew record 1,000 years of British history,
from Magna Carta to D-Day,
the events from which we weave our national story.
Among the 200km of shelving are the records of another
celebrated episode - Britain's abolition of slavery - in 1834.
But new research has revealed a darker side to that defining event.
These are the files of the slave compensation commission.
They record all the claims for compensation
from across the British Empire following abolition.
George Cummins.
Lise Espinot.
John Losh.
Edmond Gellineau.
These files tell us the name of every British slave owner.
They tell us who they were, where they lived
and how many slaves they owned.
And most chillingly,
they give us the amount they were paid for those slaves in pounds,
shillings and pence.
There's a compensation claim from Rev James Hamilton
for 216 slaves - £40,083, one shilling and sevenpence.
Compensating the slave owners for the loss of their human property
was the only way the government could bring slavery to an end.
They settled upon the incredible sum of £20 million,
the equivalent of £17 billion today.
A national commission was established to distribute the money.
46,000 slave owners came forward.
This was the only time in 200 years that the full
extent of slave ownership was exposed.
And the records reveal just how deeply slavery had
infiltrated British society.
What's immediately apparent if you look at these ledgers is
the sheer range of the people who were listed here.
So, on one end, here is a record for George Hibbert
and his brother William Hibbert of Portland Place in London
for the 360 enslaved people on one of their plantations in the
parish of St James, in the county of Cornwall on the Island of Jamaica.
And for those 360 people,
they are paid the sum of £6,244, four shillings and fivepence.
And that's not their only plantation.
In total, they were paid more than £80 million in today's money.
The Hibberts are a prime example of the super-rich dynasties
found in these records.
But the records also introduce us
to some more unexpected kinds of slave owner.
There's an entry here for Agnes and Martha Montgomerie of Perthshire.
And between them they own one slave.
And for that one individual they received £63, 19 shillings and threepence.
The slave owners weren't just aristocrats.
But there's also people from the middle class
and even what we might call the lower middle class.
And there are slave owners listed here from all over the country -
the length and breadth of Britain.
The first people to piece together this revealing new
picture of British slave ownership are a team of historians
at University College, London.
From the compensation records looking for trends as well
and that's what you'll be able to do with this kind of data.
Under the direction of Professor Catherine Hall,
the team has undertaken the painstaking task of analysing
each of the compensation claims.
People would have imagined, we would have imagined before this
work had been done, that, you know, there were...
There were great and rich people who owned slaves,
enslaved people in the Caribbean.
But actually, you know, there were widows in York, there were
clergymen in Bristol, there were iron manufacturers in the Midlands.
You needed to look at all the records,
we needed to look at the 40,000 plus claims to know the scale of it.
This research is transforming our understanding of the role
slavery played in Britain's past.
It also reveals how the legacy of slavery reaches into the present.
The team have gathered the Compensation Commission
files into an online database.
That means that any of us can discover
if there are links between our own families and the profits of slavery.
I'm half-Nigerian, so there's no point looking for my father's
family in the register of British slave owners.
So I'll put in my mother's family name, which is Kilburn,
and see what comes up.
There is a family of Kilburns. They're in Jamaica,
in the parish of St Elizabeth and they're not major slave owners.
Between them they own, what, 21 slaves between the four
members of the family.
So they're bit players, they're not major slave owners.
But in compensation, they still get a significant amount of money.
Isabella Kilburn receives £302.
That's around a quarter of a million pounds today.
I don't know anyone in my family's history who had any money
so it's kind of unlikely that we are related to these wealthier
Kilburns, but I could be related to these slave owners
and that's what's disturbing about the database.
It breaks down this idea that the slave owners were them and not us.
So how did so many ordinary British people become
involved in the enslavement of millions of Africans?
It began in 1627, when a group of around 50 British settlers
landed on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
They planned to transform this uninhabited
wilderness into farmland, and they brought along their own workforce.
Many of the settlers who arrived on these beaches were what was
called indentured servants.
These were poor people who had in effect sold themselves
and their labour, usually for a term of five years.
What they got in return from their new masters was
transport from Britain and basic provisions while they worked,
which usually meant just food and shelter.
What they were promised at the end of their term was ten
acres of land here in Barbados.
Now this system wasn't slavery, but the indentured servants were
often very badly treated and they certainly weren't free.
These servants and labourers
were contracted to a handful of masters, pioneers such
as James Drax and later, Christopher Codrington and Henry Lascelles.
They were ambitious men, hungry for wealth and power.
In the first decades, the colony grew by farming tobacco,
cotton and indigo.
Now, the more far-sighted among them
began to invest their still modest fortunes in the skills
and the technology needed to begin an experiment.
They planned to cultivate a new crop -
a form of giant grass originally from New Guinea
and brought to the Americas by the Portuguese.
This agricultural experiment, led by James Drax, would be
the catalyst for the use of slave labour on an industrial scale.
African slaves weren't unknown in Barbados.
In fact,
when the very first British settlers were on their way to the island,
they had captured a Portuguese ship and seized ten Africans on board.
Those ten became the first black African
slaves in the British Caribbean.
What made sure that they were the first of many was sugar and
the back-breaking, labour-intensive task of producing it.
The sugar planters tapped in to the Atlantic slave trade that had
been established by Dutch and Portuguese merchants.
British merchants were soon perfecting the system -
transporting slaves from Africa
and returning slave-produced commodities back to Europe.
Each year ships were arriving, bringing in thousands of Africans.
And although an African cost twice as much as an indentured
labourer, the economics of slavery made perfect sense.
An indentured labourer had to be freed after five years.
A slave belonged to his master for the rest of his life.
And what's more, any children the slaves produced automatically
belonged to the master.
Dating from the 1650s, St Nicholas Abbey is one of the pioneering
sites of the slave plantation system.
For an enslaved African, this would have been a terrifying destination.
Hundreds of slaves toiled across these fields
in organised work gangs.
This unrelenting regime emerged in part as a response to the
nature of the crop itself.
The moment you cut through a sugar cane,
you've started a stopwatch.
The juice inside the cane will very quickly spoil, so the moment it's
cut it has to be rushed in carts to the next part of the process.
To maximise the cane yield,
the slaves were forced to labour through the night.
This was the first industry to adopt the 24-hour shift system.
The process so far, working around the clock in shifts
24 hours a day was very modern, but what happened next was industrial.
This is the factory.
This is where the raw sugar cane was processed.
And the power for the factory came from the windmill.
Hundreds of windmills like this were built across the Caribbean
and they harnessed the winds that blow over these islands.
The mill would extract every last ounce of sugar juice.
Here, too, the crop imposed a time pressure.
If the juice wasn't quickly
processed into granules it would ferment and spoil.
This system of industrial farming was
so advanced that it endured into the 20th century,
as this film shows.
But during the slave era it was a more brutal process.
Africans arriving here had a life expectancy of seven years.
All of it, from the planting of the sugar out in the fields to the
processing that takes place here in the factory could only be done
because of the labour of hundreds of men, women and children.
The British soon transplanted the slave plantation model to
other Caribbean Islands.
Among the records at Kew, we can see how many lives were bound
up in the slave system.
Because slaves were deemed to be property, they appear in inventories
and registers that detail their names and ages, where they
were from, what work they did and whether they were fit to perform it.
Simon, who's just six. Adam, 29, a cooper who's sickly
and born in Africa. Adam, who's 41 and listed as an invalid.
Again, born in Africa.
And on every other page you come across the children -
David, seven,
Frederick, six years old, Nelson, Romeo, both six,
May, five, Elizabeth is two years and a few months,
Frank is two months and weakly.
And on, and on, and on. Page after page.
Thousands, hundreds of thousands of names.
These are the people who paid the price for this great
experiment of slavery.
At the time of abolition in 1834,
this roll call of slaves within the British Empire listed 800,000 names.
This massive labour force was controlled by just
over 40,000 owners and their estate managers.
The Barbados National Archive keeps records of how Britain's
first slave owners built a new kind of society.
Barbados became the world's first slave society.
This is a unique historical development.
A slave society is quite different from a society with slaves.
All the societies in the hemisphere had enslaved peoples
but Barbados was the first to be built
and sustained completely upon the enslavement of Africans with
no alternative system of economic development.
The slave system was ruthlessly enforced right from the start.
One document found here dates from 1661.
It's known as the Barbados Slave Code.
Authored by the island's most powerful slave owners,
it gives a rare insight into their way of thinking.
Part of the process of transforming people from human beings
and into things is to justify it.
And on the very first page of the Barbados Slave Code it
describes Africans as people who are heathenish and brutish,
an uncertain and dangerous kind of people.
This is early racism.
Racism that's born not just out of hatred but self-interest.
The question is, does that language originate in the context
of Barbados or is it imported from England into the Barbadian space?
The historical evidence suggests both of these
things are taking place.
The English arrive in the Caribbean already with a fully formed
racist and racial view about other people, especially African peoples.
But the market conditions have enabled an existing racial
mentality, racist mentality, to take root in the economic
and financial management,
and so you build an economy that is reflecting your state of mind.
The code goes beyond racist ideas.
It details the slave owners' reprisals for acts of resistance.
Looking at the slave code, the issue of violence comes up very quickly.
It says here that
"if any Negro shall offer any violence to any Christian,
"any white, by striking or suchlike,
"that Negro shall on his first offence be whipped,
"on his second offence be severely whipped and have his nose slit
"and be burnt with a hot iron on some parts of his face."
The Africans are in revolt, they are in resistance.
The English have made an enormous investment,
capital investment, in the plantations
and the enslaved labour and they want to make a profit.
So this system requires extremely violent suppression.
So this blueprint for how to run this sort of militarised,
highly capitalistic, entrepreneurial, brutal,
terror-based society - this spreads out from here, doesn't it?
Barbados is the incubator.
Barbados is the experiment that it could be done.
So this island is unique, not only for its beauty
and all the contemporary positive features,
but this is where the greatest... the greatest experiment in human
terror in the modern era was first put in place - in Barbados.
The British spread the slave code across the Caribbean colonies.
Jamaica's National Institute holds a rare collection that
reveals how the slave owners enforced the code.
We have here a slave leg shackle
and if somebody was caught trying to run away from slavery,
this would have been placed on them.
So that's put onto your leg and you can't run away?
You'll cut your other leg, never mind the weight.
Right.
Here we have a branding iron. So you can imagine...
And this was used not only to mark ownership of the slaves
but also as a punishment piece.
I've read about slaves being returned from having escaped
and being branded on the face and on the chest.
On the face, yeah. Uh-huh.
We have here our tongue restraint...
..and this piece would be placed around the mouth...
..to hold down the tongue. Mm.
And it latches at the back.
As you can see, there are three holes,
so chances are it could have been used for a child.
Oh, God!
Uh-huh.
Absolutely horrific. Yeah.
Those implements, those implements of torture,
are just disgusting to me in a way that few things are.
I don't really know why.
I don't know why I'm so irrational about it.
You're supposed to be detached as a historian
and I kind of can't be with those things.
And every now and then, you'll hear someone say that if slavery was
as bad as people say it was, then the slaves would have risen up and
they would have used their numerical advantages to overthrow the whites.
When you look at those things, you realise it was
a system based on terror.
It was a system that was medieval in its brutality
and people just had their life
and their capacity to resist just beaten, tortured, out of them.
And those are the things in that room that were used to do that.
And I'm glad that they're quite rare.
I'm glad that most of them - I shouldn't feel this
way as a historian - I'm glad most of them were melted away.
But the few that remain just cut into me
in a way which I can't really explain.
The suffering initiated by Britain's slave system
endured for two centuries.
And the Slave Compensation Commission records reveal
one of the reasons why - any moral objection was soon
outweighed by the sheer amount of wealth the system generated.
This is a claim for £4,293,
12 shillings and sixpence,
and it's made by the rather grandly named
John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge Erle-Drax.
Now, he's a descendant by marriage of James Drax,
who'd been among the very earliest settlers,
the very first of the planters to successfully cultivate sugar
and the first to use mass slave labour on his plantations.
So the Drax family,
they're at the very beginning of British sugar slavery.
Two centuries later
and the Drax name appears in the registers for compensation.
"£293...
"Here is Robert Cooper Ashby, who's a descendant of George Ashby..."
Britain's pioneering slave owners had helped colonise
the Caribbean islands.
They'd also invented an irresistible system
of wealth creation.
"..At around £5,000. That's £4 million in today's money.
"Jane Codrington, Mary Anne Codrington..."
As demand for sugar increased, the slave plantation model would
enrich their descendants for generations to come.
"..George Codrington, William Collins Codrington..."
This is a register of slaves for the Belle Plantation,
which is the property of the Earl of Harewood.
The Earl of Harewood is Edward Lascelles, who's the grandson
of Henry Lascelles, who'd arrived in Barbados in the 18th century.
Earl of Harewood, £3,835, six shillings and fivepence.
Two generations on and the Lascelles family
are still very significant slave holders.
There are almost 300 slaves listed here for the Belle Plantation
and the family own a further five plantations.
By the middle 18th century, pioneering slave owners like
the Draxes, the Codringtons and the Lascelles had made their fortunes.
Many would now return home in triumph.
Their profits from slavery were already
seeping into the fabric of the nation.
Now they began an even greater transformation of Britain.
This landscape, this very artificial landscape, with the pastures
and the lake and the very neat ornate gardens, was carefully
designed to create one impression - the impression of permanence.
But it's an impression that's false.
This place is really a monument to social change,
change brought about by money flooding in from the Caribbean.
'Harewood House is the family seat of David Lascelles,
'the Eighth Earl Harewood,
'first cousin once removed to the Queen,
'53rd in line to the throne.'
..All the Earls of Harewood
and many of the Countesses of Harewood up on the walls.
A mixed bunch.
Here we are in the most magnificent room in the house,
the gallery.
Wow, nice!
Interior by Robert Adam.
Beautiful ceiling.
Furniture by Thomas Chippendale, one of England's greatest craftsmen,
the mirrors and side tables and so on.
But the money was made...
'Henry, the founder of the Lascelles dynasty,
'acquired plantations and slaves by lending money to sugar planters
'and taking possession of their property if they defaulted.'
Whatever else he may or may not have been,
however abhorrent we found the trade he was in now,
he was clearly a very, very smart businessman,
a very clever entrepreneur.
They always say in the Caribbean that it was a place where you
could make a lot of money but it was also a place where you could
lose a fortune because there were men like Henry Lascelles who
were there ready to seize on people who couldn't keep up
with their rents, couldn't keep up with their mortgages.
A lot of people made great fortunes at that time, didn't they,
across the country? And that's what he went there...
'Henry was in search of social status as well as riches,
'not only for himself but for the generations that followed,
'starting with Edwin, his first-born son.'
There's Edwin over the mantelpiece in a red velvet outfit,
studied classics at Cambridge,
went on the grand tour, travelled round Europe,
looking at the great antiquities of Romans, Greece and so on.
A portrait of him by Joshua Reynolds,
the greatest portrait painter of that era.
The man you go to to say you've arrived?
Exactly. Edwin could afford the best, so he got the best.
'In 1835, the Lascelles' ascent to the aristocracy
'received the Royal seal of approval.'
This is the state bed made exclusively for visiting
heads of state.
Queen Victoria stayed here when she was still Princess Victoria.
And she slept in this bed? She would have slept in this bed.
There are three layers of mattress - you've got a horsehair mattress
and then you've got a wool mattress and then you've got a...
a down feather mattress to give maximum firmness and comfort.
So literally fit for a queen. Exactly.
And you're currently the Eighth Earl of Harewood?
I'm currently the Eighth Earl of Harewood.
That's my job title, yes. And there were many families,
not always on the scale of the Lascelles,
who were making this journey, this multi-generational journey,
from being plantation owners on the ground,
who were looking slaves in the eye,
to being seamlessly part of the British elite and aristocracy?
Yes, I think their story was typical.
Might have been quite fast, unusually fast,
because Henry made a lot of money in a relatively short period of time
over about 20 years. But it's not unique, by any means? Not unique.
The social progress of the pioneering slave owners
was to have a huge impact.
"Edward Jervis Jervis,
"Second Viscount St Vincent, Charles Rose Ellis..."
Like the Lascelles,
many of the first wave of British slave owners were handed peerages.
"John Hope, Fifth Earl of Hopetoun..."
By the time of abolition in 1834, the compensation records reveal
that at least 37 members of the House of Lords were slave owners.
Their incorporation into the establishment
ensured that the slave owners' interests
and the nation's interests were firmly aligned.
West India Dock in London is testament to
the impact that the slave owners had on the British economy.
When it was built in 1801,
it represented an investment of more than £1 billon in today's money.
'Dr Nick Draper was a banker before becoming a historian.'
If we'd been standing here,
looking out on the West India Dock in the first years
of the 19th century on a busy day,
what sort of scene would we have encountered?
There would have been a scene of very substantial activity,
but orderly activity.
The convoy would have arrived from the West Indies,
perhaps 12 West Indian merchantmen.
Very large, capacious ships.
They would have swarmed around the ships to take the sugar as
quickly as they could into the secure warehouses, and part of the purpose
of the warehouses was to keep the sugar away from the workforce.
The turnaround time in these docks was down to something
like four days from the four weeks, and sometimes longer,
that had been the case when they were trying to offload in the Thames.
So you keep more of your sugar, which means you can sell more
and make more money,
and you turn your ships around faster
so they can go back to the Caribbean and move more sugar?
Yup. The owners of the West India Dock are richly
rewarded in the first period of its existence.
So they know exactly what is needed to make this place
the perfect place in Europe
to bring sugar in from the Atlantic world?
That's why it was built. They had a vision that they could deliver on.
The commercial culture that the slave owners brought home was
just as enduring as their physical transformation of London.
The huge amounts of capital they required kick-started
some of Britain's first credit and investment networks.
And what is it about slavery and the slave trade that makes
the men involved in it so financially sophisticated, so savvy?
Well, it's partly the demands of the business itself.
It is an extremely capital-intensive business,
either to be in the slave trade or in the sugar business.
Both of those require significant amounts of capital.
That requires credit,
it requires an understanding about the time value of money,
which again is an extremely significant component
of the modern capitalism that we see around us.
The money that's embodied in the slavery
that's kept in those warehouses,
that flows up to the City that we can also see, the City of London?
Yeah, and London becomes the single most important market,
not only for the physical sugar,
but also for the West Indian merchants as a group and as a class.
That's where they operate
and part of its continued existence today as the global financial
centre undoubtedly has its origins in its success in becoming,
in the 19th century, the key component of the sugar economy.
The first waves of slave owners had created a global economy,
taking labour from Africa to produce sugar in the Caribbean
that was then sold in the markets of Europe.
And the establishment of this lucrative trade,
with its increasingly sophisticated commercial services,
enabled thousands of British people who'd never seen a plantation
to become slave owners.
The records of the Slave Compensation Commission
reveal who these people were and where they lived.
Across the British Empire,
there were 46,000 individual claims for compensation,
more than 3,000 of them from slave owners who lived in Britain.
A closer examination of the record shows that this minority
of British-based slave owners owned 50% of all the slaves in the Empire.
The records also confirm that there were clusters of slave owners
in the cities most involved in the industry -
Bristol, London...
..Liverpool.
But slave owners could be found all over the country.
Proportionally, Scotland had more slave owners than anywhere else.
Britain's resident slave owners held an astonishing
concentration of power and wealth.
And they pocketed half of the £17 billion that the government
paid out to bring slavery to an end.
So how did these later generations of British slave owners
acquire their human property?
George Hibbert, William Hibbert,
Samuel Hibbert, William Tetlow Hibbert,
George Hibbert Junior.
This family started out as cloth traders.
They dealt in the sorts of goods that were used by slave traders
to barter for slaves on the coast of Africa,
but very quickly, they became slave owners and plantation owners,
and on an enormous scale.
The Hibberts were typical of the men who worked their way into
the expanding slave economy from an involvement in an allied trade.
"William Bruce Almon..."
Their wealth would often help them acquire political power.
In 1806, George Hibbert used his profits from slavery to win
a seat in Parliament.
This was yet another way for slave owners to protect
their interests by penetrating the heart of the British establishment.
"Charles Grantley..."
Out of some 650 MPs,
more than 80 made compensation claims to the Commission.
For many others found in these records, the path to slave
ownership was not through business but through inheritance.
This book contains the will of one Joseph Barnes who dies in 1829
and in his will of 1831 leaves to his dear wife, Hannah,
a share of his 297 slaves.
They provide her with an annual annuity, which becomes her only
means of support for herself, her daughters and her grandchildren.
This is the transfer down through families of slaves
owned by someone directly involved in the slave industry down to
someone who's just married to.
It's slavery seeping in to the histories,
to the finances of families.
Inheritance explains the surprising number of women who became
slave owners.
"Mary Hunt, Woolwich Common, London..."
"Jayne Bayne, Inverness, Scotland, ten slaves, Jamaica..."
Women accounted for more than 40% of the slave owners
found in these records.
"Maria Isabella Flockton, Spa Cottage,
"Bermondsey, London, 18 slaves..."
To receive compensation, claimants had to submit forms.
These were sometimes accompanied by letters
pleading for a more generous settlement.
"I am a poor widow with a large family to provide for
"and my only dependence is on the payment of the compensation money..."
"..All I have to look forward to in life.
"Failing it, I have no other prospect than positive starvation!"
"Maria McAndrew of Cumberland Street, Edinburgh..."
The female claimants generally owned fewer slaves and they were
often entirely dependent upon them for their livelihoods.
"I am an annuitant to the extent of £200 a year
"on certain estates..."
"..And my children are legatees on the same estates
"to the amount of £5,000..."
"Mary Sutherland, Milford..."
"Anna Maria Frasier of Douglas Row, Inverness..."
Most of these women were in effect trapped.
They were dependent for their incomes upon a system that they
hadn't created and over which they had very little control.
The majority of them were relatively minor players in the slave economy.
But not all of them.
A few British women were large-scale plantation owners
in their own right.
Lady Anna Eliza Elletson Brydges, Duchess of Chandos, was one of them.
Upon the death of her first husband,
she inherited the Hope Plantation in Jamaica
along with more than 300 slaves.
She ran Hope from this London town house.
'We still have some 200 letters to her estate managers.'
'Researcher Hannah Young has used them to find
'out how absentee slave owners administered their affairs.'
She's incredibly knowledgeable
about plantation ownership
and is very assertive about what
she wants doing on the plantation.
For example, she orders that the trenches are to be dug
crosswise instead of perpendicular.
And these are the trenches that sugar cane is planted in? Yes.
And she is particularly keen to ensure that there's fresh
manure to improve the quality of the soil.
But the other half of her property were the enslaved people.
What do we learn about her relationship with them
through the letters?
This is an example which complicates the way
we think about Anna Eliza's motives.
She begins by saying,
"I'm extremely concerned at the loss of the Negro Bacchus."
This is an enslaved man who's died on the Hope Plantation?
Yeah, a skilled man. And this was of particular importance,
that the reason she's so concerned is because "he's essential
"in the still house" and she hopes "that the loss isn't irreplaceable."
So what she's really concerned about is not the loss of life
but the loss of skills, and skills that underpin her profits.
I don't think the rhetoric is entirely a facade.
I think that as an absentee, she was physically and psychologically
removed from this site of violence and exploitation.
So it perhaps allowed her to believe she was a benevolent planter.
But ultimately, at the heart of everything,
these slaves were property.
She had lists of these people, their names
and occasionally how much they were worth.
So all this effort, all of these letters going back
and forth across the Atlantic, all of this knowledge and reading,
did it work?
Well, in the 1770s and 1780s,
Hope continued to be a very profitable plantation.
Anna Eliza was receiving about £6,000 a year from the sale
of the Jamaican sugar.
A lot of money. An awful lot of money.
"I presume you will order the trenches to be dug crosswise
"instead of perpendicular..."
£6,000 is the modern equivalent of £5 million a year.
By the time of abolition,
slave ownership had infiltrated huge swathes of British society,
but the slave system was also elevating some of the most
unlikely people into the elite.
"Thomas William..."
Few illustrate this more clearly than the man who lived here -
Piercefield House in Monmouthshire.
"..Magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Monmouth...'"
The hundreds of slaves who laboured on his plantations
in the Caribbean may have been forgotten.
"..Who died on the 13th of May, 1852."
But their owner, Nathaniel Wells,
is still remembered as a respectable country gentleman.
Aged 72 years. Not a bad life.
The story of Nathaniel Wells - the Magistrate, the slave owner,
the pillar of his local community -
isn't everything that it appears to be
because Nathaniel Wells had himself been born a slave.
His father was a plantation owner in the Caribbean
and his mother one of his slaves.
When the father died
and Nathaniel came of age, among the property he inherited were
three plantations and the hundreds of slaves who worked on the fields.
Mixed-race children were common in the Caribbean,
a result of the routine sexual exploitation
and violence through which the slave owners asserted their dominance.
The vast majority of these children lived and died as slaves
but Nathaniel Wells was treated differently.
'When he was nine,
'he was sent to England to be groomed as his father's heir.'
So he comes of age, he's 21.
He's mixed race but he's educated in England. That's right.
And he's now very rich.
Why does he at that point not go back to Saint Kitts,
where he'd been born?
I think it would have been far too difficult.
He would have been a threat to the whole set-up.
He also would have had no rights, even as a free black.
He couldn't have even voted, let alone sit on a jury,
or what he eventually did here, which would be to sit in judgment.
So he was too black and he was too rich to operate in Saint Kitts
but he could use that wealth to build a new life,
to find new status and prestige here in Britain?
Yeah, that's a real irony, isn't it?
Because the society here that created the whole
set-up in the West Indies that wouldn't allow him to participate
yet here, ironically, he could,
he could rise within society and apparently be accepted.
In the end, does that wealth and that status and prestige,
does that matter more in the way people see him
than the fact that he's mixed race?
On the whole, I think it does and I think it works in that
most of the references to him refer to his gentlemanly manners and his
charitable nature and the role that he plays
rather than to his colour.
But there are a few.
He's referred to as an Othello-like character.
I think what we want to imagine would happen
was this mixed-race man, who'd been born a slave,
who'd seen slavery from the other side,
would inherit these plantations
and that he would free all of the enslaved people,
and that's not what happens at all, is it?
It can't happen at all, I suppose. He knows that.
He does free a handful of people
related to his mother.
He doesn't free anybody else.
They are the means by which his wealth
will be continued to be secured
and he would have been as aware of that from childhood as anybody else.
The compensation records make no note of colour...
..so it's impossible to say how many of Britain's forgotten slave
owners were of mixed heritage.
But it certainly seems that some benefitted from the system.
These were people who had seen slavery from both sides.
And for some of them,
Britain could provide refuge from the slave codes of the Caribbean.
The slave system was now part of the British way of life
and new waves of adventurers were still
setting off for the Caribbean to claim a share of the profits.
For the thousands who arrived in Jamaica,
Port Royal would have been a welcome sight.
Not only did it mark the end of the perilous crossing of the Atlantic,
it was also a gateway to a new life in a land of promise.
When Jamaica hit its economic stride in the second
half of the 18th century, this island,
5,000 miles from Europe and with no real natural
resources to speak of, became one of the most profitable places on earth.
The men who rose to the top of this society, the men who owned
giant plantations and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of slaves
became some of the richest men, not just in Britain, but in the world.
But beneath them was a whole ecosystem of minor players -
estate managers and overseers, book-keepers and merchants.
Now, they were all making some money
but what they dreamed of was of getting enough capital to buy
slaves and, critically, land and then striking it rich.
One of those men was a 29-year-old failed
farmer from Tupholme, Lincolnshire, called Thomas Thistlewood.
Thistlewood was typical of the wannabe slave owners
with one exception -
from the moment of his arrival, he obsessively kept a diary.
"Friday, 4th of May, 1750. Went ashore, took my things with me.
"Walked to William Dorrell's. Was well received. Dined with him.
"He offered me to go to his plantation next week and stay there,
"ready to succeed his overseer, who leaves him in two months."
Across 90 volumes, Thistlewood gives us
one of the few accounts of the corrosive,
corrupting effect the slave system had on the slave owners themselves.
"Sunday, 30th of September.
"Had Joe flogged for impudence to me.
"Appears to be drunk.
"And had Bristol corrected for lying and impudence."
He comes to Jamaica and he sees the brutality.
He understands that you have to be firm and tough...
..because you're reinforcing the law of the land.
He understands that and he just adjusts,
to the point he adjusts so well
that he does some of the most remarkable things
ever written in Jamaica, done by a slave master.
"1st of August. Put him in the bilboes. Both feet. Gagged him.
"Locked his hands together. Rubbed him with molasses
"and exposed him naked to the flies all day
"and the mosquitoes all night."
When a slave runs away and is caught and he's beaten,
then you put pickled salt on his back
and you make him really feel pain.
That is normal across the island.
But Thistlewood prides himself.
He has his own recipe for the concoction
to put on the back of a slave he's whipped.
"Saturday, 6th October.
"Punch catched at Salt River and brought home.
"Flogged him and Quackoo well.
"Then washed and rubbed them in salt pickle lime juice and bird pepper."
He's adapting... Inventing.
Yeah, he's being inventive, creative.
Yes, creative and inventing.
And that's what I'm saying, that somehow, he learned it so quickly.
"Derby was again catched by Port Royal eating canes.
"Had him well flogged and pickled
"then made Hector shit in his mouth."
That gets to the heart of the issue with Thistlewood.
What would be more comforting to believe,
in a diary that's not overburdened with comfort,
is that this man is a sadist,
that there's something psychologically wrong with him.
But he mentions so many other incidents,
in which other planters behave in similar ways,
that you wonder whether he was just an ordinary man
who came into a system that was brutal and just adapted to it.
Yes, yes, and adapted very well.
And I'm sure there must have been some kind of dialogue with himself
and the slave owner, that I'm sure they have told him,
"If you are going to survive here long and be successful,
"you have to do this."
So I'm sure, in a matter of days,
he came to the realisation that this had to be done.
So it is the system, I think, that actually made him who he is.
"Wednesday, 15th of July."
"Mr Dorrell's niggers tried today.
"Oliver Quaw, hanged.
"Fortune Quaw, both ears cropped.
"Both nostrils slit
"and marked on both cheeks."
Thistlewood's diary further chronicles
his nearly 4,000 sexual encounters over the period of 37 years,
many of them the rape of enslaved women.
When he was an older man,
Thistlewood must have considered trying to go home back to England
but he never does.
He never does, never does, because this is home for him.
He has forged his Jamaican identity, right?
He lived a life that he could not live in England, right?
He made money,
he had social power, he was an outstanding man,
so obviously, that was something he found very attractive in Jamaica,
and he could carry on his escapades,
doing whatever he wanted, to write in his little diary.
What could he write in his diary in England?
What could he do to servants in England that's fun?
Well, if he tried to behave the way he did towards
servants in Britain, he'd end up in court... Of course!
..because they were human beings under the law and they had rights.
Of course! But they had no rights here,
so he's an absolute king, a don.
So he can do what he wants
and I think that's the attraction, why he stays here until he dies.
Over the course of two centuries, slavery transformed the Caribbean.
Britain, too, changed beyond recognition.
It became a nation as addicted to cheap sugar
as it was to the profits of slavery...
..a land in which poor farmers could become aristocrats...
..that turned widows into slave owners
and ordinary men into tyrants.
Above all, the slave system made Britain wealthy.
Thomas, 33, carpenter, healthy.
Lavinia, 36, field hand, born in Africa.
And when it was finally abolished,
the names recorded in these ledgers were at the centre of the struggle -
800,000 enslaved men, women and children.
Jack, 36,
Samson, 38,
Eve, 38,
Jane, 33,
Charlotte, 38,
Martha, 33.
From these little fragments of lives, we can at least begin to
imagine who they might have been and what their lives were like.
Pitt,
Blackey, Melia,
Fanny, Melia,
market woman, field,
house servant, garden boy, field...
This is an entry for a slave called Ambrose
who's described as superannuated, which just means old.
He's 70 and he was born in Africa.
And from those little details, you can work out that this is
somebody whose whole life was consumed by slavery.
He was seized from his home in Africa.
This is a man who felt the shackles on his hands and his feet
when he was chained to the deck of a slave ship.
This is someone who came to the Caribbean,
who survived the torture and the whipping, the overwork...
..and lived through all of that for decades, all of that misery.
But he's 70, which is old for a slave in the Caribbean,
and this document's from 1817.
The slaves are freed in 1838
and you realise that Ambrose isn't going to make it.
He's going to die a slave and he's never going to know freedom again.
And these little details of individuals,
their lives recorded in numbers and entries in a ledger,
make you realise that slavery wasn't just a crime,
it wasn't just a tragedy,
it was an appalling waste of human life.
In the next programme,
Britain's slave owners wage a propaganda war to fight abolition...
..ten men manage the biggest government pay-out
in British history...
For the nation as a whole, it is the only way out.
..and how the slave owners' wealth
helped build the Britain we live in today.