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Buxton International Festival

Michael Taylor

The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of SlaveryPavilion Arts Centrebutton--dates-and-timesDates & Times

In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved.

And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful ‘West India Interest’. When abolition came at last, compensation worth billions in today’s money was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders, entrenching the power of their families to shape modern Britain to this day.

  • Duration: 1hr
  • Price: £12