Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners

Episode 1

Profit and Loss

David Olusoga reveals how more than 40,000 ordinary middle or lower class Britons in Georgian times owned thousands of slaves on plantations in British overseas territories such as Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada, Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago, and why the British government set up The Slave Compensation Commission to pay out around 20 millions pounds in compensation to British slave owners when slavery was abolished in 1834. The story of their involvement in the slave trade began when a group of around 50 British settlers together with their indentured servants landed on the then uninhabited island of Barbados in 1627.