John Gladstone (father of prime minister William Ewart Gladstone) received over £90,000 in compensation (in 1830s money) for the loss of some 2,500 slaves on his estates in Jamaica & Demerara (part of modern Guyana) – implying that a slave was worth less than £40.
I got a surprise when I idly calculated the value for each estate, however. (The individual manifests underlying the claims, the documents I saw in the 1960s, go into detail about the personal characteristics which affect the value of a slave). On the Demerara estates the average value worked out at £50 or more per slave; Jamaican slaves were worth less than half that – under £20 per head.
The UCL website gives some assistance on this point:
A commissioned group of officials were appointed by Parliament to determine who should receive what and on what basis. They carefully documented all claims made and all monies disbursed. The effect of this is that there is an extraordinary set of records, held in the National Archives at Kew, of the claimants and of the men, women and children that owners claimed as their 'property' and the monetary values that were assigned to them. If the claims were validated, having been checked in the relevant colonies, the owner received compensation. The amounts were fixed according to the classification of each individual - their gender, age, type of work and level of skill - and the level of productivity, and therefore profitability, of the different islands and territories. The average value of a slave in British Guiana (now Guyana), for example, was judged to be considerably higher than that in Jamaica.On the face of it an extraordinary difference in productivity, whether that be to do with factors such as soil & climate or the physical health of the slaves,
Or maybe it has more to do with higher levels of indebtedness of Jamaican planters?
I shall have to see what more I can find out.
Link
Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Related post
Slave ownership
Human evaluation
