The records of the 1833 Abolition Act compensation payments provide the most detailed evidence of who actually benefited from slavery. When the government paid twenty million pounds to slave owners on abolition, it created detailed records of exactly who received the money and how much they got. University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership project has researched these records extensively.
The recipients were overwhelmingly members of a specific commercial and landowning class: Caribbean plantation owners and their British agents and creditors, merchants who had invested in the trade, and lawyers and bankers who had handled plantation affairs. They were geographically concentrated in particular areas. Their descendants exist and some can be identified. But they represent a small fraction of the British population, not a broad racial category.
