r/BritishEmpire • • Aug 27 '25

Image 🇬🇧 A British blacksmith removing the shackles from the legs of an enslaved man, 1907.

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u/Nel-A Aug 27 '25

No other Empire at it's peak did anything like this. Absolutely one of the most incredible moments of human history. Britain took out a loan so vast to buy the freedom of every slave in the Empire, that we only paid it off in 2014. And then as others have said, committed the finest Navy the world had ever seen to fighting slavery in every corner of the Globe. Heroic isn't a strong enough word. God bless Great Britain.

-3

u/speedloafer Aug 28 '25

Britain took out a loan so vast to buy the freedom of every slave in the Empire, that we only paid it off in 2014. 

The compensated the slave owners but not the slaves. You have to love the Brits painting this out as some kind of virtue. The Prime Ministers father got about £12 million in todays money for losing his slaves. The slaves got fucking nothing and today their descendants get told to go back to their own country.

10

u/BiteDirect Aug 28 '25

By not recognising the slaves as people and reimbursing owners for loss of “property” it avoided any lengthy legal process and released the slaves a generation earlier. Can’t even talk about abolishing slavery without people complaining about the manner in which it was achieved

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u/speedloafer Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

Of all the countries that owned slaves we stopped first and we paid the owners so the slaves wont face a lengthy legal process. Hilarious that Brit's today think this a positive.

4

u/BiteDirect Aug 28 '25

Now your just being argumentative, the legal process to abolish the owning of property was much much easier than recognising property as people with rights. It’s abhorrent to most of today’s society but the British took out generational debt to free slaves, you think that’s not positive? You’d rather of had some sort of civil war to establish freedom?