“Unconscious stipendiaries of this wicked system”? Female enslavers and compensation in nineteenth-century Britain

This article will use the records of the Slave Compensation Commission to examine how women experienced and negotiated property- and slave-ownership in nineteenth- century Britain. Demonstrating that women played a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society, it will show how they utilised, manipulated - and were restricted by - the financial mechanisms and legal frameworks that underpinned the British economy. Women’s engagement with the compensation process illustrates both the economic opportunities open to middle and upper-class women in the early nineteenth century and the ways that female property- ownership was meditated and constrained. But we cannot elide the nature of this particular form of ‘property’. These women were significant players in a system dependent on the violent exploitation of other human beings. The article shows the different ways that British women claimed enslaved people as property, and how they used racialised violence to negotiate and wield power in a patriarchal society and claim, establish and reinforce their own potentially precarious positions. In doing so, it demonstrates the importance of interrogating the complex nexus of power relations – gendered, racialised and classed - that shaped how female property- and wealth holders thought, acted and behaved in nineteenth-century Britain.