1834-00-00: (Great Britain Decrees the End of Slavery Throughout Its Empire, a Decision Whose Moral Logic the Haitian Revolution Had Demonstrated Three Decad…

1834-00-00: (Great Britain Decrees the End of Slavery Throughout Its Empire, a Decision Whose Moral Logic the Haitian Revolution Had Demonstrated Three Decades Earlier at a Cost Britain Was Never Required to Pay): In 1834, Great Britain decreed the end of slavery throughout its empire, where approximately 800,000 people were held enslaved across the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The British government compensated the enslavers, paying them £20 million for the loss of the people they claimed to own. The enslaved were not compensated. The decision had been building for decades through the work of abolitionists like William Wilberforce, but it was the Haitian Revolution that had demonstrated the underlying truth that made abolition inevitable: that the slave system was immoral and unsustainable, capable of producing wealth and also organized revolutionary violence that could annihilate the most profitable colony in the hemisphere. Britain had learned this lesson by proxy, watching France lose Saint-Domingue. It chose to abolish the institution on its own terms, before its enslaved populations abolished it on theirs. Haiti received no credit, no compensation, and no diplomatic recognition for the lesson it had taught at the cost of a hundred thousand lives.