The abolitionists acknowledged that the slave owners would be compensated for their loss of property, something the planters had been lobbying to achieve for decades. The government recognized that it would have to foot the bill: twenty million pounds was raised and set aside to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners. That sum represented 40 per cent of all government spending for the year 1833 and is the equivalent of around seventeen billion pounds today, making it then the largest pay-out in British history.
