A closer look
British taxpayers only finished paying off the massive government debt incurred from the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act in the year 2015. Instead of compensating the enslaved people, the government took out a gargantuan loan to bail out the wealthy slave owners for their lost property, and modern citizens were still footing the bill for it almost two centuries later. It is a wildly depressing lesson in imperial economics, showing that generational wealth for the elite is almost always subsidized by the incredibly slow financial bleeding of the working class over multiple centuries
