“…It is, of course, morally troubling to pay slaveowners to end their inhumane practice, effectively recognizing the right to own slaves and rewarding the perpetrators of exploitation and oppression. The fact that this compensation has been an important source of inherited wealth and privilege in Britain, and remains so nearly two centuries later, may heighten such moral concerns (Draper, 2010; Hall et al ., 2014). It might be a mitigating factor that this compensation was a transfer between beneficiaries of an unjust system, given that the taxpayers who funded it had knowingly consumed cheap goods produced by slave labour (Levy and Peart, 2005: 124–127, 2018: 14–15), but this cannot assuage all moral qualms.…”