Raphjd - That article is hard to read ! Well, I read it for the third time and it says the Bishop of Exeter and three colleagues were paid for 665 slaves - but I didn't see any mention of WHO paid. But you are a good source of information - so I'll take your word for it that the gov't paid. 64 Billion pounds (almost 90 billion in USD) seems like an incredibly huge amount of money though. In US dollars - Many people earn less than 30,000 a year here - and work 30 years - so they have made less than a million for their entire lifetime. So 665 people earn 665 million and the same slaves are worth 15 times that? Yeah, I realize slaves worked from sun up to sun down, not 8-5 etc. Still…...
Not only that, 13,000 pounds for that time in history - an incredible amount of money! Think about this - a friend of mine had a house in an historic district along THE main street in a major city. In 1910, houses in the first block (prestige was a big factor) were selling for $3,500, second block $2500, and third block 1500. Of course, the further away you got, there were less features - (leaded glass by the fireplace, built in book cases etc) still these were all 2 story brick homes with at least three bedrooms. (Henry Ford's model T plant was about 2 miles from there, and he was offering the unheard of wages of $5 a day (which most people didn't know included benefits- that was not cash in your hand)...... So a slave was worth 1/665th of 90 Billion USD? The math or conversion figures must be wrong somewhere. A spool of thread in 1885 was 2 cents. How could a slave (or anyone else's) productivity be worth that?
