Based on a doctoral dissertation completed at University College, London, Nicholas Draper's The Price of Emancipation has made important contributions to the study of British social history as well as to the examination of the history of British slavery. His major interest is not as much in the operations of the economy and society of the British West Indies, as in the patterns of slave ownership in Britain at the time of slave emancipation in 1834. The British were the first major European nation to free their slaves, and in doing so they compensated the slaveowners, but not, of course, the slaves. Compensation was provided in two different forms. First, there was a period of apprenticeship, initially planned to last four to six years, of work for their former owners, but subsequently shortened. Second, and most central to Draper's study, there would be a sum of cash totaling 20 million for all the empire's slaves to be paid by the British government to the owners of slaves. The details of the payment led to an extended political debate ably described by Draper. The outcome was that the payments varied by island based on the number of slaves held and the selling price of slaves on the island in the period 1821–1828. Funds for the compensation would come from a special bond issue. Each slaveowner would make a claim for compensation based on the number of slaves owned, and the claims were to be certified by the Slave Compensation Commission before payment was awarded. Altogether in the West Indies there were over 30,227 awards to owners of a total of 655,780 slaves.

These compensation records are available in T71 at the National Archives, in Kew. Draper has done extensive work creating a database listing all slaveowners, and incorporating information about each of them gathered from a myriad of public and private sources. Categories recorded included absentee vs. resident, rentier vs. mercantile, and larger scale vs. smaller scale rentier owners. Additionally, owners were placed by geographic location within Britain. He examines several major questions: (1) “How widespread was slave-owning in metropolitan Britain?”; (2) “Who were these slaveowners and how did they come to own slaves?”; (3) “How did they represent themselves…in a society increasingly hostile to slavery?”; (4) “How did these slaveowners secure compensation from the British state?”; and (5) “How does the existence of this body of slaveowners fit with established narratives of the end of British colonial slavery?”(p. 2).

The last three questions are discussed mainly to provide context; it is the first two questions that are Draper's major concern. He argues that slave-owning was more widespread in metropolitan Britain than was previously understood; about 45 percent of the large units receiving compensation had absentee owners, and their holdings were larger than the resident recipients. Included among the recipients were members of Parliament, Anglican clergymen, members of the nobility, peerage, and related gentry, as well as merchants and bankers. Yet slave ownership was not ubiquitous, and there were more owners of public debt than of West Indian slaves.

The strength of Draper's work is not just in the preparation of various aggregates of the social categories that he presents, but in the detailed listing of the names of slaveowners with the material on these individuals drawn from diverse sources. This information is currently being extended in a website devoted to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership being collected at the University College, London history department under principal investigator Catherine Hall, with Draper and Keith McClelland as Research Associates. Given its extensive coverage of individuals, this should become an important data set for many social scientists.

The Price of Emancipation is a well-researched and argued book, and a major contribution to the study of British history and West Indian slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century, and along with the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project should also have continuing importance to many scholars.