After a decade of intensifying calls for emancipation in the British Empire, Parliament, in 1833, succeeded in passing a bill that would grant West Indian slaves their freedom. As part of the “Abolition Act,” the government pledged itself to partially compensate slaveholders for their loss of “property.” Thus, in order to liberate people throughout the empire, the total public expenditure totaled £20,000,000. The most galling aspect of this compensation scheme is that the former slaves—technically freed on 1 August 1834—were also forced to help compensate their master's financial loss by serving as unpaid apprentices for six years, after which time they would receive their full freedom. While this second component of the compensation plan ended with mixed success in the Caribbean colonies, the British government managed to (1) raise the enormous funds required by the law, (2) establish a bureaucracy to review individual claims, and (3) distribute millions of pounds sterling to West Indian slaveholders.

Nicholas Draper's The Price of Emancipation is much more than a study of the compensation process and the efficiency of the British government during the nineteenth century. Rather, it is the most complete prosopographical study of British West India absentees during the era of slavery. Draper uses the actual compensation claims submitted by UK-based slaveholders in order to piece together a rich analysis of ownership patterns inside England, Scotland, and Ireland.

From his compensation database, Draper argues that slaveholding, for these final owners of bondsmen, was an uncomfortable truth but one that was not stigmatized even during the 1820s. Draper claims that slave owners were not ostracized from British society, so long as they did not actively promote or advance the institution. Ironically, once abolition and compensation were decided upon by Parliament, slaveholding was squarely legitimized in the minds of most of these slaveholders. Draper shows through a textual analysis that male absentees, in particular, were the most emphatic in demanding quick compensation by underscoring their constitutional right to property.

The most impressive aspect of The Price of Emancipation is its analysis of the compensation claimant data. Draper expertly slices these records in a number of ways, breaking down the population of absentees along the lines of socioeconomic status, residence, and sex. The biographies of both small and prominent slaveholders are brought to life by Draper's expert integration of both well-known and obscure manuscript sources. The paths to slave ownership are detailed for all classes of absentees, and Draper explains that most of these men and women had hoped that their investment in humans would be profitable, passive investments. By 1834, most of the absentees could be classed as accidental slaveholders, either having acquired their West India “property” through inheritance or via foreclosure on a debt owed to them. Others, such as military officers and clergymen, came to possess a handful of slaves (usually domestics) when they were temporarily stationed in the sugar islands. Slave ownership was diffused throughout British society and, to a degree, slaveholding was socially acceptable despite nearly a half century of questioning slavery by abolitionist and emancipationist groups.

Absentees were indeed clustered in cities long associated with the sugar and slave trade, but Draper's research shows us that slaveholders, especially small owners, could be found throughout Great Britain. The Scots, for example, were disproportionately represented as claimants, but still the largest number of slaveholders could be found in London, the Home Counties, Bristol, and, of course, Liverpool. Draper's point is not that slave owning was a dominant social force in Great Britain. Rather, Draper wants to show that slave owners were neither shunned nor excluded from everyday organizations and were in many cases leaders of some of the most prestigious clubs and institutions in England. Slaveholders were vicars, leaders of small towns, captains of banking and proto-banking institutions, and founding members of elite social clubs, such as the Royal Yacht Squadron. Slaveholding, even at this very late date, did little to erode an individual's reputation in British society.

The Price of Emancipation has gone far to complicate as well as confirm our understanding of the identity of absentee slaveholders. Draper's analysis of mercantile and banking firms that were involved in the West Indies establishes that slavery was an important component to many well-known financial institutions, but by no means was slavery the primary contributor to capital formation in the metropole. Draper therefore concurs with Eltis, Engerman, and O'Brien, who have argued that sugar colonies and the triangular trades were important, but not essential, to the economic growth of Great Britain. Where Draper differs from other economic historians, however, is in his emphasis on the social history of Britain's relationship to slavery. The commonplace acceptability of slave owning during this period does not mean there was widespread endorsement of the institution by Britons or by the absentees themselves. This ambivalence led absentees to refrain from proposing that slavery was a “positive good.” Alternatively, those who profited from slavery hoped to use the distance that separated them from the colonies—and the nomenclature of capitalism—to sanitize (in their minds and in the minds of their neighbors) the violent and immoral nature of their West Indian investment.