Slavery Abolition Act 1833

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was legislation of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, introduced under Prime Minister Charles Grey's government, that abolished slavery across most of the British Empire through compensated emancipation. It received royal assent on 28 August 1833 and took effect on 1 August 1834. The Act required the British government to purchase the freedom of enslaved people throughout the empire, and roughly 800,000 freed people were recorded through the resulting compensation claims process, which covered the Caribbean, South Africa and Mauritius under nineteen separate compensation schedules. Its reach was limited: it explicitly excluded British India, where slavery was addressed only a decade later by the Indian Slavery Act 1843, and slavery persisted far longer in some British protectorates, with Bahrain not abolishing it in law until 1937, while dismantling existing local slavery systems in territories colonized later, such as Nigeria, remained a gradual process that continued into the early twentieth century.