August 28, 1833

Slavery Abolition Act 1833

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 receives royal assent

A law remembered as abolition required most adults to go on working unpaid for their former enslavers, under the name of apprentices.

28 August 1833: royal assent, and nobody freed

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833, 3 & 4 William IV c. 73, received royal assent on 28 August 1833. No one was freed that day.

The act scheduled abolition for 1 August 1834, and even then converted most enslaved people aged six or over into compulsory "apprenticed labourers" rather than granting immediate, unconditional freedom. Children under six were freed under the scheme.

£20 million, and who was to receive it

Parliament authorized up to £20 million in compensation for people legally entitled to enslaved labour. The formerly enslaved received no monetary compensation.

The money itself came later, raised as a £15 million public loan plus £5 million in government stock and administered by the Slave Compensation Commission chiefly from 1835 onward.

Not the whole empire, and not the whole story

The statute expressly excluded territories controlled by the East India Company, along with Ceylon and St Helena, so "abolition throughout the British Empire" is inaccurate shorthand for what this act did.

Compulsory apprenticeship ran until 1838. More than 800,000 people are estimated to have been emancipated across the wider process the act set in motion.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The royal-assent date and effective date are secure.
“Abolition throughout the British Empire” is an inaccurate shorthand because the original statute expressly excluded several territories and implementation dates varied in some colonies.