[ggm]

Another aspect of the british war debt, is that it was carried for hundreds of years. Rolling the specific consols into a unified public debt and then eradicating it wiped out the history of people sitting on long-tail bond payments from wreakage of the South Sea Bubble onwards.

Basically, until they rolled them up you could have a stable (if low rate of return) income denominated in Napoleonic war debt, if you wanted it, right up into the modern (1980s) era

[edit: actually consols == consolidated fund == prior consolidation of these historic debts. gilts were from time to time issued, like Churchills '27 issue for the WW1 debt ]

[nl]

I find this history really interesting.

Apparently there was a weird set of loans the UK took from the US during WW1 where the US put a moratorium on repayments during the Great Depression, and then loan payments never restarted:

> These loans remain in limbo. The UK Government's position is this: "Neither the debt owed to the United States by the UK nor the larger debts owed by other countries to the UK have been serviced since 1934, nor have they been written off."

That and a bunch of other interesting things about the history of the UK debt are in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4757181.stm

[dghughes]

Just don't ask France about loans the USA has with them for the war...the Revolutionary War!

[IIAOPSW]

The official government position is procrastination

[defrost]

In other tangentially related long term British loan debt news:

    It was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished ‘paying off’ the debt which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners in 1835 because of the abolition of slavery. Abolition meant their profiteering from human misery would (gradually) come to an end. Not a penny was paid to those who were enslaved and brutalised.

    The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.

[0] https://taxjustice.net/2020/06/09/slavery-compensation-uk-qu...

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-colle...

Eight year old 'news' now, but still relatively recent given it was a near 200 year note.

[eru]

> The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.

I wonder how that compares (perhaps as percentage of GDP or per capita or so) to the expenses of the American civil war.

[concordDance]

Still worth it to get it passed through parliament.

(Also, would be a bit odd for the British government to pay people who were not enslaved by it, but instead by private individuals)

[dragonwriter]

Property rights are a creation of law; every person made property within the territory ruled by Britain was enslaved by the British government.

[defrost]

Err, weird take.

With the forenote that I'm opposed to slavery, British companies and wealthy individuals purchased (or owned) copper from Welsh mines (or some other commodity) which they traded in Africa with African nations in exchange for humans (who were purchased already 'enslaved') and then either further traded in the Americas to plantations or used directly in plantations owned.

eg:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/uncomfortable-...

This was a large and complex business enterprise and didn't involve formal enslavement by the British Government.

The Abolition referenced above was the British Government outlawing slavery within its territories and by its citizens - as an act of Government it was only supported on the promise of slave owners (which included nice little old widowed grannies of modest means with a 2/6 th share in a slave left by an uncle) being recompensed for their forfeited property.

The funds that flowed to former British slave owners went on to establish canals, factories, rail lines, develop colonies in Australia, etc.

[Veen]

From that it follows that everyone whose property rights were created by the British government owed tax to Britain on that property. Ergo, the American Revolutionaries were in the wrong and the U.S. owes Britain substantial reparations for property theft and non-payment of taxes.

[atq2119]

Well, yes, in that narrow sense. The British at the time certainly did not think they were in the wrong.

The main reason why it is not commonly seen that way anymore is that history is written by the winners.

[concordDance]

Did that ever happen? I thought people were normally enslaved outside British territory.

Hmm... I'm now wondering if North Africa should be paying reparations as the ones who did the actual enslaving.

[zokier]

Somehow this reminds me of the people trying to get money for 100+ year old Tsarist Russian bonds https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/327261-french-still-waiting-f...

[ggm]

Funny you should mention that. My mother was an ardent CP-GB member in the 40s and 50s and persuaded her mother to burn her share certificates in Baku Oil on the grounds the revolution would never pay out and it was a capitalist evil.

In the 1960s, There was a partial rapprochement with the west and the USSR paid out holders of shares in Baku Oil fields, if they could produce the paperwork...

[giraffe_lady]

Or haiti paying reparations to france until like 1950.

[cyberax]

These are rookie numbers!

Tom Scott has a video about bonds that are being serviced continuously for more than 370 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfSIC8jwbQs

[kneebonian]

Ya know it sounds funny but it seems to me that it is a fundamental principle they the larger a body of humans under consideration is, the slower everything will move. For example a small startup with 15 developers often is able to add features and move faster to capture a market than a massive lumbering blue behemoth.

Thus if we were to reframe our understanding of timelines considering organization size.

Less than a few hundred people could be measured in time scales of a few weeks.

Large organizations with thousands of people change and move on time scales of years or decades.

Then understandably nations would often move on the time scales of centuries to do things, simply because of inertial forces.

I wonder how much of the discontent and mudslinging that now happens is a result of everything in our personal lives suddenly becoming faster without the rest of the human organizations surrounding it being able to speed up as well.

[vkou]

It's not all that funny, considering that the reason they were paying those reparations was the 'damages' inflicted upon French slaveowners by slaves freeing themselves.

[sofixa]

It was all damages - lost property (land and slaves), deaths, lost profits, etc. It was a terrible but necessary sacrifice on the part of Haiti because it was the only way France would recognise their independence, which paved the way for other countries to do the same (but nobody was forthcoming on their own either out of fear of pissing of France or their own slaves/colonies rebelling).

[giraffe_lady]

It was only necessary because france required it. And they could have stopped requiring it any time in the next 120 years and didn't.

[concordDance]

I thought there was also a lot of killing?

[ceejayoz]

Slave revolts tend to require killing, and I’m not inclined to blame the slaves for that.

[jazzyjackson]

consider that some countries have a larger bureaucracy/democracy than others, it may be that dictatorships with few people in thr actual inner circle of power can adapt faster than those countries that have to persuade their constituency and find consensus before making a move.

[flohofwoe]

Well yeah, there's no doubt that dictatorships/autocracies are faster at implementing bad ideas. That's the whole point of democracies/bureaucracies: to have a chance to weed out the obviously bad ideas before people are harmed.

[paganel]

Before clicking on the link I was sure it was about the French, they got screwed up big time in that whole October Revolution debacle.

[gumby]

A couple of other "clean ups" of the modern era:

- Tsar-era government debt had understandingly been repudiated by the communist government and mostly traded as a collector's item, with individual bonds framed or used as bathroom wallpaper or just chucked out. But enough of it was still in peoples' hands that the USSR had to pay it off before they could get access to to debt markets in the 80s.

- IG Farben shares continued to be listed and traded into the 21st century. I remember in the 80s a few crass English friends of mine who worked in the City bought and sold some shares, mainly amused that a Reichsmark-Sterling exchange rate was still available and in fact fluctuated, entirely for the trading of this one "asset".

Finance can be weird, yet hard nosed sometimes.

[pasc1878]

I thought it was only feely redeemed until 2015.

This does show how the 2010s had historically low interest rates as new bonds were always more expensive for the government until then

[justinclift]

> hundreds of years

Doesn't sound right. It only came into existence in 1914, so only one "hundred" since then. What are I not seeing? :)

[helsinkiandrew]

Similar bonds were also raised for the Napoleonic and Crimea wars and back to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720 and have been cancelled or converted in some way over the years.

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying...