The year was 1833, a special year for England to be in fact. It was the end of chattel slavery with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the rise of debt slavery via the Bank Charter Act of 1833 with England being the capital of economic power.
The Bank Charter Act of 1833 played a crucial role in entrenching financial systems that enabled and profited from forms of economic exploitation often described as “debt slavery” — especially within the context of the British Empire.
What the Bank Charter Act of 1833 Did:
The Bank Charter Act of 1833 was a major piece of British financial legislation that:
Renewed the Bank of England’s charter (its legal right to operate as a bank).
Made Bank of England notes legal tender in England and Wales for sums over £5.
Allowed joint-stock banks to issue their own notes outside London.
Began a slow process toward centralized monetary control, setting the stage for the later and more famous Bank Charter Act of 1844, which restricted note issuance to the Bank of England.
Essentially, it strengthened London’s financial dominance and concentrated control of money and credit in the hands of a few elite institutions.
Link to Debt and Exploitation:
The Act’s timing and effects were deeply entangled with imperial economics:
Post-Slavery Compensation (1833–1835):
In the same year (1833), Britain abolished slavery in its colonies.
However, instead of compensating the enslaved, the British government compensated slave owners — to the tune of £20 million (roughly £2.4 billion today).
That compensation was funded by loans arranged largely through the Bank of England and private financiers, backed by the stability of the banking system reinforced by the 1833 Act.
These loans weren’t paid off until 2015, meaning British taxpayers were servicing slavery-related debt for nearly two centuries.
→ Thus, the Act underpinned the financial machinery that enabled the state to borrow massively to preserve the wealth of the enslaving class.
Indenture and Global Debt Labor:
After abolition, Britain turned to indentured labor — a system of long-term debt contracts binding Indian, Chinese, and other workers to colonial plantations.
The financial institutions empowered by the 1833 reforms facilitated capital flows that funded these exploitative labor systems.
This system of “free labor under contract” became, in practice, a new form of debt bondage, particularly in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and Fiji.
Consolidation of Imperial Capitalism:
The 1833 Act reinforced London’s financial hegemony, allowing credit and debt to become the main instruments of global control.
Colonized regions were forced into monetary and debt systems dominated by the City of London.
Debt became the primary mechanism of subjugation — replacing physical chains with financial ones.
Conclusion
The Bank Charter Act was a cornerstone in the architecture of imperial finance that enabled and sustained systems of debt-based exploitation after formal slavery ended.
The Bank Charter Act of 1833 was important in the history of money because it made Bank of England notes legal tender during peacetime, it effectively made the Bank of England the custodian of England’s gold reserves, and it gave the Bank of England the bank rate with which to control the inflow and outflow of gold. It laid in place principles fundamental to the operation of England’s nineteenth-century gold standard, a standard that ruled the monetary world by the end of the century.
In that sense, it can be viewed as part of the transition from chattel slavery to financialized slavery — where debt replaced chains as the means of coercion.
Sources:
Encyclopedia of Money: Bank Charter Act of 1833 (England)
1833, Act on the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire