Talk:Trevelyan baronets

Trevelyan wealth and slavery

A few days ago I edited Trevelyan Baronets article to remove (in "Origins" 5th paragraph 1st line) "much" of the wealth of the family and substituted "some". I consulted the article in The New Yorker cited in footnote 9 by Sam Knight. He makes no such statement, simply reporting the compensation paid to the Trevelyans after slavery was abolished in 1833. The Trevelyans of Wallington were very rich, holding 22,058 acres in Northumberland worth an annual rental of £15,448. This property was inherited from the Blackett family, Newcastle merchants involved in shipping and mining. The plantations in Grenada may have been owned by the Blacketts, but these were a small fragment of the inheritance. The total compensation for the slaves was £34,000. If used to purchase more land in the 1830s, that sum would have gained the family about an extra 1,000 acres ( at "30 years purchase" a common method od calculation of land values) or one-twentieth of their fortune (excluding stocks and bonds, etc.), a very minor part of their wealth. Yet my edit was deleted and Wikipedia is posting a false piece of information. Sources: John Bateman, editor, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Prof. David Spring of the Johns Hopkins University, based on a British Government report republished by Leicester University Press, 1971, page 448. Also see Ellis Wasson (University of Delaware), The British and Irish Ruling Class 1660-1945, De Gruyter Open, Berlin, 2017, volume one, pages 89-90. The estimate given for the slave compensation in modern currency was over £3,000,000. At "thirty years purchase" the value of the Trevelyan estate in Northumberland in current currency would be worth over £200 million. 134.204.33.114 (talk) 17:08, 3 June 2023 (UTC)