The first threat to the family business came when British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in 1833. Lucky for the Booker brothers, key members of Britain’s political, religious and banking institutions also had considerable slave holdings. Investors convinced debt-ridden Parliament to pay out 20 million pounds (about £2 billion in today’s currency, or about $2.6 billion) to compensate slave owners across the empire. it was the largest bailout in global history until the bank bailout of 2009.

Parliament’s bailout scheme richly benefited the Bookers. Slave owners negotiated immediate cash payments to compensate for the loss of their work force — according to calculations made by the historian Hilary McD. Beckles in his book “Britain’s Black Debt,” politically powerful British Guiana owners got about of 50 pounds per slave, while older colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica fetched 20 pounds. Since the actual market value of this human chattel was set at 47 million pounds, Parliament decreed that my enslaved Guyanese ancestors had to work as unpaid “apprentices” for a period of several years after the owners cashed out to pay off the rest of their own market value.

The Booker brothers and their associates collectively submitted claims on 52 slaves, giving their fledgling business a cash injection of what amounts to 317,240 pounds (about $418,000) in today’s currency, according to archives. Because many British Guiana planters used abolition of slavery as an opportunity to liquidate their human assets and get out of the sugar business, the Booker brothers were able to acquire them cheaply. Their enslaved work force grew to 315 people in the period immediately following emancipation. After squeezing the workers for four more years of unpaid labor, on Aug. 1, 1838, at the appointed time, the Booker brothers manumitted them. “Today I had the privilege of mustering the slaves and giving them the good tidings that they were free, resulting in great rejoicing throughout the plantation,” George Booker wrote in a letter to his brother Septimus.

Rather than pay fair wages to free African workers, British planters such as the Bookers convinced the British government to help finance voyages to collect replacement sugar workers — indentured workers from India. British Guiana was first in line to receive these workers, and by the time the practice ended in 1917 amid gross human-rights abuses, the colony had received 240,000 Indian indentured workers. People of East Indian descent remain Guyana’s largest ethnic group, and continue to be locked in an often bitter competition with the African workers whom colonial society sought to discard as surplus.