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The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS) is an academic centre based in the Department of History, University College London.
The CSLBS expanded from the acclaimed Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project that started in 2009. Since then, the pioneering Legacies of British Slavery Database has seen over two million unique visitors from around the world. We are now the UK’s foremost public history Centre for research on the history of British Slavery and its aftermath. We aim to broaden public knowledge and deepen discussions in Britain and the Caribbean through our public-facing research and reparative history work. Contact the team at cslbs@ucl.ac.uk.
Context
The CSLBS’s major contribution to public scholarship is the pioneering Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) Database. The LBS Database has been the foundation for a new understanding of the extent of slavery’s impact on the development of modern Britain. It is a free and publicly accessible resource used by well over two million visitors from senior academics to genealogical investigators, students, and members of the public curious about their history.
The work of the CSLBS has been featured in television documentaries and in museums, media coverage, workshops, libraries, and other public spaces. Our team members have served as advisors on film, radio, and television productions that cover British slavery and its legacies. Among our collaborators are the National Museum of Jamaica, Royal Museums Greenwich, the Science and Industry Museum (Manchester), the World Reimagined, and BBC Radio 4. Our partnership work enables us to engage with other institutions working in the same space, and to extend and enrich public discourse.
Staff
Professor Matthew J. Smith
Director
Matthew J. Smith is Professor of Caribbean History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. He joined UCL in 2020 after many years working as a historian of the Caribbean at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. His research is pan-Caribbean in scope with special interest in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica. He is the author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a comparative study which explored the post-slavery intersections between the two Caribbean neighbours with a focus on overlapping narratives and shared migration histories. His earlier book, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) studied the activities of radical political groups that emerged after the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and prior to the establishment of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1957. He is co-editor with Diana Paton of the Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2021).
Professor Catherine Hall (retired)
Chair
Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at UCL. Since the 1990s her work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002) explored the entangled yet forgotten connections between Birmingham and Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century. Macaulay and Son (2012) focused on the relationship between Zachary Macaulay, a leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England erased the Caribbean and slavery. Since 2009, she has acted as the Principal Investigator on two phases of the ESRC/AHRC project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ seeking to put slavery back into British history. In 2014, the team published the collaborative volume Legacies of British Slave-ownership. Her current research centres on Edward Long and his family, leading slave-owners in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and powerful figures in the defence of the slave trade and slavery. In 2021, Catherine was awarded the highly prestigious Leverhulme Medal and Prize by the British Academy in recognition of the impact of her work across modern and contemporary British history, particularly in the fields of class, gender, empire and postcolonial history. Read more on the British Academy website.
Dr Matthew Stallard
Research Associate
Matthew Stallard has been a Research Associate at the CSLBS since January 2020 with a focus on database development and innovative digital techniques to reconstruct personal and community histories of enslavement as part of the Valuable Lives project. He has also worked as project manager on many of the Centre’s public history collaborations, including co-leading the Global Threads project tracing connections between global narratives of resistance, solidarity, colonization and slavery and Manchester’s industrial heritage. He has published extensively on environment, colonization, class, and race in Victorian public discourse and post-industrial regional identity in his Inventing the Black Country research project. He has conducted public and community history projects, engagement events, and oral history research across three continents and worked as a contributor and advisor on the Guardian’s Cotton Capital series. He completed his PhD in American Studies at the University of Manchester in 2017.
Dr Jess Hannah
Project Manager
Jess Hannah is the custodian of the LBS database. She received a PhD in English Literature from UCL in 2022, and in the same year undertook an archival research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, during which she focused on Samuel Selvon’s novels The Housing Lark (1965) and Moses Ascending (1975). Also in 2022, Jess was a researcher at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, where her project investigated current academic work across two UCL faculties in relation to the Sarah Parker Remond Centre’s topics of focus. At the CSLBS, she also assists with research and activities relating to slavery’s legacies in Britain and the Caribbean.
Keith McClelland
Digital Humanities Specialist
Keith McClelland is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at UCL. After many years teaching in other universities, Keith joined UCL in 2006. He was a co-founder of the original ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ project (2009-2012), Co-Director of the ‘Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership 1763-1833’ project (2013-2015), and Acting Director of the CSLBS from September 2019-May 2020. He has researched and published particularly on the history of gender, work and politics among the nineteenth-century British working class and co-edited, with Catherine Hall, Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750 to the Present (2010). He also co-wrote, with Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation (2000), and with Sonya Rose, 'Citizenship and Empire, 1867-1928' in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (2006). He is now retired but continues to work with the CSLBS, especially on maintaining the database and website.
CSLBS Associates
Isaac Crichlow
Isaac Crichlow is a PhD Candidate in the UCL Department of History and Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. He is particularly interested in perspectives that connect the cultures of the Caribbean to those of West Africa. He is currently researching the African fighting techniques and skills used by the West India regiments in the 18th century. Isaac has worked on several of CSLBS's own projects and collaborations, including The World Reimagined.
Holly French
Holly French is a PhD Candidate in the UCL Department of History and Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She holds a BA (Hons) in History from Simon Fraser University and an MA in History from UCL (2021). Hailing from a small town near Vancouver, Canada, located on the unceded traditional territory of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Musqueam, and Semiahmoo First Nations, her research interests include late twentieth-century British decolonisation and cross-Commonwealth relations, particularly relating to the themes of immigration, identity, Indigeneity, and imperial responsibility in the British metropole. She has previously worked on the Global Threads project with the CSLBS and the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester.
Rohan Shah
Rohan Shah holds an MA in History from UCL and is a History teacher at a school in London. He is a Research Assistant on the CSLBS project ‘Making Policy to Transform Inequality: A Pathway to Introducing Black Innovation History on National Curricula.'
Ashley Jones
Ashley Jones holds an MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is an Assistant Archaeologist at the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and Secretary of the Archaeological Society of Jamaica. She is a Research Assistant on the CSLBS project ‘Making Policy to Transform Inequality: A Pathway to Introducing Black Innovation History on National Curricula.'
Logo
The CSLBS logo was designed by Stephanie Channer, a Jamaican graphic designer, to whom we are very grateful. Its design invokes different meanings of the legacies of the era of British slavery. The sealing wax motif calls to mind the quintessential iconography of authority common to official documents generated in the seat of empire. Documents bearing a seal carried legitimacy and power. Seals affixed to official statements not only illustrated dominance, when used to close an envelope, they ensured the security of the contents, like a secret kept away from public view. For this reason they were much used in documents in which property, including property in persons, was purchased or bequeathed. This image is contrasted with the central feature of the logo, the nineteenth century Adinkra symbol, Owia Kokroko, of West Africa. The symbol means vitality, renewal, and the greatness of the sun. African iconography was an important element of the culture of the enslaved in the British Caribbean and is today a visual feature recalled across the region. Adinkra symbols are used in jewellery, clothing, and carry their own power of connection between generations divided by time, history, and space. By merging these two disparate visuals from the opposing sides of the slavery business, the logo invites thought on the complexities of a difficult history of subjugation, control, endurance, resistance, blood, and survival that continues to shape relations in our world.
