Legacies of British Slave-ownership
This is the opening page of the new Legacies of British Slave-ownership website. The following pages describe in more detail what the project is about and who is involved.
On this page, our purpose is to set out how we hope the project can be useful to audiences and how you can contribute to it.
At the core of the project is a database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended. As the project unfolds, we will amass, analyse and incorporate information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of all the British slave-owners on the database, building the Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, which will ultimately be made available online.
While the project is in
process, however, we are able to use the existing database to provide
information about the role of individuals as slave-owners, generally
including the estates they owned, the number of slaves and the amount of
compensation they received from the British state upon the abolition of
colonial slavery in much of the British Empire in the 1830s. Accordingly,
we are happy to receive inquiries about specific individuals with known or
possible linkages with slavery in the early nineteenth century; we will check
whether or not these individuals appear in the compensation database and
provide you with the data together with source
references.
We are also very interested to receive information about known or possible slave-owners in the British Empire. We know from experience that much material is in the hands of institutions, families and individuals which bears on the history of slave-ownership, and we are eager to hear from you if you have records or papers, especially journals, which are relevant to the aims of our project.
Please note that the records we have concern slave-owners; regrettably, we do not have information on the enslaved themselves.
To contact us and learn more, please send an e-mail to the following address: LBS@ucl.ac.uk.
You can hear a discussion of the project and its aims by clicking here.
