Legacies of British Slave-ownership
This is the opening page of the 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 podcast about the project and its aims by clicking here. And you can see Catherine Hall talking about the project here.
And for more on the context in which this project is being carried out, click here.
Recent events
Professor Catherine Hall gave the Creighton Lecture at Beveridge Hall, Senate House, London on 28th November 2011 at 6pm. The lecture was called 'Macaulay and son: an imperial story'. A podcast of the lecture is available on the IHR's History Spot website.
On 6th March 2012, Catherine also gave this year's Hayes Robinson lecture at Royal Holloway. The lecture was called 'Displaced histories: memories of the slave trade and slavery'. You can listen to that lecture on the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website.
LBS organised this year's UCL Neale Lecture and Colloquium in British History, titled "Emancipation, slave-ownership and the remaking of the British imperial world". The conference took place 30th-31st March 2012 at UCL. It was preceded by a free public lecture by Professor Robin Blackburn on Thursday 29th March. For more details of the lecture and the conference, please click Neale Conference 2012 on the sidebar.
During 2010 we held a series of regional workshops for people interested in slave-ownership and its legacies. For more details of those click here.
