Events & Workshops
Upcoming Events
The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury: An Exhibition
From the 6th March 2013, Holborn Library, 32-38 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8PA
Our Slave-owners of Bloomsbury exhibition is currently on display in the lending section of Holborn Public Library.
Alongside Bloomsbury's associations with literary and cultural gentility runs a less comfortable story of exploitation and oppression, and the exhibition maps many of the British colonial slave-owners who settled in the area's streets and squares in the 18th and 19th centuries. But slavery was only part of the connections between Africans and the area, and the exhibition also celebrates these other African presences.
For contact details, opening hours and a location map for the library, click here.
Enterprising women: race and gender in the British Caribbean 1763-1840
5.30pm on Thursday 2nd May 2013
Room G34, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
In the spring of 1824 the Colonial Secretary was surprised to receive a visit from enormous old woman of almost totally black complexion wearing a colourful turban adorned with ostrich feathers and diamonds with a heavy necklace of golden Spanish doubloons and her great girth covered by a dress made from five pound notes. She arrived unannounced and insisted on an interview with the Colonial Secretary to protest a colonial tax in the colony of Demerara that discriminated against free women of colour such as her. Lord Bathurst was so impressed her magisterial presence that he promptly had the law repealed.
The old woman was Dorothy Thomas, an illiterate ex-slave born around 1765 who had purchased her own freedom and that of her family. By the time she made her assault on the Colonial Office she was reputed to be the richest resident in Demerara, and had financial connections to some of the biggest merchant houses in the Atlantic. A colonial subject such as Dorothy Thomas came as a surprise to Lord Bathurst and she comes as no less a surprise to us.
In her paper Cassandra Pybus (University of Sydney) will explore the life of the extraordinary woman who became known as “the Queen of Demerara”.
For a map showing the location of the Institute of Historical Research, click here.
Previous Events
LBS workshop at the National Archives
2pm-3pm, Tuesday 26th March 2013, National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 4DU
Nick Draper and Keith McClelland ran a workshop about the LBS database at the National Archives on 26th March at 2pm with a practical demonstration of its relevance to local and family historians and a discussion about the wider implications of our research.
If you are interested in the importance of slave-ownership for your region, area, town or village in Britain; or if your family had connections with the Caribbean; or if you are descended from enslaved people; this database is potentially important to you.
Launch of the project website
27th February 2013, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Main Building, University College London 5:30pm
On Wednesday 27th February 2013, Catherine Hall gave a public lecture entitled 'Towards a new past: the legacies of British Slave-ownership' to celebrate the publication of this Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership and the inauguration of our new project, The Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership, 1763-1833. The event was followed by a demonstration of the Encyclopaedia by Nick Draper and Keith McClelland.
For a film of the lecture, click here.
Neale Lecture 2012
29th March 2012, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Main Building, University College London 5:30pm
The Neale Conference opened with a free public lecture by Prof Robin Blackburn (Essex) on "Slavery and Finance in Britain's Empire of Free Trade". It was followed by a reception.
Neale Conference 2012
30th-31st March 2012, Old Refectory, Main Building, University College London
The colloquium presented the findings of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and engaged with current work exploring the importance of slavery and slave-ownership in the re-making of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833.
The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury: an exhibition
10th October 2011 - 18th January 2012 - South Cloisters, Main Building, University College London
To mark Black History Month, the project organised a free exhibition examining the contentious lives and legacies of slave-owners living close to UCL at the moment of the university's foundation in the early nineteenth century.
Regional workshops and research in 2010
During 2010 we held a series of workshops in Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Newcastle with the aim of building a network of people interested in slave-ownership and its legacies in nineteenth-century Britain.
Each workshop included a presentation by the LBS team outlining the scope of the LBS project and a presentation on slave-ownership relevant to each regional audience. Members of local communities discussed their work and their plans for future research, and for the presentation of material previously solicited from the audience. The audience responded through structured Q&A sessions and gave very valuable feedback from each day.
These workshops were part of UCL's Public Engagement Initiative and were funded by the Beacon Innovation Seed Fund.
Resulting research
One important aspect of the research, presented by both the LBS team and workshop participants in Glasgow, concerned Scotland and slave-ownership. It has long been understood that Scots had a disproportionate presence in Caribbean slavery as part of the participation in the 'opportunities of Empire'. One dimension of this was Scottish slave-ownership. While it is possible to argue that the high point of this was at the end of the period of slave-ownership in the 1830s – though we cannot be certain – we believe that people living in Scotland accounted for at least 15% of absentee owners at a point when the Scottish population was less than 10% of the UK population as a whole. One of the largest single groups receiving compensation were Glasgow merchants, despite the prior absence of a significant direct participation in the slave trade. In total, Glasgow merchants took about 10% of the compensation paid to British merchants. However, it must also be noted that there is a question about what constitutes a Scot when we discuss 'Scottish slave-owners': a significant number of recipients of compensation money were Scots who had moved to England or whose families had their origins in Scotland.
