Britain has a selective memory of its slavery past. Our project will help us to remember
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Version 0 of 1. Britain’s collective memory of our involvement in colonial slavery is dominated by the vividness with which we remember the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. What we have tended to forget is that the abolition of slavery itself, the eventual freeing of almost 800,000 enslaved people in Britain’s colonies, did not take place until the 1830s. Still less do we recall that when emancipation did come, the slave owners were paid compensation, and that the enslaved people received nothing. I am part of a team of historians who have been working to rectify this historical amnesia, and to make freely available the extraordinary data at the National Archives in Kew, contained in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission, which was set up to distribute the £20m (£17bn today) among the slave owners. The current Legacies of British Slave -ownership (LSB) database contains the details of all the slave owners in the British colonies who were awarded compensation when Britain abolished slavery in the 1830s. We had intended that this should be a fully public resource: the data appeared to us to be too important to be held back and confined to academia. The database is the result of collaboration not only among the team members at UCL, but among hundreds of contributors outside academia who have shared their information with us: we continue to welcome new information and material from users. When emancipation did come, slave owners were paid compensation, and the enslaved people received nothing The database is searchable by many criteria: for example, the family name of the slave owners, their address in Britain, or the name of the estate in the Caribbean to which the compensation award applied. We have also sketched hundreds of “legacies”: specific physical, commercial, cultural, philanthropic, intellectual and political impacts in Britain that flowed from the slave owners. The site is intended as a research tool not only for academic historians but for historians of firms and institutions, for local historians and family researchers, and for all those interested in the connections of the past with the present. Immediately after its launch, we had more than 100,000 hits on the site. Since then, usage has settled with periodic spikes, as has been the case over the past few days due to the publicity for the BBC documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, the first part of which airs tonight. We are now working on a new phase of the project, to trace the development of the ownership of estates (and thus of the enslaved people on those estates) from the mid-18th century to the moment of emancipation: in other words, to answer the question: how did we get to the final structure of slave ownership in the 1830s? As a result of this new work we will add thousands more slave owners. We plan to release the new dataset in 2016. As with the original database, this is likely to bring to light previously unknown or unacknowledged connections between slave ownership and firms, families and institutions that have contributed to the formation of modern Britain. Related: Ben Affleck doesn’t want to feel guilty about his slave-owning ancestors. Who would? What has struck us and our users are not so much the spectacular individual examples of legacies – although those are certainly present – but the accumulation of hundreds and eventually thousands of specific imprints left by slave owners across the whole of the country: very few towns or even villages in Britain have no historical connections at all with slave ownership. I should stress that the database is focused on the slave owners, not on the enslaved people. We know that our material can be very helpful to those researching ancestors among the enslaved people, but we know also that the histories of enslaved people are by definition fragmented, and that our work cannot ever repair this and often cannot make any difference. Building bridges between academic historians and the wider public has become both more important (because of the pressures for academics to justify their privileges by demonstrating the wider appetite for the results of their work), and more possible (because of the power of the internet in disseminating new findings and in tapping the knowledge of thousands of contributors outside universities). The LBS database is one product of these dual processes. |