British Slave Research Articles

Edward Long’s observations on Jamaican slavery and British slave trade abolition

Abstract This note presents for the first time material on Edward Long’s views on Jamaican enslavement and British slave trade abolition in 1804. His letter of that year, deposited at the William Salt Library, Stafford, shows that in old age he adapted his position from being an ardent slave trade supporter to a stance where ending the slave trade could be accepted. Long emphasized that, in circumstances where slave revolt and Jamaica’s security were concerned, the pro-slave trade argument would need to be shelved, the implementation of abolition would be acceptable and planters could then concentrate their efforts on amelioration.

Jane Webster: Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807

Jane Webster: Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807

Jernlænken fra Fæsted

Jernlænken fra Fæsted

Henry Dundas and Abolition of the British Slave Trade: Further Evidence

This article examines newly unearthed archival evidence that challenges the notion from activists, pressure groups, and some academics that Henry Dundas, Scotland’s most powerful politician in the late eighteenth century, is to blame for Britain’s failure to achieve abolition of the slave trade sooner than 1807. This evidence supports the argument that Dundas was genuinely attempting to chart a path by which Britain could abolish the slave trade, albeit gradually, starting with an immediate end to slave trading with foreign colonies. The pathway of gradual abolition therefore meant antislavery was ultimately an anti-slavery strategy. In addition, these recent debates surrounding Henry Dundas and abolition of Britain’s slave trade highlight a further point. There is a pressing need for public bodies to exercise caution and corroborate ideas raised in social media campaigns before making rash and ill-considered decisions to permanently change built heritage, preferably with the assistance of impartial and experienced historians who can be trusted to avoid selectively using evidence to manipulate or distort the past. The potential for generating unending controversy and dissatisfaction over government bodies declaring judgment against the past is concerning, and poses risks of increased community division.

Richardson, David. Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition

Richardson, David. <i>Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition</i>

THE BRITISH COLONIZERS’ SYSTEMATIC OPPRESSION IN AFRICA: AN EXPLORATION OF YAA GYASI’S HOMEGOING

The enduring legacy of British colonization and the Atlantic slave trade shaped and influenced the physical and psychological experiences of people of African. This paper examines the British colonizers’ systematic oppression in Africa. It purports to show how Yaa Gyasi, a Ghanaian novelist portrays shenanigans of slave masters in Africa and particularly in Cape Coast as contextualized in her first novel, Homegoing. It draws its theoretical underpinnings from the New Historicism and the psychological approach. The findings from the exploration of this narrative highlight aspects of the African’s victimization such as their inferiority complex towards the white man’s race, the shenanigans of the British Slave Masters in Africa and the subsequent psychological trauma this systematic oppression on Africans. As a final assessment, this study positions Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing as an historical novel which bringing the reader back to Africans’ experience of rejection and victimization due to the colour of their skin and their origins in their own land by the British colonizers. A way the authoress to promote healing for Africans, unveiling the historical and psychological antecedents of a harsh oppression they had been victims of, the aftermaths of which ineradicably shaped their psyche, and they are still struggling to get rig off.

Pharmaceutical Captivity, Epistemological Rupture, and the Business Archive of the British Slave Trade

The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of the British slave trade and examining the underexplored relationship between captivity and drugs that articulated across the Atlantic world. By performing three different readings of a slave ship drug invoice—as a textual artifact, epistemic argument, and narrative of loss—I argue that the drug invoice stimulates new illness narratives of captive Africans in the historiography of the British slave trade.

Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism: John Picton Beete in Demerara and Swan River

ABSTRACT The career of Captain John Picton Beete (1799–1886, later John Picton Picton), an officer of the 21st Regiment of Foot (North British Fusiliers), maps some of the continuities between slavery and settler colonization. While military punishment was practiced across a wide imperial field, by focusing on the links between slavery and the new settler colonies we see how black bodies remained vulnerable to violent techniques well after they had been abolished elsewhere. Beete’s status was owed largely to his family’s extensive business interests in slavery, and he spent his career furthering the empire’s appropriation of Indigenous land and the exploitation of black labour. Beete and the 21st Regiment played a prominent role in quelling one of the largest slave uprisings in history, the landmark Demerara Rebellion of 1823. A decade later, shortly after arriving in Swan River, Western Australia, Beete and the 21st led the most intense phase of violence between colonists and Binjareb Nyungar, climaxing in the infamous 1834 Pinjarra Massacre. The common role of spectacular punishment represents the shared strategies of legal violence that maintained racial hierarchies across the empire, and points toward the continuities between British slave and settler colonies.

"I trust that I am a Liberal": The Politics and Poetics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Early Antislavery Verse

"I trust that I am a Liberal":The Politics and Poetics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Early Antislavery Verse Jerome S. Wynter (bio) In 1821, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861, hereafter EBB) wrote in her autobiographical essay "Glimpses of My Own Character and Life": "I trust that I am a Liberal for bigotry and prejudice I detest."1 This precocious avowal underlines EBB's entire poetic and political career. In fact, by 1856, she had composed three poems attacking race and slavery in the United States to support its antislavery efforts. These American antislavery poems—"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1847), "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850), and "A Curse for a Nation" (1855)—have received substantial critical attention from feminists and historians alike.2 Far less consideration has been given, however, to EBB's earlier antislavery poems: "The African: A Poem in Two Cantos" (ca. 1822) and "The Appeal," published in May 1833.3 Here, for the first time, by focusing on these virtually unknown poems, I show that paying attention to EBB's early work directly contributes to our understanding of her mature antislavery writings. In later years, EBB would downplay the significance of her early compositions. Censoring them as the "sins" of her "rawest juvenility," she chose to acknowledge only her work beginning with the 1838 publication of The Seraphim and Other Poems, which she remarked has her "voice in it" and is the product of her "mature mind" (BC, 16: 159–161; WEBB, 4: 287–315; BC, 7: 352–357). Indeed, her first abolitionist poem, "The African," composed around her sixteenth birthday during a period of convalescence from 1821 to 1822, was never published in her lifetime and survives in manuscript (BC, 1: 128n1). Identifying it in the early 2000s when the manuscript was loaned to the British Library, the editors of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning note that it is one of three unpublished poems EBB wrote around 1822, the other two being "The Enchantress" and "Leila: A Tale" (WEBB, 5: 391–392). Although we know [End Page 297] of EBB's failed attempt to publish "Leila," there is no mention of "The African" in any of her early correspondence to family and friends (BC, 1: 164–165n1). It was not until twenty years later that EBB alluded to the poem in a letter to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, dated January 12, 1842, acknowledging her indebtedness to her cousin Richard Barrett for "the subject of a poem about a runaway negro," which, she told Mitford, she still has "somewhere in his hand-writing."4 That poem is "The African."5 What makes "The African" more significant than its unpublished counterparts? Notably, it represents EBB's first known involvement in writing about Atlantic slavery. Alan Richardson has observed that once the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, there was no urgency to continue the campaign to emancipate the slaves and that because "emancipation seemed less pressing," it received virtually no poetic treatment.6 The young EBB, however, did not lose interest. Indeed, the composition of "The African" is surprisingly prescient, as it was written prior to the rebirth of the campaign in Britain to emancipate the slaves in 1823, the year a new organization, the Society for Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of British Colonial Slavery, revived popular sentiment and public call for the emancipation of the slaves.7 Interestingly, despite this development, only a handful of antislavery poems were published that year, among them Thomas Pringle's "Slavery" (Richardson, 4: 342–343). Matters were very different when EBB wrote "The Appeal" in 1832. That year was a time of great public upheaval in Britain and personal setback for her. She anxiously followed the debate on the Reform Bill, which would enfranchise a large section of the British population, writing, when it was passed on June 4, that the English were a "freer people" (BC, 2: 25). The sale by auction of the family's Hope End home and their relocation to London that August also created incredible financial and emotional distress (LEBB-MRM, 1: 8; BC, 3: 24–32, 40–48). These events of 1832 formed the backdrop to "The Appeal," published...

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition by David Richardson

For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist” tradition, as initiated by Williams.1 The humanitarian version argued that the abolition in 1807 was the product of a sea change in mentalities, both elite and popular, that reached critical mass in the late 1780s; the materialist version argued that that abolition occurred largely because the old colonial system had become an obstacle to a newly industrializing Britain, which was developing a strong commitment to free trade by necessity. These debates unfolded between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, before getting bogged down in sterile binaries of economics versus morality and of self-interest versus altruism. The 2007 bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition, when Richardson was Director of wise in Hull, re-ignited earlier debates about the fundamental nature of abolition, stimulating work by a new generation of scholars—notably Brown and Ryden—that raised fresh possibilities and pointed the way toward a potential synthesis, without themselves establishing it.2 Hence the opening for Richardson.The new volume, however, does not deliver fully on its potential. Organized in three sections—”Trade,” “Opinions,” and “Politics”—it proceeds from a brilliant summary of the slave trade to a survey of antislavery ideas in the eighteenth century and then to an account of the Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary campaigns from 1788 to 1807. It thus spans economic, intellectual, cultural, and political history in an unusual way that balances accounts of the slave trade with accounts of abolition. It recognizes that the economic and political structure of Britain in 1807 was different from that of 1707 or 1757, revealing how antislavery was intertwined with urbanization and the emergence of the professional and manufacturing middle class that redistributed political power. It effectively registers the role of Black resistance to the slave trade by both captive and free Africans. But, in the end, its treatment of abolition remains firmly within the humanitarian tradition, viewing abolition as the victory of decent ordinary people over powerful entrenched interests—an uncomplicated early mass movement for social justice and human rights. Moreover, its treatment of individuals reflects an earlier uncritical tradition. In the brief introduction, for example, Richardson characterizes Clarkson as working “tirelessly” for fifty years, overlooking his withdrawal from the struggle in the late 1790s and early 1800s, his marginalization both in 1807 and 1834, and his final demoralizing conflict with Wilberforce’s sons over the roles and responsibilities of the early abolitionists.The book falls short of the much-needed synthesis for three reasons. First, rather than seeking to understand Williams’ scholarship, it oddly rejects it from the outset as “narrow-minded cynicism,” an extraordinary position to adopt in a book published in 2022. Second, given that the book has its origins in lectures given in 2007, it references subsequent works but does not fully absorb them into the argument. Third, the book tends to treat the abolition of the slave trade as the end of the process, leaving only its final three pages to deal with the abolition of slavery itself thirty years later (for which the humanitarian and materialist explanations largely converge). Future scholars will need to build on Richardson’s new book and to draw from his life’s work in order to complete the task at hand.

Historians, Activists and Britain's Slave Trade Abolition Debate: The Henry Dundas Plaque Debacle

Since the summer of 2020 debate concerning the commemoration of one of Scotland’s leading eighteenth century politicians has galvanised opinions. The heart of the controversy surrounds the wording on a new heritage marker erected in 2021 at the statue of Henry Dundas (later Viscount Melville) in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh. This article does not address the complex question of whether or not Dundas was an abolitionist, but only if he can be held accountable for a delay to abolition of the British slave trade as claimed on the plaque. My overarching argument is that Sir Geoff Palmer, the key figure behind the new plaque’s wording, has wrongly conflated arguments about whether or not Dundas was an abolitionist with assertions that he delayed abolition of Britain’s slave trade. Through identifying the flaws in his approach to the past, I highlight the problems that arise when individuals and institutions discount, marginalise and demean professional and longstanding historical expertise. Indeed, the heritage sector is grossly undermined by the lack of rigorous scrutiny for plaques and memorials erected to serve pressure group politics. Although this controversy is about one monument in one city, it has wider ramifications for how we remember and engage with the past.

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson

Reviewed by: Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson Justin Roberts Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783. By Lee B. Wilson. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 288 pages. Cloth, ebook. The preamble to the first comprehensive English slave code—passed in Barbados in 1661—justified the creation of this set of laws by arguing that in all of the "Lawes of England" there was "noe tract to guide us where to walke, nor any rule sett us, how to governe such Slaves."1 This would suggest, as some colonial American historians have surmised, that slavery constituted a radical departure from English legal traditions. Lee B. Wilson's Bonds of Empire offers a counterpoint. By looking at a more comprehensive set of legal practices undergirding slavery in the British Atlantic, Wilson is able to stress the continuity of English legal systems in the development of colonial slave law. She argues that colonial slave law was not "a legal aberration" (3) or "beyond the pale of English imperial legal history" (5); rather, it "was a natural extension" of the English "legal system" (10). Bonds of Empire is nominally about slave law in South Carolina, but it is really much broader and more ambitious because Wilson extends her analysis to the Caribbean colonies—particularly Jamaica—and to the maritime world. Her book follows a loose chronological trajectory from the late seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapters trace that arc while remaining thematically organized around the concepts embedded in private law sources such as the conditional bonds used to transfer enslaved property, the records of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, and the records of the Board of Police, which governed Charleston during the American Revolution. Wilson relies on her legal training to shed light on how these records, which most scholars have overlooked, illuminate practices related to slavery. By focusing on such sources, Wilson offers a deeper appreciation of the ways in which English law buttressed the colonists' "commercial need to treat slaves as things" (261). Bonds of Empire clearly demonstrates that the prescriptive slave codes that have drawn so much attention from slavery historians were only a narrow subset of a far more expansive body of slave law. "Bloody and punitive," the slave codes addressed the slaves as potential criminal actors in need of social control, and they focused on "stripping enslaved people of the rights" (10) of freeborn English people. The "viscerally shocking" nature of these [End Page 491] slave codes has led some historians to emphasize that their creation signals "colonial legal deviance" (39). Wilson, by contrast, turns most of her attention to "the 'private' law of slavery—embodied in quotidian transactions and routine litigation" (39). These are sources that generally depict slaves as little more than commodities. Wilson maintains that by conceptualizing slaves as chattel and making them analogous "to ships, cows, or horses" (13), enslavers were able to draw directly from traditional English legal practices and "slot slaves into extant legal procedures and forms" (17), especially instruments of English property transfer such as "preprinted bills of sale, mortgages, trusts, and conditional bonds" (13). By relying on conventional English legal practices, she argues, colonial enslavers normalized the institution of slavery, insulating it from "moral critiques" (5). This continuity in "improvisational" (10) English legal practices and traditions made colonial British slavery resilient in the face of moral criticism and adaptable to change. Ultimately, Wilson argues that the status of the enslaved as property encouraged the "replication" of long-standing English legal practices in private law, which simultaneously bolstered the institution of slavery and "contributed directly to the dehumanization of enslaved people" (21). By privileging legal sources more concerned with enslaved people as alienable property than as potential criminal actors in need of social control, Wilson reinforces the idea that this chattel principle—the idea that a person could be bought and sold—was at the essence of Anglo-American slavery. She argues that "historians have long understood that transforming people...

General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe

AbstractThis article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs Thomas J. Balcerski Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Jim Downs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0674971721, 272 pp., cloth, $29.95. The science of epidemiology has been front of mind for many during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Yet before the publication of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, the fascinating new book from historian Jim Downs, few recognized just how much the study of infectious disease has itself been attendant with the intertwined histories of slavery, colonialism, and war. Downs conclusively demonstrates how "ideas developed between 1756 and 1866 became codified into medical theories that contributed to the development of modern epidemiology" (4). The result is a sweeping global history that reveals the complicated foundations of modern medicine itself. Through a creative reading of sources, Downs expands the cast of characters deserving inclusion in the history of epidemiology. He explores Thomas Trotter's 1786 account of scurvy victims aboard British slave ships to trace how medical ideas circulated "outside of the metropole" (26). Similarly, Downs appeals to volumes by Arthur Holroyd in 1839 and Gavin Milroy in 1846 reveal how arguments against quarantine practices drew on evidence from laundresses on the island of Malta and colonial subjects in the West Indies. In 1845, an outbreak of fever in the Cape Verde Islands eventually led Doctor James Ormiston McWilliams to interview over one hundred people of color, in the process creating "the most extensive surviving record from the nineteenth century of people of African descent describing in detail the onslaught of an epidemic in the Atlantic world" (53). As a result, McWilliams's emphasis on interviews, Downs contends, became a "core epidemiological method" (62). The global span of the British Empire served to diffuse knowledge among physicians. For example, British naval surgeon James Henry investigated a cholera outbreak aboard ships in the Mediterranean Sea, enabled by a military and colonial bureaucracy. In Jamaica, Gavin Milroy reported in detail on another [End Page 210] cholera outbreak, which later influenced John Snow's pioneering study of cholera in London in 1854. The disrupting forces of war provided another avenue for the study of the spread of disease. Also in 1854, Florence Nightingale, superintendent of London's Hospital for Invalid Women, arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scurtari, situated near the ongoing Crimean War. In her work as nurse, Nightingale came to understand better how hospitals should be designed. Taken together, these medical providers relied on colonial subjects and imperial soldiers to solidify the "foundation of modern epidemiology" (84). Perhaps most interesting to readers of this journal will be Downs's incisive analysis in a trio of chapters on the era of the US Civil War. Here, again, the category of race played a formative part in epidemiology's advance. Although the US Sanitary Commission helped to educate the public about disease transmission, it did so by focusing attention on "racial identity as a central point of investigation" (123). One commission doctor, Ira Russell, fixated on perceived differences among African Americans, simultaneously reifying the "invented racial categories as valid metrics in the study of infectious disease" (127). The resulting knowledge regime "resurrected slaveholding ideologies to amplify racial difference and to contribute to medical knowledge" (128). The Civil War created a series of unequal power dynamics that permitted doctors greater access to the study of disease among captive populations. Smallpox outbreaks especially left both enslaved and free African Americans vulnerable to invasive medical procedures at the hands of Confederate and Union doctors alike. The vaccination of prisoners at Andersonville became a key point of argument at the subsequent trial of superintendent Dr. Henry Wirz. After years of wartime study, scientific methods were becoming gradually more sophisticated. As a result, in the 1866 investigation of cholera outbreak, army physicians relied on "bureaucratic narrative reports" to trace its spread (173). Simultaneously, British doctors who studied quarantined Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca used statistical methods to search for evidence of infectious disease. Ultimately, the increased reliance on data "enabled the federal government to see cholera in a way that local...

Bad History: The Controversy over Henry Dundas and the Historiography of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

How far do individuals determine events and how much agency do they have? In March 2021, Edinburgh City Council approved plans to install a new plaque on the Melville monument in Edinburgh, Scotland, part of which refers to ‘the more than half-a-million Africans whose enslavement was a consequence of Henry Dundas’s actions’. These words on the plaque serve to hold Dundas (later Lord Melville) solely accountable for the consequences of a parliamentary vote taken in the House of Commons in 1792 on the gradual delay of the British slave trade. This article interrogates the historical controversy surrounding Henry Dundas’s role in abolition of the British slave trade with a focus on two main areas. First, it contradicts claims that historians unequivocally agree that Dundas delayed abolition. Second, it explores arguments that Dundas’s mobilisation of Scottish votes and oratorical skills ensured continuation of the slave trade. The article argues that historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests. Edinburgh City Council therefore have the urgent moral duty to remove the plaque. Otherwise, the city faces the grave charge and international opprobrium of falsifying history on a public monument.

"Places of Great Trust": Government Men and Slave Trade Networks in the English Atlantic before 1698

This article argues that conflicts and competition over the form of English slave trading in the Atlantic world during the late seventeenth century elicited the use of a common language of government corruption. Contrary to common historiographical assumptions that government officials could pursue private investments through their public duties without controversy in the English colonies during this period, contested slave trade networks both in the Caribbean and Carolina reveal that colonists actively applied typical English notions of entrusted power to police the borders of acceptable government conduct. Whether in the African slave trade or in the trade in Indigenous captives, monopolies and other regulatory regimes required the active support of government officials on the ground. As a result, these officials became the primary vectors for undermining slave trade regulations and promoting smuggling. Evidence of the extent to which government officials were complicit in illicit slave trading survives in the archive primarily because English observers in Atlantic ports chose to protest such conduct using a recognized metropolitan language of corruption.

Oceanic Intimacies

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

Equiano’s World: Chronicling the Life and Times of Gustavus Vassa

Equiano’s World (www.equianosworld.org) is a website that chronicles the life and times of Gustavus Vassa (c. 1741–1797), who is known most frequently by his birth name, Olaudah Equiano. Vassa became well known in Britain after the publication of his autobiography in 1789 and for his prominent role in the movement for abolition of the British slave trade, which was only finally enacted in 1807, ten years after his death. The associated database includes all known documentation on Vassa and information relevant to the study of his life. Foremost among these materials is his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which was republished nine times in his lifetime. Other documentation includes contemporary newspaper accounts, legal documents, and images from his life experiences. The website addresses issues arising from the context of Vassa’s life, including his place of birth, his name, and his influence on the abolition movement. It demonstrates that he only wanted to be known by the name he was given when he was enslaved rather than by his birth name; even today he is best known as Olaudah Equiano or even simply Equiano, even though Equiano was not a surname. His unusual experience as an enslaved servant to a British naval officer during the Seven Years’ War and afterwards to a merchant in the Caribbean gave him particular insight into the horrors of slavery and his commitment to its abolition. Because of the education he received on British ships and subsequently in London after he purchased his own freedom, he stands out as a prominent and literate intellectual and political activist. His autobiography continues to be read widely and taught in university courses. The project is part of a broader initiative that explores the testimonies and personal profiles of Africans who were enslaved during the era of slavery, most of whom were taken to the Americas.The article outlines the structure of the website into seven sections: first, a Home page that includes a project history, acknowledgements, technical details, and a discussion of the “Best Practices” that underlie the project. The second section focuses on Context, examining key settings from the interior of the Bight of Biafra where Vassa was born, the slave trade of the late eighteenth century, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, the Seven Years’ War, and London and Britain in the late eighteenth century. The section on his travels has a chronological timeline and maps relating to them. The Associates section contains biographical sketches and images of his family, those whom he knew while he was enslaved, his associates in the Abolition movement, his co-religionists, and his connections in scientific and military circles. It also includes a list of individuals who subscribed to his autobiography. The section on Studying Equiano includes his autobiography, a list of its editions, and over 200 legal documents, letters, and newspaper notices and accounts. The Resources section includes a bibliography of several hundred items that discuss Vassa and his work, as well as audio and visual resources, links to websites on Vassa, slavery and diaspora. This article discusses technical details of website construction, which uses a backend known as Regenerated Identities (RegID). The website relies on open-source content and has a search function that enables location of people, places, and periods relevant to Vassa’s life.

The legacies of British slave ownership Catherine Hall talks to Ruth

The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project has explored the significance of slavery to Britain's history, including in the wealth it generated for industrialisation. Such research is crucial for understanding the present, given that disavowal of these legacies has been central to white British thinking. Its mapping of compensation awarded after abolition showed the widespread incidence of slave ownership across the whole of the UK. A further legacy has been the way ideas on race developed by white plantation owners still inform contemporary thinking. An important first step towards reparation is understanding and knowing what happened, and breaking the patterns of denial.