East Meets West

This chapter breaks down the artificial historiographical and archival dichotomy between ‘east and west’ by exposing the multiple and intricate connections that facilitated the systematic transfer of people, capital and goods between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. It will suggest that if we reorient our gaze from the economic structures of slavery and focus instead upon the family as a lens through which to explore Britain’s imperial engagement during this period, it is possible to reveal a far more interconnected and intimate vision of empire than is often credited. It will offer both a qualitative and quantitative survey of the scope of connections between the Caribbean, Britain and East India Company, alongside a consideration of how the structure of the archive can be negotiated in order to explore these questions. Finally, to provide substance and depth to these claims the chapter will offer a detailed case study of the Martins of Antigua.

Local Roots/Global Routes

This chapter uses a local lens to challenge, nuance and expand the national narrative of Britain’s involvement with both slavery and abolition. Based on research undertaken as part of a public engagement partnership between the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and Hackney Museum and Archives, this chapter details the area’s complex and contradictory local histories of participation, abolitionism, resistance and emancipation. It explores the ways in which the different communities that make up the London Borough of Hackney, both in the past and in the present, have been shaped by their experiences of slavery and its legacies. It argues that in bringing slavery home, in telling stories about the past that connect the local to the global, we can reintegrate these histories into the national narrative creating a space to think critically about what it means and what it meant to be British.

Whose Memories?

This chapter explores the legacy of Edward Long, plantation owner, politician, pro-slavery activist and famed historian of eighteenth-century Jamaica. Slave-owners have until recently been for the most part ignored in the mainstream of British history, yet over centuries they made significant contributions to Britain’s wealth, politics and culture. Long, one of the most articulate protagonists of racial hierarchies, came from a family of Jamaican slave-owners who were prominent in the defence of what they saw as the rights of freeborn Englishmen, the right to hold others enslaved. His practice of disavowal, knowing and not knowing the humanity of Africans, has remained central to racial thinking into the present.

Portrait of a Slave-Trading Family

This chapter offers a perspective on the attitudes of those involved in the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. Liverpool was the dominant British slaving port in this period with a core of merchants who were heavily engaged in the trade. Using a rare collection of business and personal papers belonging to a Liverpool merchant, Thomas Staniforth, questions are asked about the commercial and social networks of the slave traders, the interplay between slaving and other business concerns such as privateering and whaling, and the attitudes of an anti-abolitionist. The world of the Staniforth papers is revealed as one in which family and commercial concerns dominated, an environment which was politically saturated in the business of the slave trade and captured in a series of revealing portraits by Joseph Wright of Derby.

From Guinea to Guernsey and Cornwall to the Caribbean

This chapter synthesises evidence from a wide range of primary and secondary sources concerning slavery and the slave trade in the Western English Channel. It argues that Cornwall and the Channel Islands, despite their special claims to distinctiveness and detachment from the slave trade, were not in fact innocent bystanders, remote from the centres of trade and power, but were instead as fully involved in the slave economy as any other part of the British Isles. It shows that enslaved and free Africans visited both regions, and that Channel Islanders and Cornish people invested in the slave trade, owned slaves, participated on both sides of the abolition debate, and wrote about slavery in a wide variety of literary and other publications. It concludes that the experience of Cornwall and the Channel Islands serves as a powerful reminder that no region or community in Britain had a special exemption from the nation’s imperial project.

Introduction

The Introduction to this volume (Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery) sets out the current context of scholarship on the history of Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery and the slave trade and its abolition, and work around the memory of this history. This chapter considers what is ultimately at stake through configuring, reconfiguring and contesting the place of slavery and the slave trade in British national identity narratives, how this has changed in the last thirty years and why examining such relationships through a ‘local’ lens is important for interrogating the relationship between history, memory and identity. The Introduction sets out the structure of the book in its two parts and gives brief overviews of the following chapters.

Afterword

This chapter presents an overview of the development of thinking about the history and memory of slavery during the past fifty years. In doing so, it helps to contextualise the essays in the volume, while at the same time offering a series of reflections on the impact of museums and the heritage sector in general on contemporary discourses about slavery and British history. The chapter stresses the vital link between local, regional and national memories of slavery. It also reinforces the contributions of a new generation of scholars in (re)writing slavery and the profits made from slaveholding back into British history. This is still very much an ongoing project but it is already abundantly clear that the old consensus, the one that focussed almost exclusively on British efforts to bring slavery to an end, has broken down.

Multidirectional Memory, Many-Headed Hydras and Glasgow

This chapter forms a case study of memory/amnesia around slavery in Glasgow and proposes that a number of high profile events in the year 2014 may prove to be a turning point in this regard. The first section peels back the overlapping layers of Atlantic, British, Scottish and Glaswegian amnesia which have prolonged the silence around slavery. The second section identifies that all twelve statues in the city’s central George Square have a connection to slavery or abolition. Borrowing from Michael Rothberg’s ‘Multi-directional Memory’ approach, it reads the statues ‘against the grain’ to demonstrate how slavery can be integrated into Glasgow’s public memory of commerce, science, militarism, politics and literature. This recovery of the memory of slavery in Glasgow comes at a dynamic period in Scotland’s history and has the potential to transform its sense of cultural history the better to forge its political future.

Forgotten Women

Women have remained virtually invisible in the historiography of slavery and absenteeism. However, there were a significant number of female absentees who managed their vast West Indian estates -and those enslaved upon them-from metropolitan Britain. This chapter examines the correspondence of one such slave-owner. Anna Eliza Elletson was a London-based absentee who was heavily involved with the transatlantic management of Hope estate, her Jamaican plantation. The correspondence she sent to her Jamaican attorneys contains detailed discussions of the practicalities of running her estate and provides a unique insight into the mindset of a late eighteenth-century female slave-owner. In analysing the attitudes and behaviour of this particular woman this chapter investigates the extent to which she variously reinforced, subverted and challenged the social mores and gendered assumptions of late eighteenth-century Britain.

Making Museum Narratives of Slavery and Anti-Slavery in Olney

This chapter explores how and why narratives of the abolitionist John Newton evolved within the Cowper and Newton Museum between the centenary of his death in 1907 and the bicentenary in 2007. Using discourse and exhibition analysis, it seeks to understand how changing discourses surrounding the memory of Newton and the wider representation of slavery affected how abolition is narrated in the museum. In doing so, it examines the complex relationship between local and global narratives of abolition and slavery.