Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership

The Centre was established at UCL with the support of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.[1]

It incorporates two earlier projects: the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009-2012), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 project (2013-2015), funded by the ESRC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.[1] The first project started with the slave compensation moneys and identifying estates connected to these. (As land owners in the British West Indies were losing their unpaid labourers, they received compensation totalling £20 million.[2])

The second project started looking at the ownership histories of those approximately 4,000 estates, going back to around 1763. The second phase found another 4,000 estates, and added another 20,000 slave-owners. The current project continues to add information and build the database created in the second phase, aiming to identify of all slave-owners in the British colonies at the time slavery ended (1807–1833), creating the Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, as well as all of the estates in the British West Indies.[3]

Its inaugural director was Nick Draper and its chair Catherine Hall; other key researchers were Keith McClelland and Rachel Lang. In June 2020, amidst the international George Floyd protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Matthew J. Smith, formerly of the University of the West Indies, took over the directorship.[4][5]

Draper and Hall argue that the central purpose of the Legacies database is to counter "selective forgetting", whereby society forgets the human cost of slavery but celebrates its abolition.[6]

Slaves working on a plantation in Antigua (1823)

Greys Court House, whose owners benefitted from slave compensation from Antigua

Farley Hall, whose owners benefitted from slave compensation from Antigua

Brentry House, whose owners benefitted from slave compensation from Antigua

The Centre's work is freely available online to the public through the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database.[6][7] This database aims to record all those individuals who were recompensed by the British state at the abolition of slavery in 1833. (Although the Atlantic slave trade had been abolished in 1807, it took another generation for the British government to manumit the enslaved people within its Empire, and even then it did not tackle slavery in India till 1843.) This flow of money was, as the title of the project indicates, to the slave owners, and not to the newly freed individuals: the liberation of the slaves was treated legally as the expropriation of their masters. A very large sum was paid by the British state to thousands of its subjects; most of the erstwhile owners received compensation for only one or a handful of slaves, but a small number of families owned large plantations with hundreds or even thousands of enslaved workers, and so received substantial amounts of money.

The project builds on a wider re-examination of Britain's links to slavery and its abolition, some of which was stimulated by the 2007 bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807. For example, English Heritage held a conference on "Slavery and the British Country House: mapping the current research" in 2009. The papers were compiled into a book of the same title, with an opening chapter to set the scene by Nicholas Draper describing the legacies project, then in embryo. Madge Dresser's introduction acknowledges that "Academic research takes time to feed through into the public domain, where such links [to slavery] had so often been either studiously ignored or actively repressed." Compensation money was received by the owners of "well-known sites of slave ownership such as Dodington Park... the National Trust’s property at Greys’ Court... and Brentry House in Gloucestershire", not far from the slave port of Bristol.[8]

The research upon which the Legacies database is based revealed that some 46,000 Britons received compensation under the Slave Compensation Act 1837. The Slave Compensation Commission established a sum equivalent in today's money to about 17 billion pounds, the largest payout until the bailout of the banks in 2008.[9]

As Hall has stated, beneficiaries of slavery were not only people who owned slaves, but also those whose business dealings derived benefit from slavery.[10] This includes the engines of the Industrial Revolution such as sugar processing and textile manufacture.

One of the purposes of the legacies project is to research how the families spent their compensation. Some of the money went to pay for the education of sons and grandsons (including grand tours of Europe) and to consolidate their professional and political power:

The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone’s maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.[11]

Money was also invested in the Railway Mania of the 1840s (tipping the transportation balance away from the Golden Age of the British canal system) and in the factory system. "As well as paying for the building of dozens of country houses and art collections, the money also helped fund railways, museums, insurance companies, mining firms, merchants and banks."[12]

Many notable people, including former Prime Minister David Cameron and actor Benedict Cumberbatch, are descendants of people who benefited from slavery.[13] Many slaveholders and beneficiaries of slavery are recognised in the United Kingdom through public honours.[14]

Slavery generated immense wealth. For example, the London business district known as the Isle of Dogs, where the three West India Docks were built, arose from speculation in the slave trade.[15] Another example is New Town, Edinburgh.[16][17]

• List of slave owners

• Official website