Legacies of British Slave Ownership - UCL

I attended an interesting workshop this evening

The Project

'At the core of the project is a database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended. As the project unfolded, we amassed, analysed and incorporated information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of all the British slave-owners on the database, building the Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, which has now been made available online...'

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission, set up to manage the distribution of the £20 million compensation, provide a more or less complete census of slave-ownership in the British Empire in the 1830s. The individuals named in these records form the starting point of the Encyclopedia.

Please note that the records we have concern slave-owners; regrettably, we do not have information on the enslaved themselves.

The registers of the enslaved are held by the National Archives; you can read an account of them on the Moving Here site.



The database is definitely useful, and holds a great deal of information with regards to the wealth amassed from slavery and its political and cultural legacy and impact in Britain.

You can search individuals, Estates, colonies.. feel free to take a look [click]

Context

In 1833 Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. The slave trade had been abolished in 1807, but it had taken another 26 years to effect the emancipation of the enslaved. However, in place of slavery the negotiated settlement established a system of apprenticeship, tying the newly freed men and women into another form of unfree labour for fixed terms. It also granted £20 million in compensation, to be paid by British taxpayers to the former slave-owners. That compensation money provided the starting point for our first project. We are now tracking back to 1763 the ownership histories of the 4000 or so estates identified in that project.