Cambridge University Press Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain

A multi authored scholarly work that attempts, through unearthing evidence from the lists of the slave owners who received compensation after the abolition of slavery, to clarify their involvement in financial capitalism, investment in industry as well as their political role in fashioning Victorian Britain. The essays shed light on the contribution of wealth derived from slave ownership in the reconfiguration of economy, state and society that took place in the 1830’s-1840’s. They show the complex and subtle legacies of slavery in Victorian society “ both the hybridity and fusion between slave-owner interests and almost every aspect of British economy , post- Emancipation”. It is estimated that 15-20% of the British rich were directly entwined with the slave-economy, but a great number of those had family connections with those who did not depend on it. Most slave owners sought other ways to mitigate their losses after Abolition. They used their political leverage to impose apprenticeship on their slaves with 7 more years of servitude, they imported indentured labour from India and China to replace the African slaves, they invested in the cotton plantations of the American South feeding the Lancashire textile industry. These essays while answering some questions raise a great deal more by opening up further research fields. To what extent the benefits from compensation were recycled into the rest of the economy as opposed to conspicuous spendings and redirected its economic activities away from the mercantile confines of the tropical crops trade or landownership into the more advanced sectors of the wider Empire? The link to industrial capitalism was not clearcut, through some investments were diverted into railway expansion and mining ventures in the white settlers colonies. How did this rich caste align its interests through their involvement in the City of London, with the impetus from the expansion of the Victorian Empire?

First things, much thanks to the hard work carried out by Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang and university team. The immense work undertaken here is breathtaking in identifying the elite who supported the slave trade in political, business and artistic who benefited from the murder and slavery of many hundreds of thousands of African people. The accuracy and compelling case made by the authors makes one nothing but angry about what happened to hiding this historical silence. It is clearly understandable why those public figures who despite given much financially to the community on a philanthropy” basis are now been questioned. The history shown in books like this clearly evidenced and reconnects philanthropy with the slave trade preventing the elite in business, politics and elsewhere from hiding their past financial benefits from the slave trade. The authors will continue to undertake further work on this subject and we should all be grateful for that.PS it needs a wider an audience but too expensive at £20!!!!Tony Laforce, Hackney, London

Actually I think it is probably worth five stars, but it's part of a debate which has a long way to go, and against the outcome of which it will be judged. It is also one outcome of an unprecedented research project at University College, London, which has taken a single source, the details of the compensation paid to the owners of slaves in British territories in the mid 1830s, when slavery was finally "abolished" ( for which expression read" replaced by a system of apprenticeship which enabled slave owners to carry on exploiting the "free" labourers on their estates for a few more years"), identify them and their activities and try to assess what difference the compensation made to its recipients. Only a very few actually used it to improve the condition of the former slaves themselves, and the evidence even for that is very scanty.The debate is about the role of slavery in the growth of the British economy as a whole over the two hundred and more years before emancipation, and the material here is only a partial contribution to it. The argument first advanced by Eric Williams, later the first Prime Minister of Trinidad that the slave economy played a decisive role is still open.But this, and Its immediate predecessor, co-author Nicholas Draper's The Price of Emancipation, are vital.I still remember my first evening at university, in the mid 1950s, when, puzzling over how exactly to eat melon without making a fool of myself, I discovered at dinner I was sitting next to an Etonian, a descendant of a minor Scottish noble line through a very distinguished military figure and who is probably now a pillar of the establishment in some Deputy-Lord-this-or-that form or other. In the brusque gruff way of the period and his peers he talked - not to me - about time he had recently spent in West Africa, learning the way of the world by working on a plantation. Of his black fellow-workers - and this was someone who had already been through the alleged social university of National Service - he said, and I quote, "The only thing they understand is the whip". That was a member of my generation. What, of course, he meant was that that was what he thought HE understood. This was a minor member of the British governing elite beginning his - as they called it in the West Indies - "seasoning", and starting from there, then..............What this book, its companion, and the public databases which support them are beginning to do is - among other things - to explore that conversation indirectly. I can't imagine any more cogent historical research than that.

Research

A serious study of the subject. Informative.