The structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833

We aim to help answer the question 'What is Britain's debt to slavery?' by systematically identifying the owners of all the estates in the British Caribbean colonies at the height of the slave-system and assessing the individual and collective impact of the slave-owners on the formation of Britain at the time of the wrenching economic, social and political changes of the Industrial Revolution. Our start-point is the list of over 4,000 estates identified from the Slave Compensation records in the 1830s, when British colonial slavery was brought to an end. We will trace the ownership of each of these estates backwards as far as 1763, initially using the Slave Registers (which list all enslaved people by location and 'owner') and then drawing on an increasingly fragmented group of sources, both in Britain and the Caribbean, to build a picture of how each estate was passed down between generations and across families. This will be the first time that such a large-scale analysis of the patterns of slave-ownership has been undertaken. We have taken 1763 as our cut-off because in that year Britain greatly added to its slave-empire in Jamaica, Barbados and the Leeward Islands by taking Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago from the French. Many of the estate-owners will have been resident in the Caribbean, that is they lived and died in the colonies. Many others, however, will have lived in Britain, having inherited the Caribbean estates and the enslaved people who worked upon them, and perhaps never visiting their slave-estates at all. Still others will have returned to Britain from the Caribbean to settle or resettle into British society. We will record details of all slave-owners but in the second part of our project we will concentrate on the last two classes - absentee slave-owners in Britain and returnee slave-owners from the Caribbean. For the individuals in these groups, we will research their lives in Britain along six different dimensions, which in combination will form a new and full picture of the significance of slave-ownership to Britain: Commercial and industrial activity will trace the investment by slave-owners into British businesses and industry, examine the entry of British metropolitan merchants into slave-ownership through the establishment of consignee and credit relationships with planters, and look in turn at these merchants' investments in commercial and industrial businesses in Britain. Cultural accumulation will identify the major collections associated with the absentee slave-owners, their most important philanthropic activities and their roles in the urban renaissance of the second half of C18 in the major centres of concentration of absentee slave-ownership in Britain. Cultural formations will examine the writings of slave-owners, not only of major texts such as those of Bryan Edwards and Edward Long but also of less well-known representations, to explore their formulations of difference and race, and their conceptions of colony, nation and Empire. Political affiliations and associational networks will identify all the MPs appearing as slave-owners or as the near-relatives of slave-owners, and re-examine the 'West India' interest of the C18. The size of this interest has been the subject of wildly varying estimates and the project offers the opportunity to provide a systematic account of its composition and importance at a national level, drawing inter alia on material from the History of Parliament Trust. Imperial activity will analyse the participation of slave-owners in the wider 'circuits of Empire' by tracing the imperial careers of individual slave-owners and their families elsewhere in Britain's Empire. Physical imprints will examine the impact of slave-ownership on the built environment, drawing on local histories to identify the country-houses, urban development and other building projects associated with absentee slave-owners.