The testimony of enslaved people in 1820s British Guiana—thousands of pages of first-person accounts of beatings, family separations, and stolen wages—has been locked in UK archives for two centuries. Historians have long struggled to recover enslaved people’s own perspectives because the records of slavery were written by slaveholders and colonial officials. This project tackles that gap by analysing the largest surviving collection of direct testimony from enslaved people in the Caribbean: the Reports of the Protectors of Slaves. These documents record what enslaved people said when they walked for days to newly available courts to seek legal redress. By mapping these testimonies and linking them to slave registration records that partially reconstruct family ties, the research asks how enslaved people used the law and what that tells us about their politics. If successful, the project will make these records permanently accessible online to researchers and descendants worldwide—overcoming the barrier of physical access to UK archives. It will also pioneer a method that combines large-scale digital analysis with a person-centred approach to individual voices. This is fundamental historical research. Its primary impact will be on how we understand slavery, resistance, and the law in the British Caribbean, and on how descendant communities in Guyana and the diaspora can reclaim their own history.
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The archival record of slavery was produced in a context of domination, making it difficult for historians to reconstruct the perspectives and experiences of enslaved people. This project responds to this problem by analysing the largest collection of first-person or reported speech testimony of enslaved people from the Caribbean: the Reports of the Protectors of Slaves of British Guiana. These documents contain thousands of pages of testimony from enslaved people who travelled often long distances to seek legal redress in judicial institutions newly available in British Guiana in the 1820s. By mapping these testimonies, reading them critically, and connecting them to another set of sources which allows for the partial reconstruction of kinship ties (the Returns of Registers of Slaves), Voices in Slavery’s Archive addresses questions about the impact of enslaved people’s use of the law and develops new ways of understanding their politics and centring their voices. Important scholarship uses fragmentary sources and critical imagination to subvert the power relationships through which the archive of slavery was created (Hartman, 2008; Fuentes, 2016). This work has sometimes been counterposed to research using large-scale datasets presented through digital resources (Slave Voyages, Legacies of British Slavery). Voices in Slavery’s Archive draws on the best of these two traditions by combining large-scale analyses of enslaved people’s legal engagement with a person-centred approach to the individual voices and experiences of the enslaved. It does this in the pursuit of three goals: To generate new understandings of enslaved people’s engagement with the law in British Guiana, and of how that engagement affected enslaved people’s politics and the broader power relationships of colonial slavery To pioneer new methods for the historical examination of slavery by combining archival research with digital tools, community engagement, and family and community history To overcome global barriers of access to these important records – held in the UK - by making them accessible to researchers anywhere in the world Voices in Slavery’s Archive is a collaborative project between scholars and heritage organisations in the UK (University of Edinburgh (UoE), the National Archives (TNA), Guyana SPEAKS), Guyana (the University of Guyana (UG)), and the US (Xavier University (XU). The project will work in partnership with the National Archives of Guyana (Walter Rodney Archives) to ensure that the records of the Protectors of Slaves, which preserve the testimony of enslaved people in British Guiana, become permanently accessible to the twenty-first century descendants of those whose voices they represent. Its mode of analysis and presentation of data will begin from principles of accountability and responsiveness to communities descended from enslaved people in Guyana and the diaspora, providing a model for future digital humanities work. It will lead to a deeper understanding of the changing nature of slavery and the conflicts it generated in its last decades, attuned to the specific geographies and landscapes of British Guiana, to familial and community ties, and to the increasing importance of the law.
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