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.

We believe that high-quality research conducted to the highest standards of historical rigour is essential to provide a shared and dependable empirical base of information for all the parties who have a stake in the history of slavery and its relationship to modern Britain. Firms; institutions; families and individuals who are among the successor firms or descendants of beneficiaries of slave-ownership; pressure groups; community representatives and individual descendants of the enslaved; governments and policy-makers in the Caribbean, Africa and Europe; and public institutions such as museums, galleries and schools: all of these are involved in some shape or form in a series of dialogues about the social, cultural, political and commercial implications of British colonial slavery. Without a shared basis of knowledge, it will be impossible for these parties to engage with each other fully or fruitfully. Recovering the histories of slave-ownership and capturing associated information on the enslaved people therefore have value for wider society in Britain. We believe that we can contribute both to the effectiveness of the existing efforts of many organisations and to the realisation of new efforts to mobilise around the issues and problems arising in Britain from the historic nexus of race and slavery.

Firms and institutions with historic roots in the period of slavery will benefit from access to rigorous empirical data on the involvement or otherwise of predecessor firms. The Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, has already amended its regulatory filings in Chicago to take account of findings from our existing project and we expect to submit substantial new information to all the major British banks from the new project.

The recovery by groups of local and regional researchers of the histories of connections to slavery and their impact on specific sites and areas was an important fruit of the efforts around the 2007 bicentenary commemorations. We provide a means of helping to sustain and renew those community efforts. We have experience of using our work to strengthen existing networks and stimulate the creation of new ones among these communities of researchers and activists, and we are committed to sustaining these processes through the new project. Our work lends itself to an unusual degree to the generation of spin-off smaller-scale research projects specific to particular towns, areas or neighbourhoods. In the course of our engagement work to disseminate awareness of the current British Slave Ownership project, we have been asked repeatedly for data and help on slave-owners and slave-ownership in the decades prior to 1833.

The project will both provide information to and represent an outlet for the work of the myriad of family historians engaged in locating themselves relative to the past. We are one of the few projects working consciously to bridge the gap between academic history and these broader constituencies with appetite for knowledge of methodologies and approaches. As such, we will work alongside institutions such as The National Archives to target high priority outreach groups. Bodies such as English Heritage, committed to producing histories of their properties that are transparent on linkages to slavery, have drawn and will continue to draw on our work. Our results will be available to museums and galleries who are also struggling to mediate between academic research and the demands of public display.

In the Caribbean, both academic and non-academic audiences have been alienated from much European scholarship on slavery. We represent an opportunity to re-engage with these constituencies, including in the public sphere, to create a basis for renewed dialogue on the colonial period.

Schools in Britain are concerned to bring immediacy to their teaching of history, and we will offer the opportunity of tailored materials for Key Stage 3 modules on slavery and empire.