Legacies of British Slave-Ownership

Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, Rachel Lang

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107040052
• eBook ISBN: 9781316056509
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Possessing people: absentee slave-owners within British society
• 3 Helping to make Britain great: the commercial legacies of slave-ownership in Britain
• 4 Redefining the West India interest: politics and the legacies of slave-ownership
• 5 Reconfiguring race: the stories the slave-owners told
• 6 Transforming capital: slavery, family, commerce and the making of the Hibbert family
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Making history in a prosopography
• Appendix 2: Glossary of claimant categories
• Appendix 3: A note on the database
• Appendix 4: List of MPs 1832–80 who appear in the compensation records
• Appendix 5: MPs and their connections: an indicative list
• Bibliography
• Index