The Legacies of the British Slave Trade: The Structures and Significance of British Investment in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, c. 1550-1807

英国在奴隶贸易上的投资结构是怎样的？奴隶贸易对英国经济、政治和文化发展的意义是什么？本项目试图通过整理和改进现有数据，并完成新的研究，来回答这两个问题，以创建一个全面的6524名英国投资者在奴隶贸易，c.1550-1807。该项目将使用该数据集来处理七个重叠的研究背景。首先，它追踪资本从贸易流向英国经济的其他部门，以评估贸易对英国经济发展的重要性。其次，该项目首次对奴隶贸易的资本投入进行了全面评估，以了解奴隶贸易投资结构的变化，并将奴隶贸易置于其他商业企业的背景下。第三，该项目将探索奴隶贸易投资在塑造国家和地方政治与文化中的作用，包括C17的贸易自由化和C19的废除。第四，该项目将通过考察商品化对C17和C18期间出现在英国的被奴役的非洲人的种族化描述的重要性，加深对种族和帝国在英国身份形成中的作用的理解。第五，该项目系统地探讨了妇女不仅作为投资者，而且作为奴隶财富的传递者和围绕奴隶贸易构建的社会和家庭网络中的纽带的作用，以提供关于性别对早期现代商业企业重要性的新视角。第六，该项目的轮廓和网络分析将使奴隶贸易的历史学家能够影响更广泛的跨学科社区，这些社区对个体参与者如何根据他们的社会、文化和经济关系做出决定感兴趣。第七，该项目的数据集为历史学家提供了一个独特的机会来了解在C17和C18期间帮助整合英国全国市场的过程。与这七个研究方向相结合，该项目旨在吸引一系列跨学科的学者。以英国奴隶制遗产的两个先驱项目的成功为基础[RES-062-23-1764；ES/J017736/1]，因此，该项目将重新强调奴隶贸易的商业背景和奴隶贸易中结构化投资的网络，同时突出该业务在英国经济中的嵌入程度。项目组将通过10篇世界领先的研究文章来宣传这些发现，这些文章将重塑奴隶贸易在经济、政治、文化历史领域的突出地位。该项目将通过创新的全国性团队结构，同时培养三位PDRAs的学术生涯。它将成立一个利益相关者小组，并通过一系列研讨会让前奴隶贸易港口的居民参与项目的实施，并建立将在项目生命周期内存活下来的地方和国家网络。在项目结束时，该项目将免费提供数据集，为探索殖民奴隶制的历史、商业和工业革命、C18城市复兴、非洲奴隶制在英国制度和文化发展中的作用以及当地和地区的过去创造一个重要的新资源。因此，该项目将把跨大西洋奴隶贸易的历史完整地纳入英国社会和经济发展的故事，帮助英国社会面对、揭露和纪念奴隶贸易。

What was the structure of British investment in the slave trade? What was the significance of the slave trade to Britain's economic, political, and cultural development? This project seeks to answer these two questions by collating and improving existing data and completing new research to create a comprehensive prosopography of the 6,524 British investors in the slave trade, c.1550-1807. The project will use this data set to engage with seven overlapping research contexts. First, it traces capital outflows from the trade into other sectors of the British economy to assess the trade's significance to British economic development. Second, the project offers the first comprehensive assessment of capital inputs into the slave trade to understand the changing structures of investment into the trade, and to situate the slave trade within the context of other commercial enterprises. Third, the project will explore the role of slave trade investment in the shaping of national and local politics and culture, including the liberalization of the trade in the C17 and abolition in the C19. Fourth, the project will deepen understanding of the role of race and empire in the formulation of British identity by examining the significance of commodification to the racialized depiction of enslaved Africans that emerged in Britain during the C17 and C18. Fifth, the project systematically explores the role of women not only as investors, but also as transmitters of slaving wealth and as bonds in the social and familial networks constructed around the slave trade to offer new perspectives on the importance of gender to early modern commercial enterprises. Sixth, the project's prosopography and network analysis will allow historians of the slave trade to influence a wider interdisciplinary community interested in how individual actors make decisions based on their social, cultural, and economic relationships. Seventh, this project's data set provides historians with a unique opportunity to understand the processes that helped integrate Britain's national market in the C17 and C18. Engaging with these seven research strands, this project seeks to engage a range of scholars working across disciplines. Building on the success of two precursor projects on the Legacies of British Slavery [RES-062-23-1764; ES/J017736/1], this project will therefore offer a new emphasis on the slave trade's commercial context and of the networks that structured investment within the slave trade, while highlighting the degree to which the business was embedded within the British economy. The project team will publicize these findings through ten world-leading research articles that will reshape the salience of the slave trade in the fields of economic, political, and cultural history. The project will simultaneously nurture the academic careers of three PDRAs through an innovative, nationwide team structure. It will form a stakeholder panel and engage the inhabitants of former slave trading ports in the implementation of the project through a series of workshops, and establish local and national networks that will survive the project-life. At the project's conclusion, the project will make the data set freely available, creating an important new resource for exploring the histories of colonial slavery, the commercial and industrial revolutions, the C18 urban renaissance, African slavery's role in the development of British institutions and culture, and local and regional pasts. The project will thus inscribe the history of the transatlantic slave trade fully into the story of British social and economy development, helping British society confront, disclose, and memorialize the slave trade.