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

我们的目标是帮助回答“英国对奴隶制欠了什么？”通过系统地确定奴隶制鼎盛时期英属加勒比殖民地所有地产的所有者，并评估在工业革命带来的痛苦的经济、社会和政治变革时期，奴隶主对英国形成的个人和集体影响。我们的起点是19世纪30年代英国殖民奴隶制结束时，从奴隶补偿记录中确定的4000多个庄园的名单。我们将追溯每个庄园的所有权，最早追溯到1763年，首先使用奴隶登记簿（按地点和“主人”列出所有被奴役的人），然后利用英国和加勒比地区越来越分散的来源，建立一个庄园如何在几代人之间和家庭之间传递的画面。这将是第一次对奴隶所有制模式进行如此大规模的分析。我们把1763年作为截止日期，因为这一年英国从法国手中夺取了格林纳达、多米尼加、圣文森特和多巴哥，大大扩大了它在牙买加、巴巴多斯和背风群岛的奴隶帝国。许多地产所有人都是加勒比海地区的居民，也就是说，他们在殖民地生活和死亡。然而，还有许多人将生活在英国，他们继承了加勒比海的庄园和在庄园里工作的奴隶，也许根本就没有去过他们的奴隶庄园。还有一些人将从加勒比海回到英国定居或重新融入英国社会。我们将记录所有奴隶主的详细情况，但在我们项目的第二部分，我们将集中注意最后两个阶级——英国的缺席奴隶主和从加勒比返回的奴隶主。对于这些群体中的个人，我们将从六个不同的维度研究他们在英国的生活，这些维度结合起来将形成奴隶制对英国意义的全新而全面的图景：商业和工业活动将追踪奴隶主对英国商业和工业的投资，研究英国大都会商人通过与种植园主建立收货人和信用关系进入奴隶所有制，并依次关注这些商人在英国的商业和工业企业的投资。文化积累将确定与缺席奴隶主有关的主要收藏，他们最重要的慈善活动，以及他们在18世纪后半期英国缺席奴隶所有权集中的主要中心的城市复兴中的作用。文化形态将研究奴隶主的作品，不仅包括主要文本，如布莱恩·爱德华兹和爱德华·朗的作品，还包括不太知名的作品，以探索他们对差异和种族的表述，以及他们对殖民地、国家和帝国的概念。政治派别和协会网络将确定所有以奴隶主或奴隶主近亲身份出现的议员，并重新审视C18的“西印度”利益。这一利益的规模一直是各种各样估计的主题，该项目提供了一个机会，可以系统地说明其在国家一级的构成和重要性，除其他外，利用议会信托历史的材料。帝国活动将通过追踪单个奴隶主及其家族在大英帝国其他地方的帝国生涯来分析奴隶主在更广泛的“帝国回路”中的参与情况。实物印痕将审查奴隶所有权对建筑环境的影响，借鉴当地历史来确定与缺席的奴隶主有关的乡村房屋、城市发展和其他建筑项目。

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.