Legacies of British Slave-ownership database

Hall, Catherine (2017). Legacies of British Slave-ownership database. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852209

This project examines the nature and significance of Caribbean slave-ownership in the formation of Britain in the crucial coincident years of the peak of the slave-economy and a decisive period in the industrialisation of Britain. It develops a history of the ownership of the 4,000 estates in the British West Indian colonies between 1763 and the end of slavery in 1834. It identifies those estate-owners and families who resided in or returned to Britain and constructs a prosopography of these slave-owners, tracing their commercial, political, social and cultural presence and impact in Britain.

The project develops an integrated analysis of the impact of slave-ownership on the shaping of the British nation and utilises the new data to re-examine the relationship between Empire, slavery and early imperial Britain in the late C18 and early C19.

The project created a new public resource which:
(1)codifies and makes searchable the ownership and evolution of estates in the British Caribbean between 1763 and 1833;
(2)traces the major commercial, political, institutional and cultural legacies of the slave-owners resident in Britain;
(3)allows users to link estate-ownership with other extant records on enslaved people, notably the Slave Registers.

Data description (abstract)

A database of all the claims for compensation submitted following the Emancipation Act of 1834 (c. 40,000 claims) and the names of the individuals connected to these claims (c. 47,000 individuals) with more detailed biographical information on those individuals we have identified as living in Britain from the mid-1830s onwards (c. 3,000 individuals).

This shows the history of slave-ownership throughout the British Caribbean, tracing the evolution of ownership estate-by-estate in the second half of the long 18th century, derived from the Slave Registers (c. 1815-1834) for all the Caribbean colonies and, for Jamaica, from the Crop Accounts (1740-1803 and the Jamaica Almanacs (1809-1839). The database records some 8000 estates, and identifies an estimated 5000 new absentee slave-owners and their legacies in metropolitan Britain.

Data creators: