Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’

Description

Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this 'national sin' by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the 'Middle Passage', and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain's history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Part I: Little Britain’s History of Slavery 1: From Guinea to Guernsey and Cornwall to the Caribbean: Recovering the History of Slavery in the Western English Channel 2: ‘There to sing the song of Moses’: John Jea’s Methodism and Working-Class Attitudes to Slavery in Liverpool and Portsmouth, 1801–1817 3: Portrait of a Slave-Trading Family: The Staniforths of Liverpool 4: Forgotten Women: Anna Eliza Elletson and Absentee Slave Ownership 5: East Meets West: Exploring the Connections between Britain, the Caribbean and the East India Company, c.1757–1857 Part II: Little Britain’s Memory of Slavery 6: Whose Memories? Edward Long and the Work of Re-Remembering 7: Liverpool’s Local Tints: Drowning Memory and ‘Maritimising’ Slavery in a Seaport City 8: Local Roots/Global Routes: Slavery, Memory and Identity in Hackney 9: Multidirectional Memory, Many-Headed Hydras and Glasgow 10: Making Museum Narratives of Slavery and Anti-Slavery in Olney Afterword Selected Bibliography Index Plates