Responsibility for Slavery – Whiteys we are all in this together

THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON SLAVE-OWNER COMPENSATION DATABASE

 Research that has been undertaken and recently reported at University College London has the following introduction:

 ‘In 1833 Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. The slave trade had been abolished in 1807, but it had taken another 26 years to effect the emancipation of the enslaved.

 ‘However, in place of slavery the negotiated settlement established a system of apprenticeship, tying the newly freed men and women into another form of unfree labour for fixed terms. It also granted £20 million in compensation, to be paid by British taxpayers to the former slave-owners.

 ‘That compensation money provided the starting point for our first project. We are now tracking back to 1763 the ownership histories of the 4000 or so estates identified in that project.

 ‘At the core of the project is a database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended.

 ‘As the project unfolded, we amassed, analysed and incorporated information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of all the British slave-owners on the database, building the Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, which has now been made available online at:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

 

Go on – put your own surname in there or that of some of your close ancestors and see what comes up.

 

FROM THE RIGHT IN NZ

 

Jonathan Key: Jamaica St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey 498 £19 10S 10D [1 Enslaved]

 

Charlotte Shipley: St Vincent 388 £58 15S 6D [2 Enslaved]

Catherine Jane Warner (née Shipley): Dominica 146 (Hatton Garden) £2104 5S 5D [127 Enslaved] – unsuccessful claimant

 

Ernest Bolger: Mauritius 60 £215 2S 1D [7 Enslaved]

 

AND FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM IN NZ

 

Alexander Shearer: Jamaica St James 784 £79 11S 7D [4 Enslaved]

Mary Shearer: Jamaica Westmoreland 123 £97 14S 3D [5 Enslaved]

William James Shearer: Jamaica Westmoreland 772 £29 3S 1D [1 Enslaved]

 

Harriett Helen Clark: Jamaica St Ann 139 £76 3S 10D [4 Enslaved]

 

Ann Anderton: St Kitts 679 £52 1S 2D [3 Enslaved]

 

Alexander Trotter: Jamaica St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey 507 (Morant) £4,184 0S 1D [240 Enslaved]

Jane Trotter: Jamaica St Mary 314 £48 13S 11D [2 Enslaved]

 

And there are nearly 50 Johnsons - of whom one, Godschall Johnson, unsuccessfully claimed for 264 slaves in Antigua worth £3,461 17S 6D.

 

One of the really surprising results from my point of view though is the very large number of families that owned 5 or less slaves. Clearly, having a few slaves in a shed on your farm in the Caribbean was a common occurrence.

 

If you want to catch up on some reviews and commentaries, try:

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/database-lets-britons-find-slave-owning-ancestors-18607402

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-stately-homes-built-on-the-back-of-slaves-8518002.html?origin=internalSearch

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-must-be-honest-about-our-role-in-slavery-8508357.html?origin=internalSearch

 

I felt the need to try to redress some of the comments on the ‘Independent Voices’ blog-site [immediately above]. It seemed to me that most of those who left comments just didn’t get it.

 

My comment was:

“Yes. Let's be honest. There is something absolutely reprehensible about enslaving people by capture or purchase into a life of servitude in lands that were supposedly democratic and subject to the rule of law [e.g. the USA 150 years ago]. Not only that, people were self-branded as slaves by the colour of their skin - once Afro-Americans landed in the Americas and the Caribbean, it was their colour that denied them basic human rights.

 

Sadly, I also cannot endorse the get-out clause that 'my family's role in those days was as serfs under the British ruling class who profited from slavery'. A little thought will confirm that the 6-Degrees of Connection argument ropes us all in.

 

Take my own family for example. The Cheshire farmers made cheese for the ships' crews - the nail and wire makers of West Yorkshire made hardware and provided the material for trinkets that were exchanged with the West African sellers - the brush makers of Salford made brushes that cleaned the cotton mills which in turn got their cotton from the US South.

 

And Liverpool and Lancaster, for example, both retain evidence of slave ships docking. The moral of all this is that we owe a debt to the future in the form of a commitment to a fair-minded, even-handed, multi-racial society, within which some of our descendants will share both sides of the coin.”

 

As a black Scot comments about Scotland: [http://www.scotland.org/features/the-forgotten-diaspora]

 

 

‘The Scottish-Caribbean link is centuries old, but grew rapidly from the early 18th century with the slave trade. By the late 18th century, Britain dominated the West Indies and along with other European countries had developed a system to transport black African slaves to work the plantations of this New World.

‘Scottish slave masters and slave owners played a significant part in British slavery. Jamaica was important to the British Empire. Pitt, the British Prime Minister, said in 1800 that Jamaica provided Britain with most of the money "acquired" from the Empire. She was a primary producer of sugar, coffee, rum and spices and large quantities of these products came to Greenock, Port Glasgow and Leith.

‘It is estimated that 20,000,000 African people were bought or captured in Africa and transported into New World slavery. Only about half survived to work on the plantations. However, even Adam Smith was impressed by the profitability of this free land, free labour, business called Chattel slavery.

‘The terrible and unique feature of this slavery was that legally slaves had "no right to life". The working life of a field slave was about five years. Those who compare this slavery with other kinds of inhuman behaviour such as trafficking are being unfair to all such terrible activities.

‘Although Jamaica is only 146 miles long and no more than 50 miles wide, by 1800 there were 300,000 slaves, 10,000 Scots and a similar number of English. The Scots and English were mainly men and they administered the island and the enslaved black population.

‘In 1795, the Caledonian Mercury noted that Jamaica's slave population was valued officially at £10.25 million. The same Scottish paper publicly disclosed the activities of West Indian slavery yet some Scots still think "It wisnae us" - the title of an excellent booklet from a young enlightened Scot which shows that the economic history of Glasgow is linked to the history of slave-grown tobacco and sugar and to the many Scotsmen who became millionaires from slavery’.