Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain
Cambridge University Press, 8/28/2014
EAN 9781107040052, ISBN10: 1107040051
Hardcover, 338 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.
1. Introduction
2. Possessing people
absentee slave-owners within British society
3. Helping make Britain great
the commercial legacies of slave-ownership in Britain
4. Redefining the West India interest
politics and the legacies of slave-ownership
5. Reconfiguring race
the stories the slave-owners told
6. Transforming capital
slavery, family, commerce and the making of the Hibbert family
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Making history in a prosopography
Appendix 2. Glossary of claimant categories
Appendix 3. A note on the database
Bibliography.