To what extent has colonial money helped build Britain’s heritage sector? Isabel Gilbert on the importance of publicly and transparently acknowledging the problematic roots of British country houses and their collections.
Tag: slavery
Radical Object: Fergusson Vaginal Speculum
What does the vaginal speculum have to do with power? How does the history of this instrument help us to understand how bodies have been understood, policed, and governed? Can this object be reclaimed?
Lisa Godson explores.
Black Lives Still Don’t Matter Here
How should we understand the connections between the transatlantic slave trade, the expansion of the British Empire, and the history of Australia? Emma Christopher explores.
James Watt and Slavery in Scotland
How was James Watt – hero of the Industrial Revolution – involved in colonial commerce and slavery in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland?
Colston Revisited
Madge Dresser argues that statues of slave traders, such as Edward Colston, often served complex local and civic objectives, which were inextricable from historical processes which silenced the voices of enslaved Africans.
Proper Channels
How did Atlantic slavery end? Diana Paton argues that erasing the Haitian Revolution preserves the fiction that Britain is and was a progressive outlier in relation to race and racism
Slavery, coerced labour, and the development of industrial capitalism in Britain
In 1860, decades after the abolition of slavery in Britain, the British economy was more reliant on slave labour than ever before. Mark Harvey explores the links between coerced labour and the production of three crucial commodities: guns, sugar, and cotton.
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