Britain played a central role in establishing and operating the transatlantic slave trade (British slavers are estimated to have trafficked some 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic between 1640 and 1807). The victims of this trade and their descendants were exploited in British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Most enslaved people were forced to labour on plantations in British colonies, but enslaved labour was also exploited in other sectors and settings, including salt production, construction, and by the military (more than 13,000 enslaved people were purchased by the British West Indies Regiment between 1795 and 1808). The vast wealth accumulated through the slave trade and plantation slavery in British colonies helped support Britain’s development as a leading industrial capitalist economy, and directly and indirectly enriched many individuals, firms, banks, universities, the Royal Family and the Church of England, as well as the port cities of Liverpool, London and Bristol.

Although the role of British antislavery actors in the struggle to end slavery is widely remembered and celebrated in Britain today, it is also important to remember that a vigorous defence of slavery was mounted by Britons who opposed its abolition. Moreover, when the Slavery Abolition Act eventually received royal assent on 28 August 1833, there were still an estimated 700,000 people enslaved in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. The British government did not provide the formerly enslaved with even a penny in compensation for the brutally violent exploitation they and their forebears had endured, but it did compensate those who had owned enslaved people for the loss of their human “property” to the tune of around £20 million - approximately £17 billion in today’s money.

Transatlantic slavery differed from previous forms of slavery not just in terms of its scale, organising principles and enmeshment in a modern, global capitalist economic system, but also with respect to who it enslaved – black Africans. Britain thus participated in the development and maintenance of racial slavery, and the legal abolition of chattel slavery did not erase the racism it spawned, which continues to shape patterns of inequalities, injustices and violence found in contemporary Britain.

The Project’s Work in Britain

Working in three main sites - Bristol, Liverpool and London – we focus on the dilemmas facing museum curators seeking to communicate knowledge about the history of transatlantic slavery and its legacies -today. Recognising that the past of slavery holds different meanings in the present for different groups of people, we will be running a series of workshops in each of the three cities involving curators and members of the public, especially people from communities most affected by the history of slavery and its legacies, with a view to exploring different answers to questions about how the story of slavery can be told. These answers will then be brought into conversation with responses from research participants in our project’s other country locations – Ghana, Brazil and Dominica. 

The starting point for the workshops is a set of iron shackles from Ghana that is currently held in the collection of the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool (one of our UK project partners). Because the shackles are on loan from our partner organisation in Ghana (the Ghanaian Museum and Monuments Board), they provide a lens on British and Ghanaian entanglements historically and today, current debates about whether objects from Empire held in British museums should be returned, and debates about reparations. But the shackles also offer an entry point into thinking through other dilemmas about the way the history of slavery and its afterlives is told in British museums. For instance:

Iron shackles are objects that are often understood to encapsulate the horror of slavery as a system of domination, and freedom is sometimes represented as “breaking the chains” or being unshackled. But historical evidence shows that simply being released from shackles and other physical restraints, and even the legal abolition of slavery itself, did not equate to liberation. How can the shackles be used in the telling of more complicated stories about freedom, slavery and its afterlives?

Another related dilemma to be explored in our workshops concerns the fact that histories of slavery have often polarised between those that stress the brutal violence of slavery as a system of domination (epitomised by the iron shackles), and those that emphasise the resistance and resilience of the enslaved (epitomised by stories of those who broke the chains). More recently, historians like Vincent Brown have called for a shift towards “viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration”. How can museums help to affect this shift? 

In the UK, we are also working filmmakers from Tamo Junto Productions. They will be collaborating with Sun Up Sun Down Productions in Ghana to produce a documentary about the iron shackles. In addition, Tamo Junto will be working with a small group of research participants in the UK to provide them with the skills necessary to produce short films on the questions addressed by our project. 

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