From the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans to The UK Modern Slavery Act: a series of eight talks curated by Deborah Lavin.

Freedom’s Debt: The Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1672 – 1752)

Tuesday 6th October 

This talk will discuss the parts played by freedom and liberty in developing England’s contribution to the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. It argues that Britain’s relationship with slavery has largely been viewed in terms of Britain’s contribution to the abolition of the trade. It suggests that British identity, British ideas, British institutions did much to develop the trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines the political deliberations that surrounded the Royal African Company – a monopolistic trading corporation formed to develop England’s slave trade that would become, by the middle of the eighteenth century, associated with some of the earliest embryonic arguments for the abolition of the slave trade. The lecture will examine the role that Britishness and freedom played in developing the largest forced-intercontinental migration in human history.

Speaker: Dr William Pettigrew, University of Kent

First Prime Minister of the London Empire: William Beckford, Jamaican Planter & Lord Mayor of London (1709 – 1770)

Tuesday 13th October

This talk examines the life of William Beckford, twice Lord Mayor of London, and one of the largest slave-owners in the British Empire. In a remarkable political career, he gained fame as a proponent of British liberties, while overseeing a transatlantic family business founded on colonial slavery. The talk will seek to demonstrate how these apparent contradictions highlighted many of the dilemmas Britain faced as a global empire, and helped to spark some of the earliest domestic debates about its future as an imperial power.

Speaker: Dr Perry Gauci

The Law’s Ambiguous Struggle with Slavery

Tuesday 20th October

This talk considers the ambiguity that the law faced in the eighteenth century in its struggle with slavery. In this century, several English judges upheld the rights of slave owners to claim property in their “Negroes”, either on the grounds that they were not Christians, or by appealing to the legal concept of jus gentium (law of nations). However, some judges upheld the rights of slaves, arguing that once a slave set foot in England, the slave became free.

In particular, this talk considers the perennial controversy that has surrounded the case of James Somersett (1772) and the role of Lord Mansfield in the change to the common law regarding slavery within Britain.

Speaker: Prof Satvinder Juss, King’s College London

George Hibbert M.P. (1757-1837) and the Defence of British Slavery

Tuesday 27th October 

George Hibbert was an early and powerful defender of the slave trade and later slavery. He was a Chairman of the West India Merchants Society, a Member of Parliament between 1806-1812, and Agent for Jamaica between 1812-1832. His family had been involved with the business of slavery for generations. As early as 1790 he campaigned for the payment of compensation for those whose livelihoods depended on the labour of enslaved people. This talk will look at the different strategies used by Hibbert to delay the ending of slavery, as well as to ensure that the government compensated the slave-owners for their ‘property in people’.

Speaker: Dr Katie Donington

The Unfortunate Colonel Despard: “Governor of Belize”, Anti-racist, Democrat, Executed as a Traitor 1803

Tuesday 3rd November 

Colonel Edward Despard was executed in London in 1803 as a terrorist and traitor. However, the seeds of his radicalism were sown on the other side of the world, during his military service in the Caribbean. A patriotic war hero who fought alongside Nelson, he fell from favour with the British government after he was appointed governor of Belize and allocated equal shares of land to black and white settlers.

Recalled to Britain, he shocked London society with his mixed race marriage, and his pursuit of racial equality and political rights steered him towards the revolutionary underground.

Speaker: Mike Jay

Slavery and the Shaping of British Culture

Tuesday 24th November 

The past forty years have yielded an astonishingly rich and varied archive and historiography about slavery. Much less impressive however has been the efforts to locate slavery as an integral feature of Western cultural life itself. Too often, slavery is seen as an exotic, discreet subject which belongs outside Western culture. This talk takes a different approach, arguing that slavery was pivotal to the way Western Europe emerged over a period of three centuries.

Speaker: James Walvin, Prof of History Emeritus, University of York

A British-Owned Congo: Roger Casement’s Battle with Slavery in Peru (1910-1914)

Tuesday 1st December 

Roger Casement was the twentieth century’s first outstanding humanitarian. Best known for his 1904 chilling report on conditions in King Leopold’s Congo, Casement continued his campaign for human rights in the Putumayo Valley bordering Peru and Colombia, where a rubber company with headquarters in London was abusing and murdering indigenous people on a massive scale – nearly thirty thousand workers had died for a few thousand tons of rubber. Casement’s 1912 Foreign Office published report made for disturbing reading. He was widely celebrated as a hero in his battle to expose widespread abusive labour regimes. In 1916, Casement was hanged on a charge of treason by the British Government.

Speaker: Prof Jordan Goodman

Identifying Unfinished Business: The UK Modern Slavery Act (2015)

Tuesday 8th December 

Almost two hundred years after the anti-slavery legislation associated with William Wilberforce, the UK government passed the Modern Slavery Act, acknowledging the fact that slavery had never really gone away. What is different now is that “modern slavery”, is present within the UK itself rather than in far-flung countries where Britons preferred to overlook working conditions. This talk will briefly trace the links between historical forms of slavery and its modern manifestations, and will critically examine claims by the government that the Act is world-leading.

Speaker: Prof Gary Craig