Slavery and Britain’s infrastructure

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by Nick Draper
On Wednesday 8th May, I gave a presentation on ‘Slavery and Britain’s Infrastructure’ to staff at the National Infrastructure Commission’s secretariat in Holborn. The NIC was established in 2017 as an executive agency of HM Treasury with a charter to provide advice and make independent recommendations to government on national infrastructure priorities, with the objectives of supporting sustainable economic growth across all regions of the UK, improving competitiveness and improving quality of life.
The invitation to speak to the NIC provided an opportunity to begin to consolidate our findings on the role of slavery in the development of Britain’s infrastructure, especially its transportation infrastructure, as part of the wider discussion of the role of slavery in the Industrial Revolution. Although, as the recent Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain argues, ‘[t]ransport improvements – both infrastructural and technological – were central to Britain’s early industrialisation’[i], little attention (other than to the early London dock companies[ii]) has been paid to the specific debt to slavery of this transport revolution, which spanned turnpikes, canals, ports and docks and railways, and which drove down both the time and cost of moving goods and people within an increasingly integrated national market. The findings from LBS’ work suggest that slave-owners played a prominent role as initiators, financiers and managers in a sufficient number of specific projects to indicate that slave-owners in aggregate constituted a meaningful source of capital and entrepreneurial endeavour in the development of Britain’s transport infrastructure.
Walton Bridge
Walton Bridge, across the Thames near Shepperton (originally built 1748-50)
Typically, early infrastructure projects were privately-funded under state sponsorship through Acts of Parliament which addressed property rights and toll-regimes. Capital was mobilized initially through local and regional networks of wealthy elites, the financing process only institutionalized in banks and joint-stock companies with open subscriptions in the 19th century. Slave-owners figured among these local elites, and therefore might have been expected at a minimum to figure also pro rata among the funders of such projects. In itself this would establish slavery as the source of some 5-10% of investing activity. The question to which we are yet to establish a comprehensive answer is whether they were disproportionately inclined to redeploy slavery-derived wealth into infrastructure and indeed industrial investment more generally, and that we can attribute a higher proportion of capital formation to slave-ownership.
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Left: Conwy Suspension Bridge, Conwy, North Wales.
Right: Bakers Quay, Gloucester, now a residential development © Chris Gunns
What we can already say is that dozens of individual projects were in whole or part the legacies of slave-owners, ranging from Walton Bridge built by the Jamaican slave-owner Samuel Dicker and rebuilt by his heir Michael Dicker Sanders to the pioneering Conwy Suspension Bridge, funded in part by John Gladstone, and from Bakers Quay at Gloucester, which carries the name of its developer, the West India merchant and slave-owner Samuel Baker, to railway companies such as the Edinburgh & Northern, in which we know more than 40% of the initial subscriptions were from slave-owners and their families.
Direct financing by slave-owners constitutes perhaps the most immediate type of legacy in infrastructure. But many other more elaborate connections, whose nature and significance require elucidation case-by-case, permeate LBS’ research findings. Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, the great engineer of London’s sewage systems, was the grandson of Louis Bazalgette and nephew of Evelyn Bazalgette: the family wealth included investments in the slave-economy through mortgage loans to slave-owners. Sir James MacNaghten McGarel Hogg, the Chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) who commissioned the Blackwall Tunnel as the MBW was wound down for corruption in 1889, carried the name of his brother-in-law and benefactor, the slave-owner Charles McGarel. In both cases, the linkage to slavery is demonstrable but the unresolved issue is the extent to which slave-wealth underpinned their professional and social formation.

Left: Sir James McGarel Hogg (1823-1890) Right: Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819-1891) © NPG x647
[i] Dan Bogart, ‘The transport revolution in industrialising Britain’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries ad P. Johnson (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Vol. I 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 2016) p. 369.
[ii] Nicholas Draper, The City of London and slavery: evidence from the early dock companies 1795-1800’, Economic History Review, 61 (2) (May 2008) pp. 432-66.

Slave-owners and Abolitionists: some letters from William Wilberforce

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by Rachel Lang
William_Wilberforce_signature
“My dear young friend,” wrote William Wilberforce to Abel Smith in January 1822, “For, friend I must term you or do myself great Injustice …” He was writing “for the purpose of asking a favour of you … [T]hat you would kindly undertake the Office of one of the Executors + Trustees under my last Will”. Two reasons are given: due to the age difference, Smith is likely “long to survive me”, and of course because of “the Estimation in which I hold you …”[i]
Smith was a banker and a fellow MP, 30 years Wilberforce’s junior. The Smith and Wilberforce families had been intertwined through multiple marriages for over one hundred years.[ii] “I cannot resist the opportunity that is afforded me,” Wilberforce continues, “of assuring you of my affectionate regard for you, + of the warm interest I take in your Wellbeing.” The affection reaches its peak in the letter’s conclusion: “So I will only add the af[f]irmances of my best wishes for yr Health + Happiness, + above all my dear Abel for yr augmenting usefulness + Comfort, in its best sense, as intimate the light + life of yr Blessed Spirit of peace + love + Joy – I am ever, my dear Abel, Sin[cerel]y + aff[ectionatel]y yours WWilberforce.”
There is a plaintive note as well: “I often regret that from various Circumstances, We have seen so little of each other … It will always give me pleasure to welcome you under our roof …” Wilberforce complains about problems caused by his eyesight, then adds a postscript: “Excuse the Mark I write fast that I may write more in less time – I now can’t read over what I have scrib[b]led – If there are any mistakes forgive them.”[iii]
Wilberforce to Smith, 30/01/1822
This is the first of four letters from Wilberforce to Smith held at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Library. The second letter, written nearly two years later, begins, “My dear Abel, For let me use the freedom of friendship, when I can truly declare it is warranted by the reality of it …” Wilberforce’s purpose this time is to request the curacy of Stapleford for his son Samuel. Again the postscript shows vulnerability: “I say noth[in]g ab[ou]t yr coming to us … but I hope we shall sometime welcome you under our roof .”[iv]
The third letter, written in January 1829, is shorter and relates to a loan of £6,000 granted to Wilberforce by Abel Smith’s father. The tone is less effusive, beginning “Mr dear Mr Abel …” The relationship is not as close as Wilberforce would wish but is still personal: “I am sorry we never meet. But when Spring returns, if it please God to preserve me so long, I hope Mrs A. Smith + you will pay us yr long owe’d Visit.”[v] In the fourth letter, (“My dear Mr A –”), he is very agitated about a dispute with the Vicar of Hendon and worried and saddened by the business failures of his son William junior. He is still in debt to the Smiths: “It is the only comfort almost I now have in the affair that you (mean yr House under yr father + yr kind offices) are acting so friendly a part in relation to it.”[vi]
The name William Wilberforce has such resonance today. It was a strange experience to see the well-known signature on a page for the first time and to reconcile this with the somewhat needy voice that comes across in all four of his letters to Smith, written in old age and ill-health, with repeated requests to meet and, in the last two letters, the “sad turmoil” involved in his need for financial assistance.



Also surprising was that Abel Smith’s role in the slave economy posed no bar to Wilberforce’s affection. Abel Smith was a partner in the London bank Smith Payne & Smith, heavily involved in the credit arrangements of West India planters in part through their ties with the West India merchant firm Manning & Anderdon.[vii] Smith, Payne & Smith had taken possession of Farm estate in Jamaica in the 1790s and were mortgagees of enslaved people on Holland, Fish River and Petersville plantations in Jamaica in the 1820s.[viii] Smith was awarded compensation for the ownership of 222 enslaved people on Raymond’s estate in Jamaica as trustee of the marriage settlement of Harriet Smith, daughter of Wilberforce’s first cousin Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington.
Separate correspondence concerning the short-lived engagement of Wilberforce’s only daughter Elizabeth to Charles Pinney in 1827 reveals some of the logic behind Wilberforce’s attitude.[ix] Pinney was descended from Nevis slave-owners on both sides of his family and became a slave-owner himself.[x] He appears in the LBS database as the awardee or co-awardee for the ownership of 1,328 enslaved people, primarily as mortgagee.[xi] Wilberforce wrote to Pinney explaining his sympathy for Pinney’s approaches to Elizabeth: “Tho’ a suitor being a West Indian merchant was an objection, it was not an insuperable one … always taking for granted that the gentleman should possess, secure from mercantile or West Indian risk, so much property, as when combined with the Ladies Fortune, might suffice for their comfortable maintainance.”[xii]
Wilberforce soon changed his mind about the suitability of Charles Pinney for his daughter, and may not have considered the match at all if it had been proposed before the 1820s, when ill-health led to his retirement from active politics and the financial troubles of his son William had impacted him greatly. His wife Barbara explained the change of heart to her close friend and Pinney’s sister Mary Ames: “… having expressed, as I felt, my satisfaction that Mr Pinney was not a proprietor possessed of Lands & Negroes but only a West India Merchant, I ought to say that I was then ignorant of what we are now led to consider is the peculiar Situation of a West India Merchant … Mortgages uphold the System of Slavery & in many Respects, all the worst part of the system, even more than any other possessions in the West Indies.” Barbara suggested to Mary that, “however humane and good”, West India merchants may themselves be trapped by the workings of the system despite representing the worst of it: “I am sure your Brother would be amongst the first to rejoice if no such system existed.”[xiii]
Wilberforce’s friendship with Joseph Foster Barham (1759-1832) follows a similar vein. Barham was an MP and owner of four estates in Jamaica, with over six hundred enslaved people, and stressed the responsibility of slave-owners to care for their human property: “To improve the condition of the Slaves, in every safe and practicable way, I have ever deemed the first duty of the master …”[xiv] Barham regretted his role as slave-owner while at the same time profiting from it and deluding himself about the real conditions his enslaved people lived in. Wilberforce described Barham as “a generous fellow, and he seems to be actuated by a warm spirit of patriotism and philanthropy.” Friendships took place across the political divide and the small world of affluent London society meant that slave-owners and abolitionists did not always operate in separate spaces.
[i] William Wilberforce to Abel Smith, 22 Jan 1822, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Library (HALS), DE/AS/4414-7.
[ii] See LBS entry for Abel Smith, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/43657 for details of Smith-Wilberforce inter-marriage provided by Sue Castle-Henry.
[iii] William Wilberforce to Abel Smith, 22 Jan 1822, HALS DE/AS/4414-7.
[iv] Wilberforce to Smith, 5 Dec 1827, HALS, DE/AS/4414-7. Samuel Wilberforce later became Bishop of Oxford, see Arthur Burns, ‘Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873), bishop of Oxford and of Winchester’, ODNB, online edition https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/29385.
[v] Wilberforce to Smith, Jan 1829, HALS, DE/AS/4414-7. Wilberforce was borrowing money to support his son William junior’s business enterprises which failed the following year, causing Wilberforce “disastrous financial losses” and enforcing a “severe financial retrenchment” – see John Wolffe, ‘William Wilberforce (1759-1833), politician, philanthropist, and slavery abolitionist’, ODNB, online edition https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/29386.
[vi] Wilberforce to Smith, 1 Mar 1827, HALS, DE/AS/4414-7. It appears the relationship had become less close and Smith was not named as an executor in Wilberforce’s final will.
[vii] See LBS entry for John Lavicount Anderdon, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/856384207.
[viii] Smith, Payne & Smith in the LBS database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/firm/view/1816453197;
[ix] See Anne Stott, Wilberforce: Family and Friends (2012) chapter 14 for an account of the engagement.
[x] Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Charles Pinney (1793-1867), mayor of Bristol’, ODNB online edition, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22303.
[xi] Charles Pinney in the LBS database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/25863.
[xii] Pinney Papers, S/4/21, William Wilberforce to Charles Pinney, 26 Apr 1827 quoted in Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: the Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (2001) p. 203.
[xiii] Pinney Papers, S/4/21, Barbara Wilberforce to Mary Ames, 18 Apr 1827 quoted in Stott, Wilberforce: Family and Friends p. 237.
[xiv] Joseph Foster Barham, ‘Considerations on the abolition of Negro slavery, and the means of practically effecting it’ (1823) p. vi.



Historical Association Fellowship

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by Nick Draper
For several years, one of our priorities in the project has been to increase the use of the LBS database as a teaching resource in secondary schools. The teaching of the slave-trade is no longer mandatory in schools, after a brief period following 2007 when it joined the teaching of the Holocaust as an obligatory part of the curriculum, but many schools continue to teach the topic, and we have been eager to contribute to teachers’ classroom practice.
The pioneering Local Roots/Global Routes project in Hackney in 2014-2015 (https://lrgr14.wordpress.com), undertaken by Kristy Warren and Kate Donington from LBS in conjunction with Hackney Museum and Archives and two local schools, demonstrated the power of the LBS research in underpinning the connections between the local and the global, both historically and in the present. The Hackney project also emphasized the labour-intensive nature of such work, and led us to seek ways to streamline the processes of adapting our work for use in the classroom, so that we could reach more schools in less time. The addition of mapping on the website was an important step in the process, allowing immediate visualization of local connections to slave-ownership.
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The Mill Yard, Antigua (British Library); Sugar Mills in Antigua (Pat Hawks, Wikimedia)
Now, in conjunction with Justice to History (https://justice2history.org) and the Historical Association, we have established a Historical Association Teacher Fellowship on Transatlantic Slavery (https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/categories/872/news/3666/teacher-fellowship-programme-2019-britain-and-tra) for secondary school teachers, to run in 2019. There will be 15 places available on a three-day residential course, which will be followed by an eight-week online course. Participants will explore a range of sources and interpretations that can be used to develop meaningful and engaging approaches to teaching about the circumstances, experiences and consequences of African enslavement in the Atlantic world. Among the aims of the programme is the development of a set of principles for the teaching of transatlantic slavery that we hope will come to be adopted more widely among schools and teachers. The programme is open to all secondary school history teachers with a minimum of four years’ teaching experience. The deadline for applications is Friday 1 February 2019.
We have been fortunate in the establishment of the Fellowship to have had the support and collaboration of the Historical Association itself, which has in the past few years successfully mounted half-dozen such fellowships, and of Robin Whitburn and Abdul Mohamud of Justice to History, as well as the continued commitment of Kate Donington, now at London South Bank. In addition, UCL’s Research Impact team has contributed to funding the Fellowship, and we are grateful to Helen Stark for her championing of the proposal within UCL. We hope that the programme will attract a group of teachers from across the country, and that this cadre will become points of reference for their colleagues in the future.

Making an exhibition on the slave trade and slavery

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by Catherine Hall
At the beginning of August I spent a week in the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington talking with a group of international curators and historians. We were planning a travelling exhibition on the slave trade and slavery – one that could move between Dakar, Brussels, Liverpool, Rio, Washington and Cape Town and tell a global story – no small challenge! The Museum itself is an inspiring place to be, the product of many years struggle and many years work, the last of the Smithsonian museums which aim to represent US life and culture. It has been an incredible success, bringing in literally millions of visitors, both African American and others, and telling a very different history to the conventional US account, a history rooted in slavery and the long struggle for freedom, the centrality of ‘race’ to US culture and the making of both black and white Americans. Blazoned on the wall as you step down into the history galleries are James Baldwin’s marvellous words, a motif for the place, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
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Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
The idea of an international travelling exhibition is the brainchild of a partnership between the Centre for Slavery and Justice at Brown University and the African American Museum. They initiated a project which has brought in museums, universities and public historians from West Africa and the Cape, Belgium and the Netherlands, France, the UK and the US. The objective is to develop a global story about colonial and racial slavery and its foundational role in the making of the modern world. The aim is to show how this history links Africa, Europe and the Americas in ways that link peoples and places; that there is a global story of power and exploitation that long precedes contemporary globalisation yet has important connections to the present. The work will involve objects and archives, artists and designers as well as curators and historians. Particular attention will be paid to the legacies and afterlives of slavery. At the meeting in Washington we began to map out some possible themes and storylines for the exhibition – focusing on the many dimensions of the slavery business, the making of gender and racial difference, bodies and knowledges, the importance of place, and the building of freedom. The plan is that over time a workshop will be held in each place that plans to host the exhibition, exploring specific links between the locality and the global story. An exhibit specific to the locality will then be developed to sit alongside the travelling exhibition, highlighting local stories and the ways in which they connect with contemporary issues of inequality. The hope is that this can make a contribution to the work of recognition and reparation, the work of challenging the destructive effects of colonialism and empires.
This is an ambitious agenda for the years ahead – but there is both excitement about such a collaborative project, and a determination amongst the participants to do this work. So watch this space!

Dreams of a new plantation society: Legacies of British Slavery in Queensland, Australia

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by Emma Christopher, University of New South Wales
The doyen of Queensland sugar planters, John Ewen Davidson, was a man with one single conviction: ‘he believed in sugar, the sugar of the West Indies.’[1] Sugar, and the vast enslaved workforces that produced it, had made his great-grandfather, and his paternal and maternal grandfathers exceedingly wealthy. And for all the plantocracy claimed that the end of slavery had ruined them, the Davidsons—John’s father Henry and his uncles Duncan, John and William—gained vast payouts at the time of emancipation. In fact John’s father had purchased more plantations in the 1810s and ‘20s with the expectation of a large compensation payout, and had an enslaved workforce of more than 4,000 men, women and children by 1834.[2]
John Ewen Davidson
John Ewen Davidson, n.d.
It seems plausible that at least some of the £301,500 John Ewen Davidson invested in his Queensland sugar estates came indirectly from the £166,612 his father had received as compensation for the loss of his enslaved workforce some 30 years before, especially since John was an only son.[3] John had visited his father’s Highbury plantation in Berbice after graduating from Oxford University and clearly aspired to recreating this in Queensland, all the while keeping quiet about his family’s slave owning past.[4]
Davidson was not the only scion seemingly trying to relive family glories of the West Indies in Queensland. Among the colony’s ‘aristocracy’[5] was the founder of the sugar industry Louis Hope, the grandson of John Wedderburn of Ballindean of Knight vs. Wedderburn infamy. Louis’ elder brother had claimed compensation for the enslaved of Blackness estate in Jamaica.
1-Hope
Left: Louis Hope, 1870s. Right: Hope’s Ormiston Mill c.1871
Francis T. Tyssen Amherst (or Amhurst) was from the aristocratic family who had once founded plantations in Antigua. He owned Foulden plantation and then purchased Farleigh and owned ships that recruited in the South Sea Island labour trade.


3-South Sea Islander in Foulden plantation
South Sea Islanders on Tyssen Amhert’s Foulden Plantation, c. 1880
Three great-grandsons of Beeston Long, Chairman of the West India Merchants, were also Queensland sugar planters. George Long would drown ‘recruiting’ labour in the South Pacific, while William returned to England, leaving behind only Edward M. Long, namesake of his father’s cousin, the Edward Long who authored The History of Jamaica. Edward founded Habana plantation, named for the Cuban capital, just outside Mackay.
2-Habana Creek outside Mackay ca. 18802-Habana Sugar Mill outside Mackay ca. 1884
Left: Habana Creek c. 1880. Right: Habana Mill c. 1884
Down the coast at Bundaberg were Horace, Ernest and Arthur Young, grandsons of Emily Baring. One of their uncles was a partner in Barings Bank while another, Sir George Young, was involved with a slave emancipation payout in Grenada. The Young brothers were prominent planters and Pacific labour recruiters, while their sister Florence established a mission among the islanders.
4-Fairymead
Left: an advert for Florence Young’s South Sea Mission, n.d. Right: Report of ill-treatment aboard Young’s Schooner ‘Helena’, Maryborough Chronicle, 2 Jan. 1885
Charles Armstrong, better known as Kangaroo Charlie and the one-time husband of Dame Nellie Melba, was the grandson of George Alexander Fullerton who inherited his great-uncle’s estates in Jamaica and received the compensation for the enslaved people who worked there.
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Charles Armstrong with Nellie Melba c. 1902
Others had smaller payouts, such as Dorothy Reddish, whose granddaughter, Maria, married Maurice Hume Black, and John Buhôt’s parents. Buhôt, who today has a plaque to his sugar-growing efforts in the Botanic Gardens in Brisbane and who worked for Louis Hope, was from Barbados. Both of Buhôt’s parents had received slave compensation; his mother, Elizabeth Walcott, likely received £708 15s 5d for 34 enslaved people in Barbados.


7-Buhot Plaque6-johnbuhot
None of these sums of money, Davidson’s excepted, may be enough to draw direct links between slave-made wealth and/or compensation and the early Queensland sugar industry. It does, however, cast another view on these planters’ insistence that ‘coloured’ labour was necessary in Queensland, a belief that resulted in the Pacific Labour Trade. These men were, after all, only a handful of those who arrived in Queensland from the Caribbean and Mauritius carrying with them ideas of labour and labour management from across the seas.


[1] ‘A Sugar Pioneer’ Cairns Post, 14.12.1923, p9
[2] Admin, ‘The History of Highbury’, Guyana International Times, 14 Jun. 2013.
[3] Aeneas F. Munro, The Sugar Fields of Mackay, (Mackay: Hodges and Chataway, 1895); David Ryden, ‘The Society of West India Planters and Merchants in the Age of Emancipation, c. 1816-1835’ [pdf], Unpublished paper, Economic History Society Annual Conference, March 2015.
[4] ‘Arrivals’, The Creole, Guyana, 24 December 1862, p2.
[5] Sir Ralph Cilento and Clem Lack Snr., Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (Brisbane: Smith & Paterson Pty Ltd, 1959) 94n.

Images:
John Ewen Davidson, Louis Hope, Ormiston Mill, South Sea Islanders at Foulden, Habana Creek, Habana Mill, Piri and Polly, all courtesy of the State Library of Queensland.
Charlie Armstrong and Nellie Melba, courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
John Buhôt, courtesy of State Archives of Queensland.
All above out of copyright.
Buhôt plaque, author’s own, 2017.

Bute House, official residence of the First Minister of Scotland

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by Rachel Lang
In 1766, the Edinburgh town council announced a competition to design a new town to the north of Scotland’s capital city with the aim of providing grand, spacious houses for the city’s elite. The competition was won by 26-year-old James Craig with a plan for two garden squares connected by three wide, terraced streets. Built in stages between the 1760s and the 1820s, the New Town provided an alternative to the polluted, overcrowded wynds of old Edinburgh and symbolised Scotland’s confident steps towards a new Enlightenment.
On the north side of the grandest square, the houses blend together in a pleasingly unified palace façade, designed by Robert Adam in 1791 as the crowning glory of the whole development. The house in the centre of the façade, number 6 Charlotte Square, the most commanding house in the best position, is just that bit bigger and grander than the rest. Into this house, in the late 1790s, moved its first resident, John Innes Crawford[1].

6 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh
Crawford had a country residence too, Cleghorn House near Lanark. He was a member of the Highland Society, a Captain in the 10thRegiment of North British Militia and had scientific and literary interests. His mother lived with him until his marriage in 1799 and shortly after, he moved to nearby George Street[2].
Crawford’s wealth derived from Bellfield, the sugar plantation in St James, Jamaica, which he inherited at the age of five or six on the death of his father James Crawford[3]. James junior was born in Jamaica in 1776 but within two years of his father’s death, his mother had returned to Scotland where she remarried. He does not appear to have visited his plantation as an adult or met the several hundred enslaved people, also his personal property, who lived and worked there. But his fortunes were bound up with their subjugation and liable also for the debts of his planter father, reportedly over £15,000 in the mid-1790s, when the net proceeds of the estate were £3,000 a year[4].

First page of the slave register entry for Bellfield estate, 1820.TNA T71/205 p. 285
Subsequent residents of Bute House were also connected with the slave economy. Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835) bought the property in 1806, moving three doors down from his previous address at number 9. A more illustrious character than Crawford, he held a seat in the House of Commons from 1780 to 1811 but is best known today as the compiler of the Statistical Account of Scotland, a landmark survey of the country’s geography, economy and inhabitants[5]. Sinclair was a trustee of the marriage settlement of Hon. Archibald Macdonald and Jane Campbell, who had married in 1802; the settlement included three plantations in St Vincent. Sinclair died in 1835 before the slave compensation was paid out, but the remaining trustee received a half share in £15,766 7s 6d for the ownership of 610 enslaved people[6].
Sinclair sold 6 Charlotte Square in 1816 to Charles Oman, who ran the property as a hotel. Oman quickly expanded his property portfolio in the 1810s and 1820s, becoming the premier hotelier in the city[7]. His eldest son, also called Charles, does not appear to have joined his father’s business; he died on Trinity estate in St Mary, Jamaica, in 1819[8].
The house is now the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland and the venue of regular meetings of the Scottish Cabinet. Until recently, its connections to the slave economy have been overlooked, in common with many properties financed or inhabited by slave-owners. LBS seeks to reinscribe slave-ownership into the history of modern Britain.

[1]The ownership of Bute House from 1795 to 1911 can be traced through the Edinburgh Post Office Directories available at https://www.nls.uk/family-history/directories/post-office/index.cfm?place=Edinburgh.
[2]See for example Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1816) vol. IV p. 628; Crawford as a subscriber to Scotland’s Skaith… together with some additional poems(Edinburgh, 1815); as a member of the Wernerian Natural History Society, Caledonian Mercury 23/04/1818; his role in the North British Militia is given in the announcement of his marriage, Aberdeen Press and Journal 14/10/1799; his mother appears in the Post Office Directories as Mrs Alex. Simpson.
[3]Ownership of Bellfield traced in the LBS database, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/2415.
[4]Francis Vesey, Reports of Cases argued and determined in the High Court of Chancery, from the year 1789 to 1817 (London, 1827), Vol. VI, 2nd ed., pp. 460-465
[5]Rosalind Mitchison, ‘Sir John Sinlair, first baronet (1754-1835), agricultural improver, politician and codifier of “useful knowledge”’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition, 2015).
[6]The estates were Argyle, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/27265, Calder, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/27266 and Calder Ridge, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/27267.
[7]For more on the Oman family see ‘The History of Bute House – Home to the First Minister of Scotland’, https://historyatrandom.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/the-history-of-bute-house-home-to-the-first-minister-of-scotland/.
[8]Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 4 p. 637 (February 1819).

An Afternoon Lecture at Latymer Grammar School, Edmonton, North London

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By James Dawkins
The lack of attention paid to the contribution of British West Indian slavery in the formation of modern Britain has been an on-going issue of concern amongst parents of African-Caribbean heritage and some school teachers. Slavery, its effects, and abolition in 1833 is currently taught as a non-statutory topic at Key Stage 3 (years 7 to 9) in English state maintained schools.[1] This is, however, the only period of compulsory schooling when pupils are exposed to the history of our country’s slave-based West Indian plantation economy. The brutal and inhumane nature of this system along with its lasting legacies, including a sustained sense of white guilt and the continued emotional pain along with feelings of injustice felt by the country’s African-Caribbean citizens, has made it a difficult subject to discuss in Britain. Interestingly, our nation’s active distancing, sanitisation, and downplaying of slavery and its role in the economic development of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain has garnered increasing curiosity from a number of quarters, particularly secondary schools and I was happy to receive an invitation from Doctor Brenda Quinn at Latymer Grammar School in north London who asked if I could come in to talk about slavery and industrialisation with the institution’s year-13 pupils.
20170130191649!Latymertower
The Latymer School, Haselbury Road, Edmonton
Drawing upon several key texts – Capitalism and Slavery; Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England; and ‘Slavery Bristol’s ‘Golden Age’’ – I spoke about the broad range of industries and professions which emerged and developed from their connection to the slave trade and the plantation economy.[2] Eric Williams was one of the first historians to trace the investment of slave-based wealth into the establishment of sugar refineries and metal works. He also pointed to the slave-trade’s stimulation of Britain’s timber and maritime industries, along with the erection of cotton factories – all of which processed the raw goods arriving from the West Indies and America, or manufactured guns, textiles, and domestic utensils that were shipped to the west coast of Africa and exchanged for Africans. I moved on to discuss the development of Britain’s social and transportational infrastructure highlighting the rise of its banking system, railways and canals, and steam-powered mechanisation, upon which the foundations of our modern-day economy were constructed. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership online database is an excellent resource for exploring the commercial footprint of the slave-based economy and I provided the pupils with a demonstration that elaborated upon the spread of West Indian colonial wealth into and across the country.
My discussion shifted from the national to the local significance of slavery as I used the online database to present an example of the geographic closeness of slavery and slave-ownership to Latymer School. John Snell was a particularly interesting individual who, in 1836, received over £3,300 in exchange for the liberation of the 123 enslaved people he possessed on the Clare Valley estate in St. Vincent.[3] Snell was a wealthy absentee who lived on Fore Street, opposite Pymmes Park, which is under one mile’s walk from Latymer School. Moreover, before he died, in 1847, he gifted one acre of land to St. James’ Church, situated just over one mile away from Latymer School, upon which St. John and St. James’ Primary School was built and opened in 1851. This was, therefore, an intriguing example of how a former slave-owner contributed to the establishment of an English school which is a stone’s throw away from Latymer School. Indeed, some of St. John and St. James’ pupils may have attended Latymer Grammar given its close proximity.

My evening at the school concluded with a lively discussion on the topic of slavery, its legacies, and reparations. The Latymer pupils advanced a series of important questions and were genuinely interested in the aftermath of British West Indian slavery and how its current legacies might be addressed. One pupil asked the excellent question: “how was Britain able to sustain itself as a global economic superpower after the decline of its plantation economy?” whilst another student asked “do you think that the country is ready to discuss the issue of slavery and reparations?”. These were just two of the many good questions that were posed. I responded to the former by highlighting the shift in Britain’s commercial interest from the West to the East Indies along with its colonisation and subsequent extraction of mineral resources from Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter question took a little more consideration and discussion with the pupils, after which I clarified my personal position and stated that stated Britain isn’t ready for an informed discussion on the subject of slavery and reparations yet. I explained that a discussion of such significance can best be addressed after a period of national education on the issue where the historical context, facts, and arguments are set out. Exposure to the numerous dimensions of this long-standing and complicated subject will allow for a more knowledgeable debate to take place. Indeed, I was informed that this lecture provoked a lively discussion in the classroom the following day as the pupils talked about slavery, industrialisation, and its legacies, which is exactly what the Legacies of British Slave-ownership’s outreach activities are intended to do.
I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon at Latymer Grammar School and appreciate Dr Quinn and her pupils’ kind invitation to come and talk about this overlooked period of British and African-Caribbean history.
[1] Statutory Guidance – National Curriculum in England: History Programmes of Study [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study].
[2] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); David Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’s ‘Golden Age’’ Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Apr., 2005), pp. 35-54.
[3] Legacies of British Slave-ownership, “John Snell, 1774-1847” [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/25788, accessed on 30 October, 2017].