Several years ago, Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and Keith McClelland launched a project at University College, London, on the “Legacies of British Slave Ownership.” The project sought to document the impact of slave ownership on the formation of modern Britain. Phase one involved building a searchable, publicly accessible, database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape at the time of slave abolition in 1833. The recently published book, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014), is a collaborative work based on this phase. In phase two the researchers are now inquiring into the structure and significance of slave ownership in the British Caribbean between 1763 and 1833.
This is a timely and enormously instructive research project, with wide implications for rethinking the present of past slaving and slave societies. It is timely inasmuch as it converges with the re-emergence of serious scholarly and public discussion (in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States) about the long aftermaths of New World slavery in terms of the question of the repair of that historical injustice. It is instructive partly because it demonstrates the possibility of detailing the scale of value placed on slaves at the time of abolition, but also because, in excavating the pathways of capitalist financial interests in slavery (both state and private) it points to possible ways of articulating a contemporary counter-veiling reparatory claim—a material claim about justice for the descendants of the enslaved.
This event is free and open to the public -- seats are first come, first served -- and will take place over two days. The first October 1 afternoon discussion with Catherine Hall will take place at the Skylight Room, 9th floor, of CUNY Graduate Center.The October 2 one-day symposium will take place at the Heyman Center Common Room, Second Floor. (Please note the location change of the October 2 symposium, which was previously to be held in the Held Lecture Hall, Barnard College.)
October 1, 2015 Thursday
4:15pm - 4:30pm EDT
4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
Catherine Hall
Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History
University College London
October 2, 2015 Friday
9:15am - 9:30am EDT
9:30am - 10:00am EDT
David Scott
Professor of Anthropology
Columbia University
Herman Bennett
Professor of History
Graduate Center, City University of New York
10:00am - 11:00am EDT
Jennifer Morgan
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History
New York University
11:00am - 12:00am EDT
Sven Beckert
Laird Bell Professor of History
Harvard University
12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Kathleen Wilson
Professor of History
State University of New York, Stony Brook
1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT
Natasha Lightfoot
Assistant Professor of History
Columbia University
3:00pm - 4:00pm EDT
Melanie Newton
Associate Professor
University of Toronto
4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Richard Drayton
Rhodes Professor of Imperial History
King's College London
5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT
Nick Draper
Research Associate
University College, London