This piece was originally posted on the author’s blog, Flip Chart Fairy Tales

Starting tonight, BBC Two is running a series called Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. It is based on research by University College London which found that Britain had 46,000 slave owners in 1833, the year slavery was abolished in the British Empire. All are clearly identified in the records of the compensation claims, and you can even see whether any of your ancestors were involved.

What has shocked many people is the sheer scale of slave ownership revealed by this research. It wasn’t just a few rich plantation owners. The wealthier middle-classes were in on it too. In those days, a lot of central London was still residential and the addresses of the slave owners are marked on maps produced by UCL. In the well-to-do areas of Fitzrovia and Marylebone, slave ownership was widespread.

Addresses in London’s Fitzrovia where the recipients of slave compensation once lived:

Addresses in London’s Marylebone area where the recipients of slave compensation once lived:

Should we be surprised by this? Given the number of British possessions in the Caribbean, their role in colonial trade and the importance of slavery to their economies, it would be astonishing if those who had money to invest didn’t put at least some of it into enterprises built on slavery. People in Britain are shocked by this is because British slavery is something we don’t really talk about. We prefer to think of it as something that happened “over there.”

When he was elected president, Abraham Lincoln’s initial aim was to confine slavery to the southern states. Events overtook him but, after abolition, the American entertainment industry succeeded in placing the blame on this part of the country. Thanks, largely, to the proliferation of American books and films on the subject, people tend to have a stylised view of transatlantic slavery. The two enduring images are the slave ships and the cotton plantations of the American Deep South.

But this is like reading the first and last…

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