Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery

Description

The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS) was been established at UCL with the generous support of the Hutchins Center at Harvard. CSLBS builds on two earlier projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009-2012), and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 (2013-2015).

Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and society still lives with its legacies. Slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain, and research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present. With its current major project, "Valuable Lives", CSLBS is now moving in the direction of more focused research on the lives of enslaved people in the Caribbean. This is a natural development from the work on slave-owners and estates and an exciting demonstration of its commitment to the study of the multiple legacies of slavery in the British imperial world.