Research into former slave-owners

The University College London’s ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ database is now searchable at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. Comprising details of slave-owners at the time slavery ended in the British Empire of the time, 1833, the project covers slave-owners in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape, as well as in Britain, in the Encylopedia of British Slave-Owners.

To compensate the owners for their consequent loss of income £20 million were granted by Parliament to be paid by British tax payers to former slave-owners. To implement this scheme, the Slave Compensation Commission was established, and the records that were consequently gathered provide details of the claimants (ie former slave-owners) and of the compensation they were paid, along with some details of the former slaves (notably their monetary value – dependent on age, gender, geographical location, skill). Approximately half of the £20 million compensation fund was paid to slave-owners living in Britain, and it is this group of people that the ‘Legacies of British slave-ownership’ project has initially concentrated on, though research is now going further back in time, and is also looking at wider implications on Britain’s wealth through the subsequent decades.

The project has collated records from many sources to create the Encylopedia of British Slave-Owners, which can now be searched at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search using an extensive range of search fields. As family historians, this is perhaps one database where we would be relieved to receive ‘No Results’ found.

Corrections to listings in the encyclopedia are welcomed, as are original documents that you might hold and are willing to donate to the collection.