National biographies and transnational lives: Tracing connections between slavery and settler colonialism

Abstract

The Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project has helped establish—with unprecedented precision and depth—the ways in which colonial slavery shaped modern Britain. In its original iteration, the project drew on British government records to produce a comprehensive database of the compensation paid to individual slave-owners under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. That database provided biographical sketches of several thousand of the individuals who—successfully or unsuccessfully—claimed government compensation, as well as listing details of the c. 47,000 compensation awards themselves. Drawing on the LBS database, more recent research (including the contributions to this volume)..