This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.

In discussions of British workingclass life between about 1850 and the 18705, most historians have agreed that there was a new tone and pattern evident after the crises of the 1830s and 1840s. The dominant figure in many accounts of this working class, as in so much contemporary social commentary and imagery, was that person who Thomas Wright in 1873 took to be the typification of the working class as a whole -'the working man'.' Many historians have followed Wright further in concentrating their attentions upon the 'representative artisan' as the working man par excellence. He was, thought Wright, someone who in times of anything like averagely brisk trade 'can command good work and good pay all the year round, has a comfortable home, saves money, provides through his benefit and trade clubs for the proverbial rainy day, is in his degree respected because self-respecting, and on the whole is a person rather to be envied than pitied'.2 And such a man is often taken to be at the centre of key developments in the working class in the period: the establishment of a more secure and visible trade unionism, albeit one confined to a minority of workers; the expansion of the resources and members of friendly and co-operative societies and other means of collective security; the gaining of 'citizenship' by a significant minority of working-class men in 1867; the new legitimacy of the working class and its institutions in both civil society and the state.3There have been considerable disagreements about how the changes in the post-1 850 working class may be described, explained and evaluated, as there have been also about the relationship between those changes and the evolution of the whole ~o c i e t y .~ Yet whatever can be learned from these, one of the most persistent absences in the historiography has been the realization that this was a gendered working class and that an adequate history will not be written until this is taken on. There has been important work by feminist historians and others on, among other things, post-Chartist politics, women's employment, marital, familial and sexual practices and beliefs, and the culture of respectability.' However, much mainstream

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