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.

Through analysing the composition of the founding shareholders in the West India and London Docks, this article explores the connections between the City of London and the slave economy on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade. It establishes that over one-third of docks investors were active in slave-trading, slave-ownership, or the shipping, trading, finance, and insurance of slave produce. It argues that the slave economy was neither dominant nor marginal, but instead was fully integrated into the City's commercial and financial structure, contributing materially alongside other key sectors to the foundations of the nineteenth-century City.T he nature and extent of Britain's 'debt to slavery' remains an historical problem with immediate and understandable resonance in contemporary society.The original debate over Williams's thesis on the paramount importance of slavery to Britain's economic transformation was conducted largely in terms of industrial re-investment of profits from the slave economy. 2 More recently, Inikori sought to reassert the centrality of Atlantic slavery to the industrial revolution within a model of economic development which foregrounds the multiplier effects of overseas trade and emphasizes the commercial revolution. 3 Inikori drew on a wide range of data and sources to argue that the Atlantic slave economy accounted for the preponderance of Britain's overseas trade, and was not just one determinant but the principal determinant of economic change and of the development of the commercial and financial infrastructure of eighteenth-century Britain.Inikori's exciting work has drawn criticism for its focus on the Atlantic at the expense of other international trades and its alleged neglect of technological change, but his claims for the dominance of slave-related activity within Britain's key manufacturing and service sectors have largely been accepted. 4 These claims are dramatic, and one important form of engagement with Inikori's overall 1 This article is based on research carried out at Birkbeck under the supervision of Michael Berlin. I would also like to thank Dr Tom Wareham of the Museum in Docklands (hereafter MD) for kindly making available to me his preliminary identification of 148 of the founding subscribers to the West India Dock Company, and Emma Draper for her help with the creation of the underlying database. 2 Williams, 'Golden age'; Drescher, 'Eric Williams'; Cateau and Carrington, Capitalism and slavery; Solow and Engerman, eds., British capitalism.3 Inikori, Africans. 4 In Inikori, Behrendt, Berg, Clarence-Smith, den Heijer, Hudson, Singleton, and Zahedieh, 'Roundtable', Berg's contribution (pp. 291-300) argues for a more global view of the sourcing of resources, and Singleton (pp. 319-24) puts more emphasis on the importance of India than the Atlantic for the British cotton industry; Clarence-Smith (pp. 300-5) takes issue with the neglect of technology. pays tribute to the robustness of Inikori's data. Zahedieh (pp. 325-9) questions Inikori's identification of th...

This article interrogates the notion of the fall of a single ''planter class'' in the British colonies and argues that in the new slave territories of British Guiana and Trinidad, the slave economy flourished between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in the 1830s. The wealth extracted in these colonies from the labor of enslaved people, especially in British Guiana, largely flowed to a group of absentee slave owners in Britain and created a new fraction of the planter class in the metropole, outside the conventional sphere of the established Jamaican planters. Using the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, appointed to oversee the distribution of £20 million in compensation to the slave owners under the Abolition Act of 1833, the article traces the dimensions of this grouping of new men, many of them concentrated in the mercantile elites of Glasgow and Liverpool. Such men had demonstrable political weight in Britain, and the article argues that only by acknowledging their role and influence can we make sense either of the structure of the emancipation settlement, which favored slave owners in the new territories over the old plantocracy, or, more profoundly, of the continued vigor of the West Indians in negotiating that settlement, a vigor which troubled Eric Williams, given his view that, by the 1830s, the West Indian planters were ''[a]n outworn interest whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective.''

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