>> Professor Catherine Hall:
[music] History is usually written by the winners,
not by the losers, and the way in which the history
of slavery has been represented, for the most part,
is as abolition, the triumph of abolition.
So we're trying to think again about that way
of writing the history and put the whole slavery business
and the wealth it produced and the people who were involved
in it back into British history.
If you read what we call against the grain of some
of these histories, you can find the mediated voices
of the enslaved.
So an interesting example of this would be the way
in which a very famous narrative of a black enslaved woman,
Mary Prince, was produced by the abolitionists as a form
of propaganda in 1831.
This woman was living for some of this time
in the area absolutely around Bloomsbury where her owner,
John Adams Wood, had a house.
Although it's apparently in her voice telling her history,
she tells it to a woman who transcribes it,
and it's then edited by the secretary
of the anti-slavery society.
So it's made appropriate for an abolitionist audience.
It's telling a particular, it's a particular way
of telling the narrative, which can give us some access
to the experience of the enslaved woman, but only some.
We can't take it as simply authentic.
That this is what Mary Prince said or thought.
Trying to read between the lines is a very important way
of trying to get access to black people's experience,
but this is work that it's very, very important to do,
and particularly important for women since, you know,
they're even less recorded.
In 1833, when slavery was abolished in British Caribbean
and in Mauritius and the Cape, 20 million pounds was paid
in compensation to the slave owners because they were seen
as having lost what was called their property, the enslaved men
and women who they had bought or who had been born
in captivity on their estates.
And of that 20 million pounds, which was paid
out of taxpayers' money, nearly ten million stayed in Britain.
So there were a very substantial number of slave owners
in Britain who made substantial claims on that money and,
therefore, had a large cash influx at that time.
The poet Elizabeth Barrett,
who became Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was the daughter
of a very significant Jamaican slave owner, and she had very,
very complicated feelings about slavery and the slave ownership,
and she was not sympathetic to slavery,
but she was very well aware that the family money came
from slavery, and, indeed, she inherited money on that basis.
And she wrote a poem in the 1840's which she wrote, in fact,
for the American abolitionists called "The Runaway Slave
at Pilgrim's Point", and in that poem,
she tries to imagine being black.
So there are many powerful lines where in the poem, in the voice
of an enslaved woman, "I am black, I am black."
And this is a woman who is raped by her white master,
bares a child, cannot bear the fact
that her child is the product of rape, kills the child,
and calls on the enslaved to rebel.
So it's a very, very dramatic poem.
Yet this woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you know,
who imagines all this, her own life is made comfortable
financially by her family wealth, and she was not opposed
at all to the principle of compensation.
She thought it was right
that the slave owners were compensated
because property was property, and if you lose property,
it should be compensated.
So that just gives us one of those complicated glimpses
into what it meant to be totally implicated
in the slavery business and
yet to have very ambivalent feelings about it.
It's been hard for Britons to think about the extent
to which slavery has shaped our history,
and there are many physical remnants of that.
The country houses that were built on slaving wealth,
the art collections that were accumulated by slave owners,
the ways in which sugar became an absolute essential part
of the diet of the entire British population
from the 18th century onwards,
the ways in which British financial
and commercial institutions have actually been built
on Atlantic slave trade and slavery, and, of course,
that's a long time ago, but those are the roots.
And then there's the political legacies and the kinds
of hierarchies of racism.
The ways in which contemporary racial thought has many
inflexions from this long, long history.
It's those legacies that we're pursuing
through the 19th century, through our work
on the compensation records, and where we want people to think
about that because of the present, because of the present,
and the ways in which these formations have been part
of what it is to be a modern Britain.
[ Music ]