 Thank you. I'll now pass the chair over to Amara Thornton who's going to carry on with the good works this afternoon. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much Martin and I'm delighted to be here this afternoon to chair this section of the event. I'm a historian of archaeology and my research really centres on the history of archaeology and archaeological collections histories in various parts of the British Empire and beyond. And I'm really pleased to be able to chair this section of the event which focuses on connections between Britain and the Caribbean, colonialism and the legacies and representation of empire in the UK's heritage landscape. Just as a reminder there will be a Q&A session at the end of each paper. I'm sure you're well acquainted with the format and having had two papers already but if anyone would like to ask a question please type it into the chat function on Zoom and I'll ask them at the end. Also if you're tweeting about the event the hashtag is intertwined histories so feel free to use that. And it's my absolute privilege to introduce Catherine Hall to give the first paper. Catherine Hall is an emeritus professor of history and chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Her work has focused on the relation between the Britain and its empire and includes the books at Civilizing Subjects, Macaulay and Sun and Legacies of British Slave Ownerships. Between 2009 and 2015 she was the principal investigator on the ESRC AHRC Project Legacies of British Slave Ownership which seeks to put slavery back into British history and has a wonderful website. Her new book will be Making Racial Capitalism, Edward Bong's History of Jamaica. So Catherine please the floor is yours. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Okay I think I'm supposed to be there now but I'm speaking but I've still got a mara on my screen. What's everybody else got on their screen? Hello? Hi Catherine. Sorry about a power point on your... No I'm not using a power point I'm just going to speak. Okay I can see you so maybe... Can other people see me? Maybe it's okay. Yes so all attendees will just see you Catherine so please. Okay fine so I decided I know you've had lots of pictures already and I thought in this brief contribution that I can make this afternoon I wouldn't use a power point so I hope you'll be prepared to just listen to me. It's great pleasure to be here thank you for the invitation and I think what I've got to say follows on there are just so many connections between what I have to say what Agal has said and what Richard's been saying about Liverpool. So but I come from the university sector rather than the museum sector but a part of the university that's always been very preoccupied with public education. So the project that I've been involved with for the last 10 years and more the legacies of British slave ownership and the legacies of slavery is deeply committed to both doing research and making that research publicly available and our website which Amara mentioned has already over two million visitors so I do recommend it to you if you've never looked at it. Well when working on issues of diversity inclusion and social justice in the heritage sector it's very clear that this means working on questions of race and I want to draw attention today in this brief contribution to the importance of the long history of Britain and its empire and the ways in which this deeply affected British domestic life. The understanding once was that empire had a huge effect on the colonies but not on Britain itself. Now we know thanks to much historical work which has been done the ways in which empire impacted on British politics and British people and how Britain's benefit from empire not least in the notion that white people were entitled to rule over colonised subjects most of whom were brown and black. So racial thinking and racial hierarchies became part of British society centuries ago but this is not a past but has disappeared it lives on into the present as we've seen so dramatically in the recent period with the Windrush scandal and then even more recently the scale of minority ethnic deaths associated with COVID. So this raises the question who can really be Britain who can really be British who can really belong and I wonder whether I should say also who can really be English in the context of today's English, Scottish and Welsh strong national identities and the potential breakup of the UK which we're facing. But I want to make three points my focus is on Jamaica because that's the area I've been working on for a long time. So my first point is the long history of entanglement between Britain and Jamaica and when I use the term entanglement I want to emphasise that that's it's not really quite the right word because they are indeed very entangled histories but always in the context of a set of power relations associated with colonialism and now with the period after colonialism. So always a relation of power and therefore entanglements where one side has a great deal more power than the other. So the connection between Britain and Jamaica started on the plantations in the mid 17th century and I'm going to briefly talk about that and secondly by how at the time of emancipation in 1834 many Britain's were involved with the slavery business in its many dimensions not least of course through the consumption of sugar which had become a basic part of the British diet particularly through the sweet cup of tea. So an increasing proportion of the population were implicated in in numerous different different ways in the slavery business. But my third point is that emancipation didn't bring freedom to the enslaved rather it brought new forms of labour and political control justified by the need for the notion of civilising people of a different colour and this history unfortunately has continued right into the 20th century and I can't focus on now beyond pointing to it but of course there is absolutely masses of work telling us about that in so many different ways. Well first then my short account of the conquest of Jamaica. So the connection between Britain and Jamaica goes back to 1655 when Oliver Cromwell wanted to tackle the power of the Spanish empire and its domination of the western world. By the 1650s the king Charles I had been executed Scotland and Ireland had been subjugated by Cromwell and he was in command and he thought the time had come to tackle Spanish and of course Catholic domination of the Atlantic. So the intention of the expedition he sent out was to take Hispaniola from the Spanish but that failed and Jamaica became a kind of consolation prize. It took five years to defeat the Spanish but by the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660 the English were in control of the island and the civil government was established. The first colonists in Jamaica were the officers and soldiers who'd survived many of course had died and the officers were given land. Charles II and his brother the Duke of York were very keen on the idea of developing the empire and extending crown control over it to improve their revenues. Their deep involvement in the Royal African Company and the provision of African captives to the Caribbean has been well documented. Barbados had been experimenting with the sugar from the 1620s and the growing market for sugar in Europe made it clear to the colonists that their future lay with a sugar colony which is what they set about establishing in Jamaica. So Jamaica was to be organised in the interests of the mother country in the expectation of an expansion of British wealth and power and that was what the colonists would contribute to in the process of making their own fortunes. The indigenous population in Jamaica the Taino people had scarcely survived by the time of English settlement so the major problem that the colonists faced was how to provide labour for the plantations. Barbadian planters had additionally had initially made much use of convicts, prisoners from the civil war, white indentured servants but their mortality rates in the protropics were very high and it soon became apparent that African labour survived much better hence the increasing demand for captives from Africa. It was then necessary to define them differently from white servants and this was the basis of the organisation of the slave codes which began from the late 17th century making a clear distinction between people who were described as white with a capital W and people who were described as negro with a capital N. So the colonists preferred to use the terminology of white and negro that white and negro meant free and unfree and I think that's one of the sources of the ways in which Englishmen came to think of themselves as white. People often say now that you know white is a kind of it's not a category that's there people don't think of it but they certainly did think about it in the 17th century and it was used to define their difference from black people and to assert their freedom. So what happened in Jamaica in the late 17th century was the formation of a racial order which was organised through property basically it was white people who owned property it was white people who had political rights the freeborn Englishmen they called themselves they established racial hierarchies on the plantations with white overseers black men were trained to be skilled and the women were for the most part were the enslaved field laborers in the law there was a completely different system a legal system for those who were white and those who were enslaved and crucially important in relation to reproduction the babies of enslaved women belonged to their owner not to the woman who had born the child and feminist historians have worked on this a lot in recent years establishing how important it is to think of this terrible wound and harm associated with slavery of the stealing basically of babies from their mothers then there were the cultural distinctions who was defined as savage and that was of course Africans and who was defined as civilized the whites well this history I have to be said have to say the early history of colonialism and Jamaica is only one example is not what most kids have learned in school what tends to be taught in schools when questions of race are raised at all is that the British abolished slavery but it's part of our great history and race is taught through the US and civil rights so it's as if race and slavery don't belong in Britain it's not part of our domestic world and our project has tried to tackle that whole issue to tackle the issue of how slavery does belong to Britain it's not something that we can say it didn't happen here it didn't happen here domestically on a great scale as it did in the Americas but of course it brought great wealth to Britain and power and ideas about race and difference from the 17th century onwards so 10 years ago we established the project at university college the legacies of British slave ownership and we wanted to challenge this narrative of the non-existence of race in Britain and the generous act of abolition and demonstrate Britain's own historic involvement in slavery so our initial research concerned the 20 million pounds which was paid in compensation to the slave owners when their human property enslaved men and women across the British Caribbean and Mauritius and the Cape were emancipated in 1834 this compensation is 20 million was paid by British taxpayers in order to get the consent of the slave owners who were a very influential political lobby in Britain to this to emancipation going through parliament so in our database we've identified the 46 000 claims that were made on that 20 million pounds and very importantly nearly half that money went to 4 000 people who were resident in Britain so these were the resident slave owners or people who were benefiting from slavery in Britain and they were living all over the country particularly high proportion in relation to the population in Scotland 25% of the people who got compensation were women and these people compensated were paid a proportion of what was deemed to be the market value of the 300 000 enslaved people who had supposedly been freed each slave owner had to apply for compensation with details of the enslaved people they owned and very detailed records were kept and that's made it possible they're all in the National Archive that's made it possible for us to do the research and put all this material into our database so at that moment people who had been bought and sold were now for the last time priced as commodities and the money went to the to the slave owners even though the whole basis of the campaign against slavery was that it was immoral to hold people as property so we investigated as far as we could what they did with the money they invested it in a whole range of economic and cultural activities from building railways and developing merchant banks to buying artworks some of which are now in our national collections building castles refurbishing country houses some of which of course the national trust now own and have been the subject of great rouse recently after the national trust's report on their connections that the connections that their property has with slavery and empire same with English heritage so these slave owners made a significant contribution to the building of modern Britain through their involvement in the economy and they were also active politically in defending West Indian interests after emancipation and particularly in the development of indenture which was the new system which replaced slavery it was a form of unfree labor but not chattel slavery which was crucial to the expansion of sugar production in Guyana and Trinidad and brought in hundreds of thousands of salvation people and that's the origins of the very mixed populations in Guyana and Trinidad it's not just slavery it's also indenture the slave owners also wrote histories and fictions and poetry which re-articulated racial hierarchies for the post-slavery period black people they argued were still in need civilization and must be subject to white control they also invested their capital both human and mobile in the development of the new colonies of white settlement in Australia New Zealand and Canada so we now have very interesting collaborative projects going on particularly in Australia about the legacies of compensation and slave ownership in different colonies in Australia emancipated men and women meanwhile struggled with their varied conditions of limited freedom our subsequent research has focused on the britains who owned property and land and people in the caribbean from the mid 18th century to 1833 opening up the long histories of white families who lived off the exploitation of enslaved people over many generations the transmission of wealth from the caribbean to britain was an important source for the building of an infrastructure which was crucial to the development of industrial capitalism as eric williams in his famous book capitalism slavery wrote many years ago so our aim has been to provide unequivocal evidence hard evidence which cannot be denied of the ways in which white britains have benefited from slavery and how the practices of racial injustice are historically embedded in british society and culture and then of course to move into how the past lives on in the present how these racial hierarchies are still constantly reconfigured and reworked our database has provided masses of evidence for genealogists local historians amateur historians academic historians school kids teachers all sorts and being particularly interesting i think the people who have been tracing their ancestors and who have often discovered very shocking things they may have thought they were purely black and they discovered they descended from white people slave owners or they may think they were purely white and they discover those mixed heritage in their families so the entanglement across uh sexuality across the sexual economy of the caribbean has been a very very important aspect of the upsetting i'm glad to say of any simple division between those who are black and those who are white none of this stopped after emancipation the heavy involvement in what we call the slavery business all the other ways in which people in britain were involved in provisioning the plantations in building the ships in providing the financial uh credit dozens and dozens and dozens of ways thousands of people were involved in the wider business of the slavery uh of slavery uh making nails making fetters making uh refining the sugar you know on and on and on we can go about the ways in which the slavery economy run into uh the british domestic economy so none of that stopped after emancipation when british capital moved into cotton and fed the massive expansion of us slavery in the south and the extensive use as i've mentioned of indentured labor on the tea plantations in india and the sugar and coffee plantations in the caribbean so the long history of how that goes on i can't talk about here but i could give you many many examples of this continuing entanglement and inequality across the centuries from the 17th century right into the 21st century and our end times so let me leave it there and give time for some discussion thank you so much Catherine that was great and speaking of someone who's got partially caribbean heritage it was particularly meaningful but um we have a question um to start us off and Abigail wants to know if you can say something about um with the legacies of british slave ownership database how many um of the people who were compensated were of mixed race or can you make that determination sorry how many of them were how many of the um the compensation uh recipients were of mixed race or can you make that well that's uh it's an interesting one um it's very very difficult to say that because the records don't usually record color but what we know is that i mean our focus uh up to now has been very much on the british slave owners because we wanted to demonstrate british involvement now of course there were masses of people in the caribbean who got slave compensation too and very interestingly in the caribbean nearly 40 nearly 45 percent of the people who received compensation were women and we are while we're certain that a large number of them were people of mixed heritage because they were the women who were the illegitimate children of white men and enslaved women they were often freed by their fathers or manipulated at some point and they became a very important presence particularly in urban life in the caribbean so in Jamaica for example both in the two main towns spanish town in kingston there are large numbers of independent brown women acting as hoteliers as brothel brothel keepers as retailers as nurses like mary c Cole for example um and owning um without any difficulty owning enslaved people themselves and some of the most fascinating findings actually have been about the ways in which in the caribbean uh the children who'd been freed of um by a white father might own their half brothers and sisters themselves so you've got these extraordinary kinship relations where some are free and some are unfree but literally within the same households and trying to think about what those quite what those personal relationships must have been like of course this is where the fiction writers um can do such wonderful work and you know the thing about this whole subject is that i mean the combination of the work that visual artists do that filmmakers do that writers do that dancers do the musicians do i mean we have such a wealth of different ways of thinking about this period of history as well as you know um very concrete empirical things like our database if i if i shared my screen now i could just show you the um the database in case people aren't familiar with it please do if i can i've also put a link to it in the chat uh it's not that oh i'm i'm afraid i may be very involved in the making of a database but my capacity to be technologically savvy is extremely limited i'm not going to mess about trying to do it um well i've put i've put a link to it in the chat thank you so much and access it there but we've got time for one more question if we're really fast and um that is um we have laura who's who's asking who paid for the compensation was the taxpayer funded and if so how long did it take for the debt to be paid well actually there's there's quite a lot of argument about this the money was um was raised by the government to assume bonds and the money came through the Rothschilds we do know that but interestingly all the detailed documentation about that has been lost so people would really really like to know more about what happened because different groups made bids but it went to the Rothschild so it took years and years and years and decades and decades and centuries to pay it off but what's complicated about that is that the way in which the finance was organized all kinds of different uh elements got packaged into the interest on those loans over years so um i mean there is an argument that which may be right that it wasn't finally paid off until 2015 what is absolutely clear is that British taxpayers paid for it because particularly in the 19th century the the interest and loans were paid for by taxes particularly on sugar um which was of course an absolutely crucial part of working class diet Sidney Mintz in his famous book sugar and slavery sweetness and sugar uh talks about how you know the tragedy really of enslaved populations producing sugar which then enabled white populations the proletarian population in Britain to survive on very poor diet because sugar gave naked strength so the numbers of people lived on tea which of course comes from India tea sugar and bread in the 19th century deeply shocking one of the aspects of white poverty which links us back to this question that Adele raised at the beginning this afternoon the intimate connections between these different histories of black and white people thank you so much and Catherine it's been an absolute privilege to have you and talk today thank you very much for your contribution thank you