Price
- Free
Length
- 90
Presented By
- LITFEST
VENUE: Combined Events Spaces, Lancaster University Library
Launch of The Register of British Slave Traders
With Sunita Abraham
From 2021 Will Pettigrew and Nick Radburn led the huge research project on ‘The Register of British Slave-traders’ at Lancaster University (with colleagues from UCL and Manchester). Now, five years later, they present the distillation of their findings in a completely accessible database called The Register of British Slave Traders, and in an event chaired by Sunita Abraham of Lancaster Black History Group they talk about their findings and how what they found has changed their idea of British history.
Using newly assembled data from the research project, Nick Radburn will demonstrate that, far from having little impact on the development of Lancashire, as had been previously thought, the entire historic county of Lancashire, from Liverpool to the South Lakes, was shaped by Atlantic slavery, and that by 1800 the county had become the ‘slaving capital of the world'.
Will Pettigrew will talk about what the new database tells us about the national picture and will trace the wealth of slave-traders in the Register into various organisations around the country.
Dr Nick Radburn is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500–1800 at Lancaster University and author of Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Will Pettigrew is Professor of Global British History at King’s College London, where he is leading a European-wide research project to identify and study the people who financed the transatlantic slave trade. He is the author of Britain’s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History (2026) and series consultant of the two-part BBC2 TV documentary Finding Britain’s Slave Traders which will be broadcast this autumn.
Dr Sunita Abraham is a lecturer in decolonisation at Lancaster University and is a board member of Lancaster Black History Group.
AGE GUIDANCE: 16+
