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TROUBLING MEMORIES: NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIES OF THE SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2011

Catherine Hall
Catherine Hall*
Affiliation:
THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK
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Abstract

This paper explores the memories and histories of the slave trade and slavery produced by three figures, all of whom were connected with the compensation awarded to slave owners by the British government in 1833. It argues that memories associated with slavery, of the Middle Passage and the plantations, were deeply troubling, easier to forget than remember. Enthusiasm for abolition, and the ending of ‘the stain’ upon the nation, provided a way of screening disturbing associations, partially forgetting a long history of British involvement in the slavery business. Yet remembering and forgetting are always interlinked as different genres of text reveal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 2011 , pp. 147 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2011

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References

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3 The Legacies of British Slave Ownership, based in the History Department at UCL, is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-062–23–1764). We are building a database which will be developed as a web-based encyclopaedia, tracking in as much detail as we can the c. 3,000 individuals in Britain who received compensation. This paragraph draws on our research findings to date.

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39 John Charlton, ‘Who Was John Graham-Clarke 1736–1818’, unpublished paper 2010. Thanks to John Charlton.

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48 Cora Kaplan argues that shifting the scene to US slavery allowed Barrett Browning to use elaborate, melodramatic and violent scenarios – gang rape and child murder – that she simply could not do in a West Indian setting without implicating her family. ‘“‘I am black”: Aesthetics, Race and Politics in Women's Anti-Slavery Writing from Phyllis Wheatley to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, unpublished paper, 2011.

49 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’, in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, introduced by Cora Kaplan (1978), 392–402.

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57 Marks, The Family of the Barrett, 628.

58 This discussion draws on my forthcoming book Macaulay and Son: Writing Home, Nation and Empire (2012).

59 Proceedings of the First Anniversary Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society Held at the Freemasons Hall, 25 June 1824 (1824), 71–6.

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70 Ibid., 222.

71 TBM to HM, 29 July 1833, Pinney, ed., Letters, ii, 283.

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73 Ibid., 124.

74 Ibid., 126.

75 The Trevelyan claims are discussed in John Charlton, Hidden Chains. The Slavery Business and North East England (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008), 126–34.

76 As Richard Huzzey convincingly argues, both protectionists and free traders were against slavery, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal 53, 2 (2010), 359–79.

77 TBM, Speeches, 259.

78 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (1997).

79 TBM, Speeches, 265.

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81 TBM to Napier, 19 Oct. 1842, Pinney, ed., Letters, iv, 61.

82 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993).