Staff and students are invited to the annual Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies John Rule Lecture with Catherine Hall, one of the leading historians of slavery and abolition, at 18:00, Wednesday 25 February in Lecture Theatre B, Avenue Campus.
Plantation slavery in the Caribbean was central to the eighteenth-century British empire. During the nineteenth century the British dismantled this system, abolishing first the slave trade (in 1807) and then slavery itself (during the 1830s). Popular history has tended to focus on these abolitions, rather than on slavery and its various legacies, which include the economic gains that Britain made from slave colonies.
Assumptions about racial difference, which underpinned slavery, did not disappear with the ending of the institution. Catherine’s talk about the ‘stories the slave-owners told’ will explore the ways that slavery and its ending have been remembered, and why this matters for us.
The Rule Lecture, organised annually by the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, is named for John Rule (1944-2011), a pioneering labour historian and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University.
You can find more information about the event here.