John Rule Memorial Lecture Event

'Whose memories?  The stories the slave-owners told'

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 Hall is one of the leading historians of slavery and abolition, and her 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.