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The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS) is an academic centre based in the Department of History, University College London.

• Context
• CSLBS team and associate staff
• Logo

The CSLBS expanded from the acclaimed Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project that started in 2009. Since then, the pioneering Legacies of British Slavery Database has seen over two million unique visitors from around the world. We are now the UK’s foremost public history Centre for research on the history of British Slavery and its aftermath. We aim to broaden public knowledge and deepen discussions in Britain and the Caribbean through our public-facing research and reparative history work. Contact the team at cslbs@ucl.ac.uk.

Context

The CSLBS’s major contribution to public scholarship is the pioneering . The LBS Database has been the foundation for a new understanding of the extent of slavery’s impact on the development of modern Britain. It is a free and publicly accessible resource used by well over two million visitors from senior academics to genealogical investigators, students, and members of the public curious about their history.

The work of the CSLBS has been featured in television documentaries and in museums, media coverage, workshops, libraries, and other public spaces. Our team members have served as advisors on film, radio, and television productions that cover British slavery and its legacies. Among our collaborators areÌýthe National Museum of Jamaica, Royal Museums Greenwich, the Science and Industry Museum (Manchester), the World Reimagined, and BBC Radio 4. Our partnership work enables us to engage with other institutions working in the same space, and to extend and enrich public discourse.

Staff

Professor Matthew J. Smith
Director

Matthew J. Smith is Professor of Caribbean History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. He joined Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê in 2020 after many years working as a historian of the Caribbean at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. His research is pan-Caribbean in scope with special interest in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica. He is the author ofÌýLiberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After EmancipationÌý(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a comparative study which explored the post-slavery intersections between the two Caribbean neighbours with a focus on overlapping narratives and shared migration histories. His earlier book,ÌýRed and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957Ìý(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) studied the activities of radical political groups that emerged after the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and prior to the establishment of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1957. He is co-editor with Diana Paton of theÌýJamaica Reader: History, Culture, PoliticsÌý(Duke University Press, 2021).

Professor Catherine Hall (retired)
Chair

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê. Since the 1990s her work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire:ÌýCivilising SubjectsÌý(2002) explored the entangled yet forgotten connections between Birmingham and Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century.ÌýMacaulay and SonÌý(2012) focused on the relationship between Zachary Macaulay, a leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas Babington Macaulay, whoseÌýHistory of EnglandÌýerased the Caribbean and slavery. Since 2009, she has acted as the Principal Investigator on two phases of the ESRC/AHRC project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ seeking to put slavery back into British history. In 2014, the team published the collaborative volumeÌýLegacies of British Slave-ownership. Her current research centres on Edward Long and his family, leading slave-owners in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesÌýand powerful figures in the defence of the slave trade and slavery. In 2021, Catherine was awarded the highly prestigious Leverhulme Medal and Prize by the British Academy in recognition of the impact of her work across modern and contemporary British history, particularly in the fields of class, gender, empire and postcolonial history. Read more on theÌý.

Dr Matthew Stallard
Research Associate

Matthew StallardÌýhas been a Research Associate at the CSLBS since January 2020 with a focus on database development and innovative digital techniques to reconstruct personal and community histories of enslavement as part of the Valuable LivesÌý±è°ù´ÇÂá±ð³¦³Ù. He has also worked as project manager on many of the Centre’s public history collaborations, including co-leading the Ìý±è°ù´ÇÂá±ð³¦³Ù tracing connections between global narratives of resistance, solidarity, colonization and slavery and Manchester’s industrial heritage. He has published extensively on environment, colonization, class, and race in Victorian public discourse and post-industrial regional identity in his Ìýresearch project. He has conducted public and community history projects, engagement events, and oral history research across three continents and worked as a contributor and advisor on the Guardian’s series.ÌýHe completed his PhD in American Studies at the University of Manchester in 2017.

Dr Jess Hannah
Project Manager

Jess Hannah is the custodian of the LBS database. She received a PhD in English Literature from Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê in 2022, and in the same year undertook an archival research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, during which she focused on Samuel Selvon’s novelsÌýThe Housing LarkÌý(1965) andÌýMoses AscendingÌý(1975). Also in 2022, Jess was a researcher at the Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, where her project investigated current academic work across two Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê faculties in relation to the Sarah Parker Remond Centre’s topics of focus. At the CSLBS, she also assists with research and activities relating to slavery’s legacies in Britain and the Caribbean.

Keith McClelland
Digital Humanities Specialist

Keith McClelland is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê. After many years teaching in other universities, Keith joined Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê in 2006. He was a co-founder of the original ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ project (2009-2012), Co-Director of the ‘Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership 1763-1833’ project (2013-2015), and Acting Director of the CSLBS from September 2019-May 2020. He has researched and published particularly on the history of gender, work and politics among the nineteenth-century British working class and co-edited, with Catherine Hall,ÌýRace, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750 to the PresentÌý(2010). He also co-wrote, with Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall,ÌýDefining the Victorian NationÌý(2000), and with Sonya Rose, 'Citizenship and Empire, 1867-1928' inÌýAt Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (2006). He is now retired but continues to work with the CSLBS, especially on maintaining the database and website.

CSLBS Associates

Isaac Crichlow

Isaac CrichlowÌýis a PhD Candidate in the Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Department of History and Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.ÌýHe is particularly interested in perspectives that connect the cultures of the Caribbean to those of West Africa.ÌýHe is currently researching the African fighting techniques and skills used by the West India regiments in the 18th century. Isaac has worked on several of CSLBS's own projects and collaborations, including The World Reimagined.

Holly French

Holly French is a PhD CandidateÌýin the Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Department of History and Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. SheÌýholds a BA (Hons) in History from Simon Fraser University and an MA in History from Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê (2021). Hailing from a small town near Vancouver, Canada, located on the unceded traditional territory of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Musqueam, and Semiahmoo First Nations, her research interests include late twentieth-century British decolonisation andÌýcross-Commonwealth relations, particularly relating to the themes of immigration, identity, Indigeneity, and imperial responsibility in the British metropole. She has previouslyÌýworked on theÌýGlobal Threads project with the CSLBS and the Science and Industry Museum,ÌýManchester.Ìý

Rohan Shah

Rohan Shah holds an MA in History from Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê and isÌýa History teacher at a school in London. He isÌýa Research Assistant on the CSLBS project ‘Making Policy to Transform Inequality: A Pathway to Introducing Black Innovation History on National Curricula.'

Ashley Jones

Ashley Jones holds an MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is an Assistant Archaeologist at the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and Secretary of theÌýArchaeological Society of Jamaica. SheÌýisÌýa Research Assistant on the CSLBS project ‘Making Policy to Transform Inequality: A Pathway to Introducing Black Innovation History on National Curricula.'

Logo

The CSLBSÌýlogo was designed by Stephanie Channer, a Jamaican graphic designer, to whom we are very grateful.ÌýIts design invokes different meanings of the legacies of the era of British slavery. The sealing wax motif calls to mind the quintessential iconography of authority common to official documents generated in the seat of empire. Documents bearing a seal carried legitimacy and power. Seals affixed to official statements not only illustrated dominance, when used to close an envelope, they ensured the security of the contents, like a secret kept away from public view. For this reason they were much used in documents in which property, including property in persons, was purchased or bequeathed. This image is contrasted with the central feature of the logo, the nineteenth century Adinkra symbol,ÌýOwia Kokroko, of West Africa. The symbol means vitality, renewal, and the greatness of the sun. African iconography was an important element of the culture of the enslaved in the British Caribbean and is today a visual feature recalled across the region. Adinkra symbols are used in jewellery, clothing, and carry their own power of connection between generations divided by time, history, and space. By merging these two disparate visuals from the opposing sides of the slavery business, the logo invites thought on the complexities of a difficult history of subjugation, control, endurance, resistance, blood, and survival that continues to shape relations in our world.

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