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The Slavery Business and the Making of “Race” in Britain and the Caribbean

This paper discusses the work of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project, which has focused on the significance of British slave owners between the mid-eighteenth century and the time of emancipation (1834) as a way of countering the erasure of the slavery business in popular memory. Slave owners were granted 20 million pounds in 1834 in compensation for the loss of “their property.” The documentation of this has made it possible to create a prosopography, and further research has been done on the economic, political, and cultural activities of those slave owners who were resident in Britain. Case studies of particular families can enrich this “big data.” The Long family is the focus of the second part of the paper. The activities of the three branches of the family, planters in Jamaica, merchants in London, and landowners in Suffolk, are sketched alongside a discussion of the different ways in which they contributed to “race making” in both metropole and colony. The hope is that such work can contribute to a changed understanding of Britain’s history and its relation to empire.