Here are 100 books that Legacies of British Slave-Ownership fans have personally recommended if you like
Legacies of British Slave-Ownership.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am a feminist author, having written about women’s history for nearly half a century. One phrase, "Dig where you stand," truly inspired me. Living in Oldham, I began researching the history of the radical suffragists across industrial Lancashire. Later, moving across the Pennines to Halifax, I gradually learned of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall—and became gripped by her diaries! Meanwhile, I worked in Adult Education at Leeds University & was a Reader in Gender History.
In 1973, this book broke daring new ground, inspiring me to become a feminist historian. Effortlessly, Sheila introduced readers to an extraordinary range of feminists—from C17th Mary Astell to Stella Browne, the C20th birth control campaigner.
No worries if you’ve not heard of these women: by the end, you’ll be as entranced as I was!
In this classic study of women in Britain from the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century to the 1930s, Sheila Rowbotham shows how class and sex, work and the family, personal life and social pressures have shaped and hindered women's struggles for equality.
She explores the different effects that changes in the process of production have on middle-class and working-class women; why birth control and the organisation of working women have been perceived as threatening to traditional male control of the family; how paid work and work in the home are intricately related and determine the social valuation of women…
I am a feminist author, having written about women’s history for nearly half a century. One phrase, "Dig where you stand," truly inspired me. Living in Oldham, I began researching the history of the radical suffragists across industrial Lancashire. Later, moving across the Pennines to Halifax, I gradually learned of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall—and became gripped by her diaries! Meanwhile, I worked in Adult Education at Leeds University & was a Reader in Gender History.
The story of a courageous working-class woman growing up in the 1870s near Manchester.
Young Hannah, with just a meagre "fortnight’s schooling," had everything against her. But she never stayed down for long: she joined the new Independent Labour Party (ILP), becoming a suffragette. Then, disillusioned with the Pankhursts, Hannah joined the Women’s Freedom League. Later, she became not only a councillor but also a magistrate.
She has an inspiring story of never giving up and always keeping her goals in sight.
“My readers may not find it a very thrilling story, but I hope it will reveal to them the early dreams, secret hopes and half-realized ambitions of one very ordinary woman...Looking back on my own life, I feel my greatest enemy has been the cooking stove — a sort of tyrant who has kept me in subjection.”
'The Hard Way Up' is a unique and absorbing social document — a first-hand account of the life and struggles of a working-class woman who became a leader of the Suffragette and Labour movements in the north of England.
I am a feminist author, having written about women’s history for nearly half a century. One phrase, "Dig where you stand," truly inspired me. Living in Oldham, I began researching the history of the radical suffragists across industrial Lancashire. Later, moving across the Pennines to Halifax, I gradually learned of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall—and became gripped by her diaries! Meanwhile, I worked in Adult Education at Leeds University & was a Reader in Gender History.
This book introduced young Anne's diaries to book-buyers for the first time. You’ll enjoy reading her recording in secret code (and in intimate detail) her affairs with other women.
"I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love but theirs." These are probably Anne’s words that will stay with you longest.
Discover the extraordinary diaries of the real Anne Lister: the inspiration for Gentleman Jack and Emma Donoghue's new novel Learned By Heart
'Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing' SARAH WATERS
'[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON
'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history' EMMA DONOGHUE
When this volume of Anne Lister's diaries was first published in 1988, it was hailed as a vital piece of lost lesbian history. The editor, Helena Whitbread, had spent years painstakingly researching and…
I am a feminist author, having written about women’s history for nearly half a century. One phrase, "Dig where you stand," truly inspired me. Living in Oldham, I began researching the history of the radical suffragists across industrial Lancashire. Later, moving across the Pennines to Halifax, I gradually learned of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall—and became gripped by her diaries! Meanwhile, I worked in Adult Education at Leeds University & was a Reader in Gender History.
This book tells the tale of the 1913 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society (NUWSS) pilgrimage. I’ve always been irked by how the suffragettes and their arson campaign captured the headlines.
So here’s the other story. Suffragist pilgrims walked from all corners to London: down from Carlisle, up from Land’s End. This booktakes you with them, mile by mile—all for Votes for Women! Would you have taken part in 1913?
FEATURED ON BBC RADIO 4's START THE WEEK and BBC RADIO 3's FREE THINKING
Set against the colourful background of the entire campaign for women to win the vote, Hearts and Minds tells the remarkable and inspiring story of the suffragists' march on London.
1913: the last long summer before the war. The country is gripped by suffragette fever. These impassioned crusaders have their admirers; some agree with their aims if not their forceful methods, while others are aghast at the thought of giving any female a vote.
Meanwhile, hundreds of women are stepping out on to the streets of…
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
We tend to think of social relationships in societies like early eighteenth-century Jamaica in male terms – masters and enslaved men. Jamaica was a very masculine place with a distinct masculine culture based around sexual access to women and a vibrant economy. But white women were also there and tended to flourish – working with the slave system rather than against it. This book is testimony to gender history and to the diversity of experiences in colonial Jamaica.
Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.
Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves…
I was in my 40s before I began exploring the topic of the British Empire. It came after I realised it explained so much about me (my Sikh identity, the emigration of my parents, my education) and so much about my country (its politics, psychology, wealth…) and yet I knew very little. It turned out that millions of people feel the same way… and I hope I provide an accessible introduction and summary of the massive topic.
Coming in at just over 250 pages of generously spaced text, this is not the longest book on the subject. Nor is it the most famous.
But in efficiently telling the stories of three men – John Newton, the captain of a slave ship, who later became a preacher, Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner who made a small fortune from a plantation in Jamaica, and the black slave Olaudah Equiano.
Walvin deftly reveals how slavery, like so many aspects of the empire, has been erased from the British consciousness and conscience.
There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable. By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement. James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807.
John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood's…
I'm a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic world who realized years ago that Britain, like the United States, hadn't yet fully acknowledged or come to terms with its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and African slavery and its global afterlives. Although awareness of Britain's role in the African slave trade and Atlantic slavery has begun to feature more prominently in national consciousness, particularly due to the work of The Movement for Black Lives and calls for an overdue reckoning with the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racial injustice, much work remains to be done. Using the archival record--as flawed as it may be--to piece together Britain's imperial past, confront calculated historical silences, and track the full extent of British participation in the enslavement of millions of Africans will help to ensure that the histories and voices of enslaved people and their descendants aren't distorted or forgotten by current and future generations.
Based on painstaking analysis of the surviving records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, this book provides a comprehensive look at British slave-ownership in 1833, when the British government abolished colonial slavery and paid £20 million to slave-owners as compensation for their loss of human property. After emancipation the enslaved received nothing. Moreover, they were forced to remain on their plantations and continue to labor for their former masters under the apprenticeship system, which was not abolished until 1838. Draper concludes that slave-owning was widespread in metropolitan Britain and that many individuals, businesses, and institutions derived wealth from African slavery.
This book demonstrates that there is indeed a strong case for reparations and it is best read as a companion piece to University College London’s Legacies of British Slaveryproject, an extensive database tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the development of modern Britain.
When colonial slavery was abolished in 1833 the British government paid GBP20 million to slave-owners as compensation: the enslaved received nothing. Drawing on the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, which represent a complete census of slave-ownership, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of absentee slave-ownership and its impact on British society. Moving away from the historiographical tradition of isolated case studies, it reveals the extent of slave-ownership among metropolitan elites, and identifies concentrations of both rentier and mercantile slave-holders, tracing their influence in local and national politics, in business and in institutions such…
I’m a teacher, a student, and a reader by trade (that is, a university professor), and I spend most of my time trying to understand social and political power: why some people have it, and others don’t, how it circulates and changes (gradually or suddenly), why it sometimes oppresses us and sometimes liberates, how it can be created and destroyed. I mostly do this by reading and teaching the history of political theory, which I am lucky enough to do at McGill University, in conversation and cooperation with some wonderful colleagues.
I am blown away by the scope, detail, and rigor of Patterson’s scholarship.
I think it is easy to imagine that slavery is a simple thing, treating a person like property and forcing them to work. But Patterson showed me that slavery has always been an entire system of meaning, ritual, and social dynamics.
I especially appreciate that Patterson demonstrates the ultimate perversity of the delusion that you could master other people.
Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association
In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.
Praise for the previous edition:
"Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and…
I’ve been fascinated by the Atlantic slave trade since 2007, when I first studied the business papers of a Liverpool merchant who had enslaved over a hundred thousand people. I was immediately struck by the coldness of the merchant’s accounts. I was also drawn to the ways in which the merchant’s profit-motivated decisions shaped the forced migrations and experiences of their victims. I have subsequently extended my research to examine slave traders across the vastness of the Atlantic World. I'm also interested in the ways that the slave trade’s history continues to shape the modern world, from the making of uneven patterns of global economic development to such diverse areas as the financing of popular music.
As I extended my research beyond British merchants to examine slave traders elsewhere in the Atlantic World, I noticed that there has been surprisingly little written on the men who sold Africans arriving aboard the ships in the Americas.
Katie Donington’s examination of the Hibberts, perhaps the largest slave-trading family in the British Americas, is, therefore, a must-read for anyone wanting to know who drove the traffic. By studying the different members of the Hibbert clan on either side of the Atlantic, Donington demonstrates the centrality of women, both free and enslaved, to slaving merchants’ businesses.
She also reveals the paradoxical ways in which familial connections between merchants were crucial to the smooth functioning of the slave trade—a business premised on sundering family ties between enslaved people.
Moving between Britain and Jamaica The bonds of family reconstructs the world of commerce, consumption and cultivation sustained through an extended engagement with the business of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was both shaping of and shaped by the dynamic networks of family that established Britain's Caribbean empire. Tracing the activities of a single extended family - the Hibberts - this book explores how slavery impacted on the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain. It is a history of trade, colonisation, enrichment and the tangled web of relations that gave meaning to the transatlantic world. The Hibberts's trans-generational story imbricates…
I’m a legal historian with a particular interest in eighteenth-century Britain and the United States. My research has investigated the history of arbitration, historical connections between law and politics, and changing attitudes to the rule of law. Since 2018, I’ve been a professor at Notre Dame Law School, where I teach courses in legal history, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and the rule of law.
The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.
Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.
In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award Finalist for the Cundill Prize
A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.
