Douglas Hamilton

Representing Slavery in British Museums: The Challenges of 2007

The bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 2007 was marked by an extraordinary array of commemorations across the United Kingdom. Exhibitions sprang up from Scotland to southwest England, and in often in places not traditionally associated with the slave trade. For university academics, the slave trade, slavery and their abolition have, of course, been at the heart of decades of detailed and groundbreaking research. Until comparatively recently, however, these issues had not been regarded as central to the work of museums and galleries. A corollary of museums’ increasing engagement with these issues was a growing interest by slavery scholars in the work of museums, both as advisers to exhibitions and as commentators in the increasingly fertile field of public history.1 2007, then, was not just about commemorating the bicentenary, but fostering a much closer dialogue between academics, museums and their audiences. This dialogue, however, should not imply that there was consensus; indeed, it is clear that representing slavery was about finding acceptable compromises between competing voices and interests.

‘A most active, enterprising officer’: Captain John Perkins, the Royal Navy and the boundaries of slavery and liberty in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT John Perkins was the most senior black officer in the Royal Navy during the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He rose through the ranks from a carpenter’s enslaved servant in 1759 to post-captain in 1800, and went on to be one of the very first British officials to land in newly independent Haiti in 1804. His career as a spy, gun-runner, naval officer and land owner was one of almost implausible adventure and speaks to the capacity of the maritime service to subvert race and slavery in the Caribbean. His very uniqueness, however, highlights the profound challenges for slaves and ex-slaves in trying to remake themselves as free people.

Settler society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776

in the introduction. Here the editors identify government shipping policies and shipping company strategies as the two potential explanatory candidates for the differing record of the Nordic countries. Swedish government policies hampered the competitiveness of its fleets, while Norwegian and Danish shipping benefited from the adoption of supportive maritime policies. Nevertheless, as they point out, public policy is not sufficient in itself to account for the different performance of these three countries’ shipping industries: if it were so, Norway would have prospered as much as Denmark. Corporate strategy was therefore the key factor in determining success or failure, with a premium on innovation as a response to changing market conditions. But if choosing to carry on as usual was a definite path to failure, creative innovation was a risky necessity, so the most enterprising did not always come out on top. For much of the last 50 years, as this study amply demonstrates, the Nordic experience proved a rough passage.