Nicholas Draper

The City of London and Slavery: Evidence from the First Dock Companies, 1795-1800

Through analysing the composition of the founding shareholders in the West India and London Docks, this article explores the connections between the City of London and the slave economy on the eve of the abolition of the slave trade. It establishes that over one-third of docks investors were active in slave-trading, slave-ownership, or the shipping, trading, finance, and insurance of slave produce. It argues that the slave economy was neither dominant nor marginal, but instead was fully integrated into the Citys commercial and financial structure, contributing materially alongside other key sectors to the foundations of the nineteenth-century City.

‘Dependent on precarious subsistences’: Ireland's Slave-owners at the Time of Emancipation

When the United Kingdom Parliament abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, it provided £20 million to compensate the slave-owners. At least half of the compensation payments for the Caribbean were made to absentee owners and creditors living in Britain and Ireland. While slave-ownership was only one way in which the Atlantic slave-economy came home to Ireland, the records of such payments, now digitised and available online at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/, allow analysis of the structure of slave-ownership in Ireland at the end of the colonial slave-system. In contrast to England and, especially, to Scotland, slave-owners of Irish origin showed a much lower propensity to return home as absentees. Nevertheless, both in Ireland and within the Irish diaspora in London, Liverpool and Glasgow are striking instances of slave-owners whose legacies helped shape Irelands commercial, cultural and physical fabric in the early nineteenth century.