Catherine Hall gave this year's Birmingham Centre for Modern and Contemporary History Annual Lecture on Tuesday 30 April 2013.
Her major research project ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ set out to examine the impact of slavery in the formation of modern Britain. It documented the nineteenth-century Britons who either owned slaves or benefited financially from slavery and explored the different legacies of slave-ownership, using a census of slave-owners created in the 1830s by the Slave Compensation Commission to manage the distribution of the then-enormous sum of £20m paid as compensation to slave-owners on the abolition of colonial slavery.
The project created a publicly-accessible online Encyclopedia of British Slave-Owners, which will act as a hub for regional efforts to show how communities in Britain were linked to slavery.