Birmingham Centre for Modern & Contemporary History annual lecture
- Location
- G15, Main Lecture Theatre, Muirhead Tower, University of Birmingham
- Dates
- Tuesday 30 April 2013 (17:30-18:30)
- Contact
FREE EVENT: To register, contact Charlotte Heap on c.heap@bham.ac.uk or call 0121 414 2787.
The Birmingham Centre for Modern & Contemporary History Annual Lecture
Reconfiguring race after slavery: the stories the slave-owners told
Catherine Hall (UCL)
The prestigious Birmingham Centre for Modern and Contemporary History annual lecture series is delighted to welcome Catherine Hall, Professor of History at University College London, and one of the foremost historians of modern Britain and its empire.
The men and women of Birmingham have featured heavily in Professor Hall’s work on Britain’s social and cultural history, including her landmark study Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850.
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, to be launched in February 2013, which will act as a hub for regional efforts to show how communities in Britain were linked to slavery.
Join Catherine Hall as she examines the roles and influence of these slave-owners within British society in their lifetimes, and trace their major legacies after their deaths.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.