Troubling Memories: Nineteenth-Century Histories of the Slave Trade and Slavery

Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London will explore how the slave trade and slavery were remembered and forgotten in mid-nineteenth century Britain.

From the moment of the abolition of the slave trade public remembrance was focused on abolition, complicity in the trade and slavery were for the most part erased.  Once the enslaved had been freed the stain on the nation was seen to have gone. The payment of £20m in compensation to the slave owners in 1833 was a recognition by the state that property, albeit in persons, was property. The shifting thinking about slavery and memory will be explored through key figures, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great historian of England.