LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY GROUP

This new library collection has emerged out of a collaboration between  Lancaster Black History Community Group and Lancaster University. The collection seeks to provide local people, schools, and community groups with the opportunity to loan books and other materials about Lancaster’s historical role as the fourth largest Trans-Atlantic slave-trading port in the 18th century, its ties to the larger ‘slavery business’ through trade in plantation commodities such as sugar, mahogany and cotton, and the role of prominent local families in Imperial trade and plunder This Glocal collection (global and local), will enrich and deepen our understanding of how the city of Lancaster’s history is entangled with histories of people and places in West Africa, the Americas, West-indies, and East-Indies, and was shaped by slavery, colonialism, and Empire. 

In launching this collection, we also want to acknowledge the history of the land beneath our feet. Lancaster University Bailrigg Campus was built on land purchased and enclosed in the early 19th century by a man called Joshua Hinde (1722-1812). Part of a Lancastrian slave-trading and plantation owning dynasty, Joshua sold cargoes of enslaved people landed by English slave ships in the West-Indies, was the manager on a sugar plantation in Grenada before he retired back to Lancaster and used some of his ill-gotten wealth to turn Bailrigg into a private agricultural estate.  By the end of the 19th century the Bailrigg estate was in the ownership of local industrialists, the Storey family. In 1961 Lancaster City Council purchased the estate from the then owner, Barton Towneley, to offer it as a site that would entice the University Grants Committee to locate a university at Lancaster. While the University has no direct connection the Hinde family and has never benefitted from this ill-gotten wealth, the history of the land on which it is built is emblematic of the city of Lancaster’s connections to Transatlantic and Plantation Slavery. 

To find out how to get a free community lending card click here.

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AUTHORS

Professor Imogen Tyler, Department of Sociology 

Marion McClintock, Honorary Archivist 

Joshua Sendall, Research and Scholarly Communications Manager