Seeking Freedom : 18th Century Black Lives in Northern England
This KS2 Education pack (free to download using the link below) has been developed by members of Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG). It supports our work on the Facing the Past : Black Lancastrians Exhibition at Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster and builds upon the Facing the Past educational resource pack ‘Lancaster’s Slavery Business : The Transatlantic Slave & West Indies Trades’ written by Geraldine Onek which is available to download below. Full colour hard copies of this pack are available to purchase at the Judges’ Lodgings Museum shop.
Lancaster’ Slavery Business: The Slave Trade and West-Indies Trade. A Teaching Resource for Primary Schools by Geraldine Onek.
This teaching pack (free to download below) for Primary Schools was written by Geraldine Onek, a primary school teacher, and co-founder of Lancaster Black History Group, it was edited by Lynda Jackson (Lancaster Museums) and Melinda Elder (Historian) and designed by Jack Knight. This resource is particularly aimed at pupils in upper Key Stage 2 (9-11), and we are delighted it is now being used by over 30 primary schools in our district. Thank you to all the project partners, and Arts Council England who funded this project. Watch this space for future LBH schools and educational resources.
OTHER Resources
Browse out list of resources below. This is not an exhaustive list but some recommendations collated by our team. Many of these resources can now be loaned in hard copy to the local community from Lancaster University as part of a ‘Glocal Collection’ and community lending card system which emerged out of a collaboration between LBH and Lancaster University Library. To find out how to get a free community lending card click here.
Navigate resources using the below contents:
All items marked with * have Lancaster and local area specific content.
Reading List
Anderson, J. 2015 Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Harvard University Press.
*Bernier, C.-M., Bernier, C.-M., Rice, A., Durkin, H., Himid, L., 2019. Inside the invisible: memorialising slavery and freedom in the life and works of Lubaina Himid, Liverpool studies in international slavery. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
Baucom, I., 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Duke University Press. Chicago.
Dabydeen, D., 2011. The Black Figure in 18th-century Art.
*David, Rob and Winstanley, M., 2013. The West Indies and the Arctic in the Age of Sail; voyages of Abram, 1806-62 (Lancaster University, CNWRS/RHC). [A study of a Lancaster ship owned by Burrow and Mason, Lancaster merchants, and a planter, Abram C Hill, on Tortola, which sailed between Lancaster and the Tortola, and later became a whaler].
Devine, T. (Ed.), 2015. Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
*Duggan, M., 2013. Sugar for the house: a history of early sugar refining in North West England.
*Elder, M., 2007. The Liverpool Slave Trade, Lancaster and Its Environs, in: David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, Anthony Tibbles (Eds.), Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, pp. 118–137.
*Elder, M., 1992. The slave trade and the economic development of eighteenth- century Lancaster. Ryburn Pub, Krumlin, Halifax [England].
Eltis, D., Richardson, D., 2015. Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade.
Gerzina, G., 2020. Britain’s black past.
Gerzina, G., 1995. Black England: Life before Emancipation. John Murray, London.
Gilroy, P., 2002. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Routledge, London, New York.
Hall, C., Draper, N., MacClelland, K., Donington, K., Lang, R., 2016. Legacies of British slave-ownership: colonial slavery and the formation of Victorian Britain.
*Howson, G., The Making of Lancaster: people, places and war, 1789-1815 (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2008).
*Huddleston, J., 2010. And the Children’s Teeth are Set on Edge: Adam Hodgson & The Razing of Caton Chapel, A Tale of Slavery and Abolition in a Lancashire Village
Hurston, Z.N., 2018. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave. Harper Collins, London.
*Ingram, K. E. “Furniture and the Plantation: Further Light on the West Indian Trade of an English Furniture Firm in the Eighteenth Century.” Furniture History 28 (1992): 42-97. [including some records of ships used to export Gillows furniture].
Johnson, J.F., 1843. Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. John Snow, London.
Mouser, B. “Iles de Los as Bulking Center in the Slave Trade, 1750-1800,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire 313 (1996): 77–91.
Olusoga, D., 2018. Black and British: a Forgotten History. Palgrave.
Olusoga, D., 2015. The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed. The Guardian.
Pinckard, G., 1806. Notes on the West Indies: Written During the Expedition Under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby. Hurst, Rees and Orme, London, 3 volumes.
Pleece, W., 2018. Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland. BHP Comics, Glasgow. [graphic novel]
Rediker, M., 2008. The slave ship: a human history. John Murray, London.
*Rice, A., 2009. ‘Revealing Histories, Dialogising Collections: Museums and Galleries in North West England Commemorating the Abolition of the Slave Trade’. Slavery & Abolition 30, 291–309.
*Rice, A., 2007a. ‘Naming the money and unveiling the crime: contemporary British artists and the memorialization of slavery and abolition’. Patterns of Prejudice 41, 321–343.
Rice, A., 2007b. ‘The Cotton that Connects, The Cloth That Binds: Manchester’s civil war, Abe’s statue, and Lubaina Himid’s transnational polemic’. Atlantic Studies 4, 285–303.
Rice, A., 2004. ‘Remembering iconic, marginalised and forgotten presences: Local, national and transnational memorial sites in the black Atlantic’. Current Writing 16, 71–92.
Rice, A., Kardux, J.C., 2012a. ‘Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes’. Atlantic Studies 9, 245–272.
*Rice, A.J., 2012. ‘Creating memorials, building identities: politics of memory in the Black Atlantic’.
Rice, A.J., 2003. Radical narratives of the Black Atlantic. Continuum, London ; New York.
*Richardson, D., Tibbles, A., Schwarz, S., 2010. Liverpool and transatlantic slavery. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
*Roscoe, Philip. 2020. ‘White Markets, Black Markets‘ [On the racialized structures of finance and history of stock markets – including Zong massacre and family connections to Liverpool/Lancaster slave traders, this is a podcast and blog/transcript]
Sandhu, S., 2011. The First Black Britons. BBC History.
*Smartt, D., 2008. Ship shape. Peepal Tree, Leeds. [Poems about Lancaster and Slavery]
*Schofield, M. 1946 An Economic History of Lancaster 1680-1860 vol. 1 (Lancaster Historical Association, 1946).
*Schofield, M. 1976. ‘The slave trade from Lancashire ports outside Liverpool, 1750-90’. Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire¸vol. 26, 30-72.
Schofield M. and Richardson, D, 1992 ‘Whitehaven and the eighteenth-century slave trade’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, vol.92, 184-204
*Stuart, S. Gillows of Lancaster, 1730-1850 (Woodbridge, 2008), 2 volumes
Tattersfield, N. 1998. The Forgotten Trade: Comprising the Log of the Daniel and Henry of 1700 and Accounts from the Minor Ports of England, 1698-1725. [Focuses on Dartmouth, but has brief mention of Lancaster, and more on Whitehaven. By drawing on an original log book and other contemporary historical source material, this book offers particualr insights into the sheer complexity, time, labour and risks involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade for opportunistic merchants. Should be read alongside Rediker’s The Slave Ship”].
Tibbles, A., 2018. Liverpool and the slave trade.
Trouillot, M. R., 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, Boston.
*Tyler, I., 2020. Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality. Zed Books, Limited, London.
Walvin, J., 2007. A short history of slavery. Penguin, London.
Walvin, J., 2001. Black ivory: a history of British slavery, 2nd ed. ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass. USA.
* Walvin, J. 2017 Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits
*White, A., 2003. Lancaster: a history. Phillimore, Chichester, West Sussex, England.
Williams, E.E., 1994. Capitalism & slavery. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Databases
*Legacies of British Slave-ownership, UCL https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
plus Guidance from LBS website on what sorts of people received compensation
*Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk
*Slave Voyages Database https://www.slavevoyages.org
3-D rendering of a Slave Ship https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/ship#slave-
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/3d-slave-ship-model-brings-a-harrowing-story-to-life
*Black Abolitionist UK Speaking Locations http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/Map:Abolitionists/
Museums, Newspaper stories and more
*The Last Slave Ship Built in Lancaster https://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/the-last-slave-ship-built-in-lancaster/
*Lancaster and the Slave Trade http://collections.lancsmuseums.gov.uk/narratives/narrative.php?irn=43
*Lancaster Slave Trade and Fair Trade Trail Map http://www.globallink.org.uk/downloads/online-resources/towntrail_lowres.pdf (this is about to be updated, July 2020, and the new trail features stories of black agency and black lives in the city – link coming soon and the new map can be picked up for free from Maritime Museum and the Priory)
*Bringing to life Lancaster’s Georgian boom and rich maritime heritage through locational audio dramas and community engagement, Port Stories gathered award-winning writers, actors, celebrated historians and passionate Lancastrians to animate the dramas behind the architecture.
*Nick Lakin, (2020) ‘What next? Lancaster’s slave trade past in the spotlight again as calls are made to re-name streets and create a new memorial’, Lancaster Guardian, https://www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/uk-news/what-next-lancasters-slave-trade-past-spotlight-again-calls-are-made-re-name-streets-and-create-new-memorial-2881308
*Lancaster Slave Trade and the Quakers, http://www.documentingdissent.org.uk/lancaster-quakers-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/
*Mike Hill, (2020) Lost story of Preston’s slave traders, Lancashire Evening Post, https://www.lep.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/lost-story-prestons-slave-traders-2879257
*Online Teaching pack ‘“the abominable trade: Cumbria’s’ Connections to the History and Legacy of Slavery ” https://cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/542/795/41053132443.PDF
*‘Slavery in the North of England’ Melinda Elder, OpenLearn https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/heritage/slavery-and-the-north-england
*Cumbria and the Slave Trade sheet https://cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/542/796/41381124341.PDF
How Much Did Manchester Profit From Slavery? – a partnership project with eight Manchester museums http://www.revealinghistories.org.uk/home.html
The Life of James Johnson https://galleryoldham.org.uk/is-this-james-johnson/
*Abolished? Lancashire Museums marking 200 years of the abolition of the Slave Trade, Lancashire Museums, 2007, http://www.antislavery.ac.uk/items/show/505
*Handlist 69: Sources for Black and Asian history, Lancashire Archives, https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/media/52101/Handlist-69-Black-and-Asian-Studies.pdf
The Black Presence in Britain https://blackpresence.co.uk
National Archives Black Presence 1500- 1850 https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/index.htm
*Lubaina Himid (Turner Prize Winning Artist who has worked extensively on Lancaster and its connections to slavery) Making Histories Visible,
Lubaina Himid “Its nice that’ https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/lubaina-himid-modern-art-oxford-spike-island-nottingham-contemporary-300117
*Lubaina Himid Swallow Hard, the Lancaster Dinner Service
*Kevin Dalton Johnson’s ‘Captured Africans’ memorial on St George’s Quay,
Lives Remembered: Slaves in the 1700s and 1800s, Historic England,
Elder and ‘The Lady’s Box – a twelfth share in one ship‘ [on Gillow’s Lady’s Box]
LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY GROUP 