Slavery & Abolition

Liverpool’s Slave Trade Legacy

Once the slave-trading capital of Britain, the memory of Britain’s empire of enslavement remains visible in Liverpool’s public buildings and streets.

Slaves and Indians

Europeans did not introduce slavery to North America – although they did change the way it was practised.

Beyond Profit

The Dutch role in the slave trade cannot be dismissed as a matter of numbers.

Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens and National Museums, Liverpool/International Slavery Museum. Installation view at Spike Island, Bristol. Photography Stuart Whipps

Lubaina Himid: Naming the Un-Named

Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid’s artworks fill in the gaps that history leaves behind.

HMS London chasing a slaving dhow near Zanzibar. Watercolour by Rev Robert O’Donelan Ross-Lewin, 1876-77. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

Kroomen: Black Slaver Hunters

Fiercely independent, highly skilled sailors, the Kroomen of Sierra Leone forged an alliance with the Royal Navy to rid the African coasts of slavers.

African-American suffragist Nannie Helen Burroughs, far left, at the Banner State Woman’s National Baptist Convention in 1915

Slavery, Women’s Suffrage and the American Civil War

As calls for women’s suffrage gained momentum following the Civil War, an uncomfortable racial faultline emerged dividing white suffragists from their African-American sisters.

Runaway Reading

How did literacy encourage slave rebelliousness after the American War of Independence?

A Society Built On Slavery

The extent to which Britons were involved in slave-ownership has been laid bare by a project based at University College London. Katie Donington shows how one family profited.