Event Details

As part of Black History Month, Litfest has collaborated with LU School of Global affairs and Lancaster Black History Group to bring you this special event on campus relating to a new database about Britain’s link to the transatlantic slavery – the Register of British Slave Traders .

Join Prof Will Pettigrew and Dr Nick Radburn in a panel chaired by Dr Sunita Abraham, to explore how Atlantic slavery shaped Lancashire and Britain, drawing on new findings from the Register of British Slave Traders.

From 2021 Will Pettigrew and Nick Radburn led the huge research project on ‘The Register of British Slave-traders’ at Lancaster University (with colleagues from UCL and Manchester). Now, five years later, they present the distillation of their findings in a completely accessible database. They will talk about their research and how what they found has changed their idea of British history. Using newly assembled data, Nick Radburn will demonstrate that, far from having little impact on the development of Lancashire, as had been previously thought, the entire historic county was shaped by Atlantic slavery, and that by 1800 the county had become the ‘slaving capital of the world’. Will Pettigrew will discuss what the database tells us about the national picture and will trace the wealth of slave-traders in the Register into various organisations around the country.