Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, en partenariat avec l’Institute of Historical Research (Londres), AGORA (Cergy Pontoise), le CREA (Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense), CREW (Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle), le CRULH (Lorraine), le LARCA (Paris-Diderot), la Maison française d’Oxford et, pour cette séance, le Centre d’histoire du XIXe siècle (Paris 1-Paris 4)
 Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e , salle D040

Projection du documentaire « Britain’s Forgotten Slave-Owners » (David Olusoga 2015), suivie à 19h d’un débat avec Nicholas Draper et Keith McClelland, co-responsables du projet « Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” (University College London), et Myriam Cottias (CNRS)

Ce documentaire est fondé sur les recherches du projet collectif « Legacies of British slave-ownership », basé à University College London.
L’ouvrage de Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Nick Draper, Kate Donington et Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2014), présente des travaux issus de ce projet.

Le documentaire sera projeté en version anglaise non sous-titrée. En raison du plan Vigipirate, l’inscription est obligatoire : fbensimon chez free.fr

« In 1834 Britain abolished slavery, a defining and celebrated moment in our national history. What has been largely forgotten is that abolition came at a price. The government of the day took the extraordinary step of compensating the slave owners for loss of their ‘property’, as Britain’s 46,000 slave owners were paid £17bn in today’s money, whilst the slaves received nothing.
For nearly 200 years, the meticulous records that detail this forgotten story have lain in the archives virtually unexamined - until now. In an exclusive partnership with University College London, historian David Olusoga uncovers Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Forensically examining the compensation records, he discovers the surprising range of people who owned slaves and the sheer scale of the slavery business.
What the records reveal is that the slave owners were not just the super-rich. There were widows, clergymen and shopkeepers ; ordinary members of the middle-classes who exploited slave-labour in distant lands. Yet many of them never looked a slave in the eye or experienced the brutal realities of plantation life.
In Barbados, David traces how Britain’s slave economy emerged in the 17th century from just a handful of pioneering plantation owners. As David explores the systemic violence of slavery, in Jamaica he is introduced to some of the brutal tools used to terrorise the slaves and reads from the sadistic diaries of a notorious British slave owner. Elsewhere, on a visit to the spectacularly opulent Harewood House in Yorkshire, he glimpses how the slave owners’ wealth seeped into every corner of Britain.
Finally, amongst the vast slave registers that record all 800,000 men, women and children in British hands at the point of abolition, David counts the tragic human cost of this chapter in our nation’s history. » (BBC presentation) »

Les enregistrements de la plupart des communications sont disponibles sur le site du séminaire et sur celui de l’université de Londres