Catherine Hall - A new conversation about the legacy of slavery

Catherine Hall, Emeritus Professor at University College London, argues that the legacy of slavery is more relevant than ever.

About Catherine Hall "I'm the chair of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership and Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London.

My research has been concerned with questions of Britain and its Empire. In particular, I focused on both the connected histories of Britain and Jamaica, and on the history of writing as central to the ways in which the story of Empire is told. In general, I've been preoccupied with trying to write a different story of the history of Empire."

Key Points

• The 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade sparked a new conversation in Britain about the legacies of slavery. • A ‘reparatory’ history is required if we are to properly understand the wrongs of the past and take responsibility for them in the present. • Race politics today cannot be understood outside the legacies of slavery and the legacies of Empire.

A new conversation about slavery

The 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade marked the whole question of the legacies of slavery and the importance of thinking about new ways of understanding that history. In the context of that bicentenary, Black activists, historians, writers and documentary makers, who had been thinking for a long time about the forgotten histories of slavery and the way in which the story of abolition had displaced the history of the violence, coercion and destruction associated with slavery and the British Empire, started what I think of as a national conversation about the slave trade and how it should be remembered.

Re-evaluating Britain’s role in abolition Should we be thankful and remember proudly how Britain had supposedly led the way (which, of course, it didn’t) with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807? Or is it more important to remember the whole history of slavery, and to try and bring that history back into view?

The way in which the history had been written from the time of the abolition of the slave trade onwards was in terms of abolition and emancipation, being part of the history of progress and the way in which Britain had led the world. There was the notion of the civilising humanitarian route that was Britain’s task in the world: to improve the rest of the world in the image of itself.

That’s how history has been understood. To unpick that history became a major task and has been taken up in so many different ways by writers, artists, historians, people making television and radio programmes and so on.