Impact case study database

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LBS research has enriched and transformed evidence-based public debate around Britain’s historic and ongoing debt to slavery. Changing the terms of that debate, LBS’s open access website and database have also expanded the range of its participants and audiences. By disrupting abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in 1833 as, respectively, the focal point and the end point of Britain’s relationship to Caribbean slavery, LBS has challenged dominant understandings of Britons’ longstanding commitment to liberal values such as racial equality. This work has encouraged a wide range of stakeholders to acknowledge slavery’s profound and enduring effects on modern and contemporary Britain. Working with media, policy-makers, cultural organisations, charities, educational professionals and students, LBS has stimulated new thinking about race, nation and inequality in Britain.

Raising awareness of Britain’s relationship to slavery: LBS’s award-winning website and underlying database ( R1) has been a powerful tool for research by, and engagement with, public stakeholders in the media, including social media. 1,759,811 website users in 224 countries or territories accessed this online resource between 1 August 2013 and 31 December 2020, an average of over 20,000 users per month ( A). Journalists, broadcasters and members of the public have extensively used ( R1) and ( R2) to inform, report and participate in public debates on slavery, wealth and race in Britain. Peaks in website use that follow specific current events and/or media publications that draw upon LBS research have repeatedly attested to LBS resources’ broader utility for enhancing public understanding of the past. In partnership with film-maker David Olusoga and the BBC, the LBS team made Britain’s Forgotten Slave-owners, a 2-part television programme first broadcast in 2015. Inspired by and based on LBS’s research in ( R1) and ( R2), this programme revealed to an initial audience of [TEXT REDACTED] how modern Britain was built on the profits of slavery. Its July 2015 broadcast led to a spike in LBS website engagement with 227,000 users accessing ( R1) that month (compared to 6,692 in June), demonstrating viewers’ active appetite for LBS research. The programme won the 2015 Royal Historical Society Public History Prize for Broadcasting and the 2016 Specialist Factual BAFTA award. The RHS judges commended the series for tackling “an extremely difficult subject in a measured way by showcasing new historical research,” noting that it “explains the complex economics of slavery and encourages viewers to take a better informed and more critical stance on current economic issues” ( A).

LBS’s role in engaging and informing public understanding of the past was especially significant during British debates about statues commemorating slave-traders and slave-owners and the wider international Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The LBS database ( R1) and television programme (featured on BBC iPlayer in July 2020 and still available) were major resources informing public discussions of Britain’s relationship to slavery. Users of ( R1) rose to 322,000 in June 2020 (compared to 24,000 in May). LBS findings were drawn on in social media, the press, and broadcasting to support arguments about individuals’ and institutions’ involvement in slavery and reveal how the legacies of slavery continue to underpin national and racial identities and experiences in Britain today. In the week following 7 June and the toppling in Bristol of the Victorian statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston, the biggest sources of traffic to ( R1) were the 74,589 referrals via Twitter and Facebook. Tweets highlighting the insights offered by the LBS database garnered substantial interactions and drove traffic to the site as the public were prompted to learn more. Booker Prize winning novelist Bernadine Evaristo shared the website and encouraged followers “To find out how slavery shaped Britain […]. Enter names & you get the FACTS of post-slavery compensation for many recognisable institutions/companies/ families who flourish today” (435 retweets, 766 likes). A London-based community organiser created a thread of tweets that drew directly upon, and linked to, ( R1) to highlight slave-ownership within the ancestry of the political establishment (over 6,200 retweets, 15,000 likes) ( B).

Nationally and internationally, journalists relied upon LBS research, especially ( R1), to inform their reports and interpretations of BLM. In Britain alone, 26 national newspaper articles used LBS research ( R1) between 7 June and 15 August 2020, including prominent articles in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mail online. The Guardian articles were shared by online users 23,761 times. Many articles that appeared in the national press, particularly in Scotland, cited LBS research: there were 27,007 referrals to the website ( R1) in these weeks. This period also saw at least 58 international news articles cite LBS research, including in Le Monde (France), the New York Times (USA), and Yomiuri Shimbun (the biggest selling newspaper in Japan). Two programmes on CBS TV and one on CNN Business featuring McClelland led to a spike in interest in ( R1) in the USA. In the week beginning 9 August, there were more users in the USA (7,111) than in Britain (6,002) – the first time in the project’s history that British users were outnumbered by those from elsewhere.

Reparation debates and policies: LBS has had a palpable impact on national and international debates around the role and responsibilities of intergovernmental organisations, states, financial institutions, and universities with respect to slavery and reparations. Internationally, its research has been central to the debate over reparations among the 15 Caribbean states and dependencies within CARICOM, an organisation promoting economic integration and cooperation. The sustained campaign for reparations led by Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Sir Hilary Beckles, publicly credited as “the chief spokesman of a global movement for racial justice” ( C), has drawn heavily on LBS work in mounting the case for reparations: in 2015 he “credited Draper’s research with shaping much of his own book [ Britain’s Black Debt],” which “lays out the Caribbean case for reparations” ( C). In 2018, the UN commissioned Draper as an author of ( R1) and ( R2) to write a report, Some Potential Lessons from the British Financial Sector's Role in Perpetuating and Ending Chattel Slavery ( D). This provided historical background for the Financial Sector Commission’s development in 2019 of an “Implementation Toolkit,” a set of practical tools and initiatives to accelerate action by the sector in combatting this modern USD150,000,000,000 industry affecting 40,300,000 people. In June 2020, the Bank of England apologised for the involvement of some of its past governors and directors in the slave trade, and pledged to remove all statues and paintings of them from public display in its headquarters. Reports of this decision, such as in the Financial Times (19 June 2020), explicitly linked LBS to the Bank’s decision. In 2020 Greene King, one of the largest of the UK’s pub chains and Lloyd's of London, the insurance firm, both committed to pay large sums to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities after their roles in the slave trade were highlighted by Daily Telegraph investigations using ( R1,R4). Responding to LBS research, five universities—Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent—have investigated their historical links with slavery, an imperative articulated in ( E). As The Economist reported in 2020, LBS research “has been critical in pushing institutions, in higher education and beyond, to look into how they benefited from slavery and the slave economy.” The University of Glasgow’s 2018 report, “Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow,” makes 37 references to ( R1). It resulted in the university’s 2019 commitment to establishing a Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research with the University of the West Indies, investing £20 million over the next 20 years ( E).

Impacts on Schools, Pupils and Teachers: LBS research has made a significant contribution to school-teaching through the development of new pedagogic materials, co-produced with pupils and teachers, and public engagement activities with UK archives, schools and charities. With Hackney Archives and two local schools, LBS implemented the Local Roots/Global Routes project in 2015, which facilitated the co-creation of a Key Stage 3 resource concerning the historic links between Hackney and transatlantic slavery. This was clearly a transformative experience for pupils of African-Caribbean heritage: one student told LBS that taking part “was for me mental reparations; it repaired me mentally.” In 2015 and 2016, LBS ran work experience weeks for twelve BAME pupils from City and Islington College. The students contributed to the LBS database and learned “how slavery was intertwined with the development of Britain as a nation and how its legacies…can be recognised today,” of which they had been previously unaware ( F).

LBS also contributed a section to the Runnymede Trust’s online “Our Migration Story” teaching and learning resource (launched in 2016), which showcases the often untold stories of the generations of migrants who came to and shaped the British Isles. OCR and AQA exam boards recommend “Our Migration Story” as a key resource for teaching GCSE history modules on migration, taken by a total of 11,615 students in 2019-20. The LBS page introduces Britain’s links to slavery and the African diaspora, using ( R1) to structure a student activity to facilitate discovering local connections to the slave trade and received 2,418 views in the impact period ( G). Collaborating with the Historical Association, LBS established and helped staff a Teacher Fellowship ( HATF) to train a cadre of schoolteachers able to inspire colleagues in their own disciplines. In April-July 2019, 17 UK schoolteachers participated in this professional development scheme. Using LBS research ( R1, R2), they explored how best to teach Britain's complex entanglement in slavery and abolition, and its legacies. Working with Draper and Donington, teachers developed new resources and lesson plans, as well as 14 working principles for future best practise when teaching this subject, which were adopted by the Historical Association in 2019 ( G). The benefit of this “transformative experience” extended beyond the workplace, “this Fellowship was a profoundly important part of my development, not just as a history teacher, but as a citizen of the United Kingdom, coming to terms with this country’s past” ( G).

Cultural institutions and curation: LBS has worked with major cultural entities to reframe and re-present the UK’s national narratives surrounding slavery. Many cultural and heritage organisations rely on Oxford University Press’s *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( ODNB)* as a key, authoritative reference tool for framing of the national story for public audiences. From 2016, ODNB collaborated with LBS to commission and publish 35 new entries for slave-owners (of which LBS members wrote 15) and to amend hundreds more to reflect the LBS data, changing and enlarging the national narrative to recognise Britain’s extended histories of slavery ( H). Informed by LBS research, Tate Britain, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery have begun a systematic and comprehensive accounting of the legacies of slave-ownership in their collections of British art. LBS searchable data (from R1) and collaboration were fundamental to each of these initiatives. Each of the galleries is identifying links between artists and works in their collections and slave-ownership in order to re-present the material in their public displays. At the Tate’s request, LBS developed a public statement on the connections of the Gallery to slavery, which was published on the Gallery’s website in 2019. The Head of Research at the Tate writes that LBS “has had a profound impact on Tate’s efforts to account for the legacies of slave-ownership both in relation to the national collection and the institution’s history” ( I). LBS has also had major impact on the work of both the National Trust for England & Wales and the National Trust for Scotland. The National Trust's September 2020 report on the links between colonialism, slavery and properties in its care cited LBS work ( R1) and ( R2) in its main text and in 29 endnotes, thanking the LBS team for their assistance in its acknowledgements. The National Trust for Scotland's work on addressing the legacy of slavery and empire in its properties amply registers the importance of LBS. The Project Leader for Facing Our Past states that “the real game-changer for all of us has been this amazing website called the Legacies of British Slave-ownership” ( J). Providing both high-calibre, open access data and scholarly expertise on histories of slavery, LBS research has provided cultural organisations and wider publics powerful new resources for navigating contested heritage debates and policies.