All nations prefer to celebrate their achievements and forget the more shameful aspects of their history. For this reason, Britain long glorified its 1833 abolition of slavery, while brushing over its long history as the world’s leading slave-trading nation.
This began to change in the 1990s when descendants of the enslaved demanded acknowledgement of their ancestors’ experience. In response historians like Catherine Hall fostered a new approach to Britain’s imperial history, and in the process explored how an empire built on slavery shaped Britain as well as its colonies. In 2013 Hall and her colleagues had launched a database within the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, based at the University College London, that documented important aspects of Britain’s slaving history. This revealed details of slave-owners who received financial compensation for the loss of their human ‘property’ after abolition. Mapping the vast sums awarded to British investors in slavery prompted immediate questions about where the wealth, people and ideologies generated from within the slavery economy went next. Our research reveals that some of those profits came to Australia and New Zealand.
Australian links to slavery
It has been easy for most Australian and New Zealand historians to regard the Atlantic slave economy as operating separately from our national pasts. Exceptions to this general pattern include the work of pioneering labour historians such as the late Kay Saunders, whose doctoral research examined similarities between Caribbean plantations and the Queensland sugar industry. She showed that there were profound structural commonalities shared by these contexts.
Over the last decade our research collaboration with scholars across Australia and in Britain has excavated links between Britain’s slave system and the Australasian settler colonies established in the era of slavery abolition. This work has shown that the imperial reorganisation of industrial, mercantile and financial capital precipitated by abolition fuelled investment and settler colonialism in the new colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Australasian expansion during the 1830s was not coincidental with abolition but was both enabled by and benefitted from it.
Financial, familial and cultural ties between these two global regions were extensive. Many examples are presented in our new edited collection, Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand. This is the 200th volume in the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series.
Developing a multidirectional model of transnational and global interconnections, our research explores the movements of people and ideologies, as well as goods and capital. It reveals how economic questions are entwined with cultural histories in current scholarship on imperialism. Significantly, our new volume recognises the importance of Truth Telling, by placing Australian histories of colonial invasion and exploitation into a longer historical trajectory of exploitation of labour and land, including the slave trade.
Many of our contributors used biographical methods to illustrate the interconnected global processes involved. Some focused on individual life stories that show mobility, (re)investment, and the application of practices from the Caribbean. Others used collective biography to explore broader themes of governance and Empire. For example, two-thirds of Australia’s 69 pre-Federation governors had substantial personal or professional links to slavery. Zoë’s cohort study of these governors alerted us to the importance of West African, as well as Caribbean, experiences among the men governing colonial Australia.
Telling their stories
There is also powerful evidence of formerly enslaved people’s seeking new lives in the Australasian colonies.
William Hickman, for example, was an enslaved ‘man of colour’ born in Jamaica around 1800. He came to Western Australia’s Swan River in 1829, as an indentured servant to the Colonial Secretary, Peter Nicholas Broun. After his arrival, Hickman was arrested for a series of thefts, including of food and clothing intended as ‘presents for a native child’ for whom he clearly felt sympathy. Sadly, he died aged 50, with no known family.
These structural and personal histories show that slavery did not end in Britain’s empire with abolition. Some beneficiaries of slavery compensation and the broader Atlantic slave economy were able to (re)invest in the new Australasian colonies and maintain or increase their wealth, often by acquiring vast tracts of First Nations Country for pastoralism or agriculture. Trans-Atlantic slavery profits enabled enduring colonial privilege and wealth in Australia.
Ideas about race forged in slavery also pervaded Australia’s colonisation and fostered the mistreatment of First Nations peoples forced into domestic servitude, exploitative pastoral work and the hazardous pearling industry. South Sea Islanders were often coerced into taking up unfair indenture contracts on Queensland’s sugar plantations.
Many First Nations Australians know of the enslavement of their ancestors. These include the Badimia sisters, Carol and Julie Dowling, who, respectively, contributed the foreword and cover portrait to our collection. They remember their great-great-grandmother Melbin, enslaved by colonists as a domestic labourer and paraded in Britain during the 1870s.
Research into the Australasian links to slavery and wealth generated from post-abolition compensation continues. There is new work focusing on the colonies of South Australia and Victoria where wealth from slavery was invested from the 1830s onwards. As Angela McCarthy and Angela Wanhalla’s chapter on New Zealand in our new book reveals, there’s more to be done on other British colonies too. Many more individuals and groups of individuals remain to be conclusively traced, with a high priority being descendants of the enslaved who migrated to the Australian colonies. What were their aspirations, and to what extent were they realised?
Our project raises questions for all Australians and New Zealanders. The pervasive connections to the Atlantic slave economy we have identified encourages us to revisit phenomena closely associated with ‘settler colonialism’, especially First Nations’ dispossession from Country and genocidal violence. Our research negates the comforting assertion for non-Indigenous Australians, that Australia’s colonisers repudiated slavery entirely and found colonial violence repugnant. Rather, many colonisers imported social and economic practices established in the slave trade.
Traces of Australian links to Atlantic slavery survive all around us – in placenames, suburbs and statues, and in bequests that continue to support our educational and cultural institutions. William MacKinnon (1784-1870), for example, was the son of wealthy plantation owners on both his mother’s and father’s side. Records show there were 279 enslaved people on the MacKinnon Estate in Antigua in 1834. MacKinnon went on to become a British politician and colonial commissioner. MacKinnon Parade in Adelaide is named after him. What responsibility lies with non-Indigenous Australians today to address our continued benefit from historic slavery?
