Legacies of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Bristol

A study of Bristol's elite in the period after emancipation, charting the changing fortunes of slavery-enriched families alongside the wider elite not all of which had been involved in the slavery economy. Bristol occupies an important place in the history of Britain's involvement in transatlantic slavery, and families enriched by the slavery economy were significant members of the Bristol elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, research on slavery hitherto has concentrated on the slave trade and its abolition and on emancipation. The story of what happened next, after emancipation in the late 1830s, in the legacy stage of the slavery economy, has been largely neglected. This book, based on extensive original research, explores how fortunes accumulated from slavery survived its formal termination. It puts the slavery-enriched families into the narrative of Bristol across the entire nineteenth century and locates those families in the context of the wider, and changing, urban elite in the city. It shows that not all Bristol elite families were the beneficiaries of slavery and also that most families who benefitted from slavery were not that rich. Overall, the book contributes both to the literature on the slavery economy as it affected British cities and to urban history more generally.