Women and Slavery

New research into female slave owners in Britain to women on Caribbean plantations. Christienna Fryar talks to researchers Katie Donnington, Meleisa Ono-George and Hannah Young and hears about stories including the daughter of the Hibbert family, one of the most prominent slave traders in Kingston, Jamaica, and the revelation after she had died, that she had intended to ask her mother to free the enslaved people she held, and about the risks taken by women who had children with their owners and who fought for the rights of those children.

Katie Donnington lectures in History at London South Bank University. She has published a book called The bonds of family: Slavery, commerce and culture in the British Atlantic world. She was an historical advisor for the BBC2 documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave-owners (2015) and co-curated Slavery, Culture and Collecting’ at the Museum of London Docklands (2018-2019).

Dr Meleisa Ono-George is at the University of Warwick. She has researched the ways in which women of African-descent in Jamaica were discussed in relation to prostitution, concubinage and other forms of sexual-economic exchange in legal, political and cultural discourses in nineteenth-century Jamaica and Britain.

Hannah Young is at the University of Southampton where she focuses on late eighteenth- and early 19th-century Britain, with a particular interest in exploring the relationship between Britain and empire and absentee slave-ownership.

You might also be interested in this conversation featuring Katie and Christienna and a novelist and dramatist who have considered slavery history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f7d5

This episode looks at the law on modern slavery https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jnmc

Producer: Emma Wallace