The AfSM team has started researching links between British colonies and Suffolk. We were joined at Suffolk Archives last week by three very special guests – Professor Corinne Fowler, researcher Kate Bernstock and Dr Richard Maguire.
Lucy Maxwell, Suffolk’s Museum Development Officer, gives an overview of what’s been happening:
“Last week we visited The Hold in Ipswich to view documents that Suffolk Archives staff had kindly pulled out for us. Straightaway colonial links to Suffolk towns started appearing – to Halesworth, to Woodbridge, to Saxmundham among others.”
“We were looking at documents relating to plantations in the Caribbean that were owned by families with properties in Suffolk as well. It became clear that the families were socially connected with one another in the UK and that plantation wealth had been used to finance estates in this county.”
“We cross-referenced the names in the documents with UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery online database. This is an incredibly useful resource. It makes it possible to find out which people applied for, and in many cases were awarded, financial compensation from the British government for the perceived financial value of the enslaved people they had owned when Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833. For more context see: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context. There is also a helpful guide to searching the database: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/search-notes.”
“Kate Bernstock has put together a list of the people with a Suffolk address who applied for compensation. Please contact museums@suffolk.gov.uk if you’d like to have a copy of this listing.”
“This is, of course, a huge topic to start digging into but we would like to encourage museums to do just that. As well as UCL’s database, we recommend the following printed sources.”
“Richard C Maguire’s Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 (Boydell & Brewer, 2021) is excellent and copies are available through Suffolk Libraries. Richard has gone through many parish records and identified Africans and their descendants across Norfolk and Suffolk. He is really good at showing exactly where his information has come from and has included Appendices that present the names of people with the places their lives were recorded.”
“Professor Corinne Fowler’s research into the Bungay area is included in her forthcoming book Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (Penguin Allen Lane, 2024). Before that book is published, we recommend Green Unpleasant Land – Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (Peepal Tree Press, 2020). The National Trust report Corinne contributed to is also available to download here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/research/addressing-our-histories-of-colonialism-and-historic-slavery.”
“Kate Bernstock’s essay in Many Struggles –New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (ed. Hakim Adi, Pluto Press, 2023) shows how researchers can build up a picture of a neighbourhood from multiple sources to shed light on what life might have been like for people, in that place, at a particular time, and to give more of a life to people from the Global Majority who lived there when the archives only reveal a slender thread of their story.”
“It was fantastic to have Corinne and Kate at the AfSM Network meeting during which they shared what it was like to find so much relevant material in just one day’s visit to Suffolk Archives. Representatives from East Anglia Transport Museum, Little Hall Lavenham, Food Museum and Woodbridge Tide Mill all got stuck in to the discussion that followed.”
“Thank you to Corinne, Kate, Richard, and our colleagues at Suffolk Archives, for making this initial research possible and we look forward to bringing you more news on this work in due course.”