The British Online Archives team have recently updated the collection, Slave Trade Records from Liverpool, 1754–1792. This collection allows researchers and students to explore Britain’s part in one of the darkest episodes in modern human history, the transatlantic slave trade.
Liverpool’s pivotal location in the industry is explored through captain’s logs, financial accounts, order papers, and private correspondence of those trying to find fortune in the city. Despite the one-sided nature of the documents, British Online Archives have sought to foreground the oppression experienced by the enslaved through new insights, a new collection description, and new marketing material. However, this oppression is never more present than through the documents themselves, in which financial accounts and correspondence outline the abhorrent way in which enslaved Africans were conceptualised merely in terms of commercial cargo.
As well as a newly curated collection homepage, Professor Kenneth Morgan has provided a detailed description of the collection, covering Liverpool’s historical role in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as more specific contexts surrounding the individual ships that sailed to Africa and the New World of the Americas.