Brighton and Slavery’s Legacy

Brighton is often remembered through the Pavilion, the seafront and the growth of a fashionable resort. But the town was also connected to a much wider British history, one stretching across the Atlantic to estates where people were enslaved.

Records collected by University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery show people with connections to Brighton and Hove appearing in records relating to slavery and the compensation system that followed abolition.

Those connections were not all the same. Some people owned enslaved people or held interests in estates. Others appear as beneficiaries, trustees, mortgagees, creditors or unsuccessful claimants. Some are connected to the records principally through a local address.

Taken together, however, the evidence places Brighton and Hove within a financial and social system that reached far beyond the Sussex coast.

Compensation after slavery

When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in the 1830s, the British government compensated slave owners and others who could establish a financial claim.

The people who had been enslaved received no compensation.

The surviving claim records are detailed because money and property were at stake. They identify estates, legal relationships, compensation amounts and, frequently, the number of enslaved people attached to a claim.

For historians, those records now provide another purpose. They allow connections between British towns and colonial slavery to be traced more closely than was once possible.

Brighton and Hove appear repeatedly within that evidence.

From Brighton and Hove to the Caribbean

The local records lead to places far beyond Sussex.

Jamaica appears frequently, alongside Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, St Kitts, British Guiana, Mauritius and other parts of the British Empire.

Some connections are particularly clear.

One person later associated with Hove is recorded in the UCL database as an owner-in-fee in a compensation claim concerning Hodge’s Bay in Antigua and 201 enslaved people.

A Brighton resident appears as an awardee in two Jamaican claims connected with York and Gale’s Valley in Trelawny, involving 246 and 229 enslaved people respectively.

Another Hove-linked record concerns Newtons in Barbados, where the claimant is recorded as owner-in-fee and the claim concerned 262 enslaved people.

These examples matter not because they are the whole story, but because they make the connection clear. People living in Brighton and Hove could have financial and legal interests tied directly to estates thousands of miles away.

The Legacies of British Slavery database allows these claims, individuals and estates to be followed in much greater detail.

More than ownership

It would be misleading to describe every Brighton or Hove name in these records simply as a slave owner.

The database itself shows why.

Some people appear as unsuccessful claimants or creditors. Others appear as mortgagees, trustees, guardians or beneficiaries. In other cases a Sussex address is recorded without the same clear ownership relationship.

The distinctions can seem technical, but they are important.

British slavery was supported by more than plantation ownership alone. It was tied into lending, inheritance, marriage, trusts, business arrangements and property.

That wider financial network is part of the reason its effects reached British towns far from the plantations themselves.

A history that reached into Brighton and Hove

In the nineteenth century Brighton was growing quickly.

People came to live here for health, retirement, society and the attractions of a fashionable seaside town. Hove was developing too, particularly through grand residential areas close to the sea.

Among those residents were people whose lives, families or finances had connections with colonial slavery.

The records place such connections across Brighton and Hove, including the seafront, Brunswick area, Montpelier and other parts of the growing town.

We have chosen not to turn those addresses into a list.

The exact names and locations remain important to the research because they allow claims to be checked and individuals traced. But the larger story is not about attaching a label to a modern house. It is about understanding the economic and human relationships represented by the records.

What the compensation records do not show easily

There is another limitation to these records.

They were created principally to record property and compensation.

As a result, the British claimant can be named in detail while the enslaved people connected to an estate may initially appear only as a number.

201 enslaved.

246 enslaved.

262 enslaved.

Each figure represents individual people.

Other surviving records, particularly colonial slave registers and estate documents, can sometimes take the research further. They may record names, ages, births, deaths, occupations, family relationships and movements between estates.

That gives us a different direction for the research.

Rather than stopping with the people in Britain who claimed compensation or held financial interests, we can begin asking what can still be found about the people who were enslaved.

Brighton was not of one mind

This history also needs to sit beside Brighton’s involvement in the campaign against slavery.

The town hosted anti-slavery meetings, including gatherings at the Old Ship and Friends Meeting House. The Brighton Society’s research into the transatlantic slave trade and Brighton gives useful detail about this local abolition activity.

Our own article on Olaudah Equiano looks at how his writing and campaigning formed part of the wider abolition movement that also reached Brighton.

There is no contradiction in telling both stories.

A town could contain people who opposed slavery while other residents benefited from or held interests connected with it. That uncomfortable overlap is part of nineteenth-century British history.

Seeing both gives us a fuller picture of Brighton.



Looking beyond Brighton

Since this article was first published, our research has widened.

A broader review of the UCL records identifies 185 individuals with recorded Sussex connections across 356 records.

Again, that does not mean 185 slave owners. The records contain many different types of relationship.

What the larger dataset does give us is a route into numerous estates and claims across the Caribbean and other former British colonies.

Our next article, Sussex and British Slavery: Following the Records, takes that wider view. It looks at what the Sussex records contain and how surviving estate and slave-register records may help us learn more about the enslaved people themselves.

Sources and further reading

• UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery
  The academic centre responsible for the Legacies of British Slavery research and database.
• Legacies of British Slavery database
  The main research source used to trace individuals, compensation claims, estates and relationships connected with Brighton, Hove and Sussex. UCL explains that the compensation records formed the starting point for its database of British slave ownership and its wider legacies. University College London
• The Brighton Society: The transatlantic slave trade, our city, its heritage and its people
  Local research covering compensation connections and Brighton’s anti-slavery activity, including meetings held in the town in the 1820s and 1830s. brighton-society.org.uk
• Echoes of Brighton’s Past: Olaudah Equiano
  Our related article on Equiano, abolition and Brighton’s place within the wider anti-slavery movement.