A search of University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery database identifies 185 individuals with recorded Sussex connections across 356 records.

That is a striking number, but it needs to be read carefully.

It does not mean that 185 slave owners lived in Sussex. The records include owners, beneficiaries, trustees, mortgagees, creditors, executors, guardians, unsuccessful claimants and people whose connection is recorded in other ways.

What the records do show is something wider.

People living across Sussex were connected through property, inheritance, finance and family relationships to estates in Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, St Kitts, St Vincent, British Guiana and other parts of the British Empire where people were enslaved.

This article follows our earlier piece, Brighton and Slavery’s Legacy, which looks specifically at Brighton and Hove. Here we widen the view across Sussex and ask a different question: where can these records lead us if we follow them beyond compensation?

What the Sussex slavery records actually show

The UCL database was built from records created around the compensation system that followed the abolition of slavery across most of the British Empire in the 1830s.

The British government compensated people who could establish financial claims connected with enslaved people. Those who had been enslaved received no compensation.

That system generated a large documentary record.

Claims can contain names of individuals in Britain, estates and plantations, legal relationships, compensation amounts and the number of enslaved people attached to a claim.

The Sussex search brings hundreds of those connections together.

Some are in Brighton and Hove. Others lead to Chichester, Hastings, Worthing, Lewes, Eastbourne, East Grinstead, Horsham, Crowborough, Bognor and villages and estates elsewhere across the county.

The geographical spread matters because it shows that these connections were not confined to one fashionable Brighton neighbourhood or a small circle of families.

They reached across Sussex.

One database, many different relationships

The words used in the records matter.

Some entries identify someone explicitly as an owner-in-fee.

Others record a trustee, mortgagee, beneficiary, executor, guardian or assignee.

There are also unsuccessful claimants.

One Sussex-linked record, for example, identifies a claimant connected with three Jamaican estates as an unsuccessful claimant but also records his relationship as owner-in-fee. Those claims concerned 249 enslaved people at Mile Gully, 505 at Garbrand and Mullet Hall, and 244 at Paradise.

Another records a Hove connection with Hodge’s Bay in Antigua. In that case, the claimant is identified as owner-in-fee in a claim concerning 201 enslaved people, while a second claim at the same estate records him acting as guardian in relation to 42 people.

The difference is important.

If we reduced all 185 individuals to a list of “Sussex slave owners”, we would lose much of what the records actually tell us about how slavery was supported financially and legally.

Estates stretching across the Caribbean

The Sussex records contain many named estates.

In Jamaica they include places such as Mile Gully, Paradise, New Montpelier, Old Montpelier, Virgin Valley, Spring Garden, Swaby’s Hope, Windsor Forest and Pembroke.

Antigua records include Hodge’s Bay and Sion Hill.

Grenada connections include Tempe, Grand Bras, Telescope, Simon, Sagesse, Beausejour and Grenville Vale.

Barbados, St Kitts, St Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago and British Guiana also appear repeatedly in the Sussex results.

The scale varies greatly.

A Chichester-linked record for Charles Rose Ellis, Lord Seaford, for example, includes several Jamaican estates. UCL records him as owner-in-fee in claims concerning 146 enslaved people at Shettlewood Pen, 70 at Crawle Pen, 153 at Ellis Caymanas, 276 at New Montpelier and 373 at Old Montpelier.

Elsewhere, a Brighton-linked record concerns Sion Hill in Antigua and 176 enslaved people, with the Sussex individual recorded as a mortgagee rather than owner.

These differences show why individual claims need to be read, rather than simply counted.

The records were designed to follow money

There is an imbalance at the heart of this archive.

The compensation records were created because the British state was deciding who should receive money.

That meant considerable attention was paid to ownership, inheritance, mortgages, legal rights and competing claims.

The people who had been enslaved were not the intended beneficiaries of the process.

As a result, a British claimant may appear with their name, address and precise financial interest while hundreds of enslaved people appear initially as a single figure.

The National Archives notes that records of slavery were usually created from the viewpoint of those controlling the system, and that information about enslaved people is often much harder to find. The National Archives

That is one reason we do not want this research to end with the compensation claims.

Following the records in the other direction

The estate names give us another route.

The National Archives holds the records of the Office of Registry of Colonial Slaves and the Slave Compensation Commission in its T 71 series. Slave registers survive for the period from the early 1810s to 1834. The National Archives

Depending on the colony and the surviving record, those registers can contain an enslaved person’s:

• name
• age
• gender
• birthplace or nationality
• owner
• parish

The National Archives specifically recommends searching the registers using an enslaved person’s name, year of birth, owner’s name, colony and, where available, parish. Many of the registers can also be searched through Ancestry. The National Archives

This means that a compensation entry recording, for example, 201 enslaved people at Hodge’s Bay, is not necessarily the end of the evidence.

It may be the beginning.

What we hope to find

We are now starting to follow selected Sussex-linked estates through these earlier registers.

The aim is not simply to produce longer lists.

Where the evidence allows, we want to ask whether individual people can be followed through successive records.

Can a child recorded in one register be found again several years later?

Can mothers and children be identified together?

Do the records show births or deaths between registrations?

Do they record occupations?

Can people be followed as they were moved between estates?

And what, if anything, can later records tell us about their lives after emancipation?

We have to be careful here.

The surviving records are incomplete. Names can be spelled differently. Ages may not be exact. Family relationships are not always stated. People can disappear from the records for reasons that are difficult to establish.

We will not fill those gaps with assumptions.

Names rather than numbers

The language of the compensation records can make hundreds of people look like a statistic.

One Sussex-linked Jamaican record concerns 483 enslaved people at Spring Garden Estate.

Another concerns 505 people at Garbrand and Mullet Hall.

A Grenada claim records 314 people at Grand Bras Estate.

Those figures demonstrate scale, but numbers alone cannot tell us who those people were.

The next stage of the Echoes research is therefore deliberately slower.

When we find a name in a slave register, we need to establish which estate it belongs to, which year the return covers, who submitted it and whether the same individual appears in another register.

Only then can a name safely become part of a published story.

Why we are not publishing a list of Sussex names

The full names and addresses in the British records remain important to our research.

They allow us to check identities, distinguish people with similar names and follow estate and compensation records accurately.

But this article is not intended to become a directory of Sussex residents connected with slavery.

There are two reasons.

First, their relationships with the estates differ considerably. Publishing a single list risks flattening those differences.

Second, the British names are already the easiest people to see in the compensation archive.

Our interest now is in using those records to look further.

Where a Sussex individual needs to be named to explain an estate, a legal relationship or an important piece of evidence, we will do so. Where the name adds little, we do not need to place it at the centre of the story.

Sussex was connected in more than one way

The records also challenge any simple picture of Sussex in the age of abolition.

Brighton had an organised anti-slavery movement. A public meeting on 16 November 1830 resolved to petition Parliament against colonial slavery, a local event already recorded in our Olaudah Equiano research. Echoes_Brighton_Past_Timeline.xlsxXLSX

At the same time, people elsewhere in Brighton, Hove and Sussex held financial, legal or family interests connected with estates where people remained enslaved.

Those histories existed at the same time.

That is not a contradiction to be solved. It is part of the history that needs to be understood.



Building on Brighton and Slavery’s Legacy

Our earlier article, [Brighton and Slavery’s Legacy](PASTE EXISTING ECHOES URL HERE), looks more closely at the Brighton and Hove evidence.

This Sussex research broadens that picture.

The 185 individuals and 356 records give us a starting map. Legacies-of-British-Slavery-merged.pdfPDF

The estate records give us possible routes across the Atlantic.

The slave registers may allow us to reach individual names.

From there, some stories may become substantial enough for separate articles about particular estates, communities or families.

Others may remain only fragments.

Both have value.

The National Archives warns that records of enslaved people are often difficult and incomplete. That will shape how we publish this work. The National Archives

We will separate what the evidence establishes from what remains uncertain.

Where a family relationship is proved, we will say so.

Where it is only possible, we will say that too.

And where the records stop, we will not invent what happened next.

Following lives across the Atlantic

The Sussex compensation records begin with British names, money and property.

They do not have to end there.

By following the estates into the surviving registers, it may be possible to move from a Sussex record describing hundreds of enslaved people to individual names and, in some cases, pieces of individual lives.

But it offers a different way of connecting Sussex with the history of British slavery.

Not simply by asking who in Sussex had an interest in slavery, but by asking what surviving records can still tell us about the people whose lives were bound to those interests.

Sources and further reading

• UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery
  The principal database used for the Sussex search, compensation claims, individuals and estate connections.
• UCL Legacies of British Slavery database
  Searchable records covering individuals, claims and estates connected to British slavery.
• The National Archives: Enslaved people and slave owners
  Guidance on using the colonial slave registers, including the T 71 records and the information they can contain. The National Archives
• The National Archives: British transatlantic slave trade records
  A wider guide to records relating to slavery, abolition, slave registration and compensation. The National Archives
• Echoes of Brighton’s Past: Olaudah Equiano
  Related reading on abolition and Brighton’s local anti-slavery history.