Read an abstract from Cathy Bergin and Anita Rupprecht’s piece ‘Reparative Histories: tracing narratives of black resistance and white entitlement’ in the Race & Class journal.
An extract from Reparative Histories: tracing Brighton’s forgotten slave owners
“Resistance by enslaved peoples in the Caribbean played a vital role in finally ending British colonial enslavement in 1834. The British government paid £20 million of tax-payer’s money to the planters in compensation. A significant number of people who received this compensation lived in Brighton. Cathy Bergin, Louise Purbrick, Anita Rupprecht and Gill Scott have been researching this forgotten part of Brighton’s local/global history and mapping the town’s connections to the struggle against enslavement that took place in the Caribbean, the colonial wealth that was accumulated there and to Brighton’s nineteenth century antislavery activism. This article begins with Caroline Anderson who lived in Bedford Street in Kemp Town. She received substantial compensation as an inheritor of her father’s sugar estate at Brewer’s Bay on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. But the piece is mostly about how, in 1831 and just three years before emancipation, the enslaved on her father’s sugar estate at Brewer’s Bay contributed to a last wave of Caribbean-wide resistance by developing a secret plot to rise up, escape the island, and sail for Haiti and freedom.”
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