Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery Project
Project Team
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Professor Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at The University of Western Australia. Her books include The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (NewSouth, 2012), Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (Bloomsbury, 2016), and the edited Visualising Human Rights (Perth, 2018). She led the Returning Photographs project between 2011-2019 which can be accessed at: Returning Photographs https://ipp.arts.uwa.edu.au/. Her book No Slavery in a Free Land? Anti-Slavery and Australia, 1780-1900 (Routledge 2021) explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution.
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Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.
She grew up on Gunditjmara Country in western Victoria and was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. After spending over 20 years studying and working in the UK, Zoë returned to Australia in 2018. A historian of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, she has published on British imperial networks and governance, settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and humanitarian activism. Much of her research now focuses on the Port Phillip District/Victoria, both within the Australian Legacies of Slavery projects and beyond. Zoë’s books include
Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Colonial Connections 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester UP, 2005), and co-edited with Alan Lester, Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Inter-connected World (Routledge, 2015). -
Jeremy Martens teaches global history at the University of Western Australia; South African, African and British imperial history; and the history of race and racism. His research interests include the evolution of immigration restriction legislation in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as race, gender and the law in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. In addition to publishing widely on South African, Australian and British imperial history in scholarly journals, he is the author of Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWAP, 2018) and Government House and Western Australian Society, 1829-2009 (UWAP, 2011). The latter book was shortlisted for the 2011 WA Premier’s Book Awards (WA History) and received a Special Commendation, 2012 Margaret Medcalf Award. In 2020 he was awarded the annual Marian Quartly Prize for ‘The Mrs Freer case revisited: marriage, morality and the state in interwar Australia,’ History Australia 16.3 (2019).
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Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. Since 2017 he has been Director of the Edith Cowan Centre for Global Issues. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America.
His publications include Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes, 1605–1837 (2010), and the edited volumes Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging (2019, with Leena Kurvet-Käosaar), Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity (2018), Private Lives, Intimate Readings (2015, with Leena Kurvet-Käosaar), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014, with Katherine Bode), Framing Lives (2014), International Life Writing: Memory and Identity in Global Context (2013), Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 18 (2012, Deputy General Editor), Voices from the West End: Stories, People and Events That Shaped Fremantle (2012, with Geoffrey Bolton), and Recovering Lives (2011).
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Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London, Chair of the Centre for the Study of British Slave-ownership and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research centres on rethinking the relation between Britain and Empire in the early/mid-nineteenth century and reflects on the ways in which metropolitan ideas and practices have been shaped by the colonial experience. Catherine was Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’ (2004-12) and the ESRC/AHRC-funded ‘Structure and Significance of British-Caribbean Slave-Ownership, 1763-1833’ (2013-16). At the core of this work is a database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended, amassing and analysing information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of all the British slave-owners on the database.
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Keith McClelland now works part-time in the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership. (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/staff) His particular responsibility is for maintaining the database and website. He was previously Co-director of the Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership 1763–1833 project (2013–2015) and co-founder of the original Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009–2012). He was also Acting Director of the Centre from September 2019 to May 2020. A social and political historian, he has a long-standing interest in forms of labour—enslaved, coerced and ‘free’.
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Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University University of Sussex and Adjunct Professor of History at La Trobe University. He has written extensively about colonial humanitarian, settler and governmental, and Indigenous networks and recently edited The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (Hurst 2024).
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Historian
Caroline Ingram is a historian whose research interests include Australian legal history, women’s history and Western Australian history. She is the author of Women in the Court: The Criminal Trials of Women in Colonial Western Australia (Palgrave McMillan – forthcoming) . Her work has appeared in History Australia, Law & History and Australian Historical Studies.
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Naomi Preston is a Research Assistant on the Australian Legacies of British Slavery project. She recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Western Australia, where her research focused on heritage and difficult histories of incarceration, punishment and forced labour.
Naomi serves as the Postgraduate Representative on the History Council of Western Australia and is an active committee member for Oral History Western Australia.
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Nikita Vanderbyl is an historian of nineteenth-century Aboriginal art and colonial history. Her research focuses on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung art and history in the context of colonial cultures of collection and display. After publishing with Alan Lester in History Workshop Journal ‘The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832-8’ (2020), she has joined the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project. Nikita’s research has appeared in Aboriginal History, The La Trobe Journal, Agora and on the Conversation. Most recently she has published with Professor Barry Judd on Indigenous masculinities. She teaches history part time at La Trobe University in Mildura and she lives on unceded Barkindji Country in southern New South Wales.
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Aoife Nugent is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia and a lawyer for the Aboriginal Legal Service WA. She is currently researching the contributions of three imperial families (the Prinsep, Mangles and Stirling families) to the development of trade, commerce and labour in Swan River Colony between 1829 and 1850, in view of their connections and investments in British slavery from the eighteenth century onwards.
Australian National Maritime Museum, Project Partner
UWA Modern Slavery Research Cluster, Linked Project
Our research project is also linked to The University of Western Australia’s Modern Slavery Research Cluster. The UWA Modern Slavery Research Cluster (MSRC) brings together interdisciplinary researchers and students from across UWA and our partners to contribute to tackling Modern Slavery. We adopt a broad approach to modern slavery and as a working definition consider modern slavery to be: ‘… an umbrella term used to describe a number of crimes, including, but not limited to, human trafficking, forced labour, sexual slavery, child labour and trafficking, domestic servitude, forced marriage, bonded labour including debt bondage, slavery and other slavery-like practices’. Read more about the MSRC.