Guest editorial : museums and the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade

TLDR: The 1807 Commemorated Project as discussed by the authors aimed to map and to promote reflection on the ways in which the Bicentenary of the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing British participation in the slave trade was marked in museums in Britain.

Abstract: This issue of Museum & Society reports on some of the findings of the 1807 Commemorated Project. Four of the papers (by Cubitt, Wilson, Fouseki and Smith) are by members of the project team; the opening paper by Waterton, based on her own researches in a closely related field, provides an important context in which to view the museum activities that the project studied. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship, the 1807 Commemorated Project aimed to map and to promote reflection on the ways in which the Bicentenary of the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing British participation in the slave trade was marked in museums in Britain. (It should be noted that the 1807 Act did not abolish slavery itself: the emancipation of those held as slaves in the British Caribbean would come only in the 1830s.) Hailed by the then Minister of Culture, David Lammy, as ‘an opportunity to celebrate, educate and inform’, the Bicentenary was interpreted by many in government and in the media as an occasion to celebrate the achievements of abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. This ‘Wilberfestian’ mood was challenged, however, by a range of commentators and community and political groups. The response to the Bicentenary of museums and galleries around Britain was to attempt to provide a holistic account of enslavement, resistance, abolition and the consequences of the slave trade for Africa, the Caribbean and Britain. This was perceived by many in the museum sector as a particularly important task in furthering social debate about the legacies of the trade, whose significance in British society is often regarded as a ‘hidden’ history (Oldfield 2007; Dresser 2009; Paton 2009). The purpose of the 1807 Commemorated Project aimed to analyse exhibitions dealing with slavery, abolition and related themes that opened in the Bicentenary year, and to examine their impact on visitors and their contribution towards shaping public awareness of the histories and contemporary legacies of slavery and abolition. The project, based at the University of York, and supported by the University’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past and the Departments of Archaeology and History, was co-directed by Laurajane Smith and Geoffrey Cubitt who, with post-doctoral research assistants Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki, worked with seven partner museums during 2007-9. The official partner institutions of this project were the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; the British Museum; the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool; the Museum of London Docklands; the National Maritime Museum; and Wilberforce House Museum, Hull. The project team worked intensively with these institutions, conducting interviews with a variety of museum staff and community representatives involved in the planning process of exhibitions marking 1807. In addition, exit interviews with visitors to exhibitions during 2007 were undertaken at each of these museums as well as at Harewood House, Yorkshire, which had mounted a temporary exhibition to commemorate 1807. To gain a broader perspective, members of the project team also visited about fifty further exhibitions, compiling a detailed textual and visual record of many of these, and interviewing some of the staff involved. Less comprehensive information was gathered for about 120 additional exhibitions. The materials gathered constitute a substantial archive and database documenting the varieties of museum practice during the bicentenary, the experiences of practitioners, and the responses of visitors. The results of the project team’s work have been discussed and disseminated at a conference held in 2008 at the University of York and at sixteen workshops held during 20082009. Eight of these workshops were undertaken with staff from partner museums, and another eight with museum staff and community representatives from regional centres across England. Seven of these latter workshops were sponsored by the Museum, Libraries and Archives