A letter
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/22/historians-working-towards-a-…
in today's Guardian comments on the role of the database at
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
"uncovering Britain’s imperial past". In a headline sense, I agree. I did some
work on Wikipedia on Abel Rous Dottin, an MP from a West Indian slave-owning
background, and his part in the launching of the London & Greenwich Railway:
family connections were certainly behind some of the initial funding. Not at all
the emphasis in the standard history of the L & G.
I thought some people would be interested in the more technical background
(which amounts to inheritances, genealogy and land ownership records, politics
and commerce); or at least what is being done on Wikidata in this direction.
There is a property, P3023, for the database identifier for people. It occurs on
506 items. That sounds quite good, until you realise that the database has
around 50,000 people mentioned, so only 1% of entries are so identified.
Of those, 298 have occupation "politician". and 241 are identified in the
History of Parliament Online (sterling work by Andrew Gray means for the
relevant period to 1832, Wikidata has complete coverage of MPs). That sounds
like quite good coverage of the "West India lobby" and anti-abolitionism in
Parliament.
On the other hand, one of the conclusions of the research in this area is that
many of the fortunes made by Caribbean slave-owners were not in the public eye,
in the same way. Further, the database is primarily about those who were
compensated after the 1837 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It does
have information digging further back: but for some reason the identifiers used
are long and apparently random numbers, where those who were compensated form a
simple and essentially unbroken sequence.
To sum up, we can reach for our old friend, the "low-hanging fruit", which
appears to have been largely gathered so far. Information is sparse, in the
database, in the average case: we cannot yet place most of these people, and the
"long tail" of those who were given smaller sums is mostly opaque. (Sorry,
mixed
metaphors there, but never mind.)
There were large sums paid out, particularly to those who had acquired estates
in British Guiana: and we don't always know much about them, because they were
prominent only in commerce. And those who are central to the database are not in
general those who built up and profited most from the plantation system, which
peaked in commercial terms at least a generation before 1837. Matthew Parker's
well-written "The Sugar Barons" gives the impression that the smaller
landholders really were there to "make up the numbers".
The approach, now standard on Wikidata, is to put a dataset into the mix'n'match
tool, and gradually cross-match it. That way has not been pursued in this case,
because it isn't clear how to proceed, and much of the data is just not there
for those receiving compensation (they would be marked N/A for matching, in the
jargon). I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who could help with the
first point.
Right now, honest piecemeal effort can bring a few more of the people involved
into better focus.
Charles