Abstract
From 2007 to 2009, I and a number of colleagues at the University of York conducted a research project entitled ‘1807 Commemorated’.1The aim of this project was to analyse the museum activity that was developed in Britain in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the 1807 Act of Abolition — the Act which formally ended British participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Our assumption at the beginning of this research was that we were studying a national commemorative event, and one which might also, since the slave trade was obviously a transnational rather than a purely national phenomenon, have an international significance. Our plan was therefore initially to focus our attention fairly intensively on a small number of museums — places like the British Museum or the new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool — whose contributions to the bicentenary we felt would constitute significant interventions in a national and international debate on slavery and abolition, and on their long-term legacies. What we did not fully anticipate — and we were not the only ones who did not2 — was the amount of activity that the bicentenary would generate at a much more local level, and the significant part that a much wider range of museums — including many local and regional ones — would play, along with other local institutions and community groups, in defining its meanings and implications for British society.3
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Cubitt, G. (2015). Displacements and Hidden Histories: Museums, Locality and the British Memory of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In: Beyen, M., Deseure, B. (eds) Local Memories in a Nationalizing and Globalizing World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469380_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469380_7
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