Summary
The Bank of England Archive Service supported colleagues at its museum in preparations for an exhibition on the Bank’s historic links with the transatlantic slave trade. Working with historian Michael Bennett, a review of some uncatalogued records in the collections led to the discovery of an inventory documenting the Bank’s ownership of enslaved people.
The archive service supported communication and public engagement about this document and its implications primarily through the ‘Slavery and the Bank’ exhibition at the Bank of England Museum which ran from April 2022 – February 2024.
Challenges and opportunities
Colleagues in the Bank of England Museum had started to research the Bank’s links
to slavery and the trade in enslaved people in 2018. The death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protest in the summer of 2020 provided additional impetus to look closely into this topic.
Research led by the Bank’s Ethnic Minority Network presented information on the topic to staff during 2020. Research by the Museum team also resulted in eight portraits of Directors being removed from display. The research also prompted the Bank to acknowledge and apologise for “inexcusable connections” between former Governors and Directors and the trade in enslaved people. It was then agreed that an exhibition at the Bank’s museum would go ahead to communicate and examine this history in more detail.
There was a major breakthrough in the research in September 2021, when Liberty Paterson – a researcher and one of the curators for the exhibition – identified a box of documents in the Museum catalogue relating to Bacolet and Chemin, two plantations located in Grenada. This cache of letters, deeds, powers of attorney, and account books provided the extra level of detail to properly analyse the Bank’s relationship with the two plantations. The most striking, and poignant, discovery was an ‘inventory’ of Bacolet and Chemin in 1788. This document contains the names of the 599 enslaved women, men, and children that the Bank owned when it took possession of the plantations in Grenada in the late 1780s.
The papers were in poor condition so an early priority for the Bank’s museum and archive teams was for them to be conserved. The inventory was then digitised, allowing the names of the enslaved people to be a prominent feature of the exhibition and also for online resources.
Additionally, Dr Michael Bennett, an academic researcher, one of two researchers brought in to provide expertise, looked at the payment of slavery compensation that was administered by the Bank. Mike Anson, the Bank’s Archive Manager, co-ordinated a small group of Bank staff to transcribe two ledgers, containing over 13,000 transactions relating to the compensation scheme.
The analysis led to a Staff Working Paper, published in November 2022, and sharing the data on an open access basis. Research is ongoing, and findings so far have already been widely disseminated, including at the ‘Slavery and the City’ conference held at Lloyds of London in November 2023 and in a podcast for the European Association for Banking and Financial History.
Detail from the Bacolet and Chemin ‘inventory’, 1788
Outcomes for service users
The exhibition text was co-produced by museum colleagues and Michael Bennett. In curating the exhibition, the team was keen for the text to be accessible and inclusive for visitors of all ages.
The presence of the plantation records and especially the ‘inventory’ within the Bank’s collection remains powerful. The document is now featured in the archive service’s tours for colleagues as it brings home what it really meant in human terms for the Bank to own these ‘assets’. The inventory is also available for external service users to examine in the archive service’s reading room for their own research purposes.
For the Bank itself, the incorporation of an academic researcher into the project team meant that they were able to facilitate a deeper examination of the records and the institution’s history than might otherwise have been possible.
What was learned from the process?
The research and the exhibition deal with a difficult subject matter but the outputs have been well-received. It served as a reminder of how much work was involved in an exhibition of this scale and ambition but also the benefits of collaboration with a wide stakeholder group including archive, museum, academic colleagues, senior decision-makers and other staff within the organisation.
The previously uncatalogued Grenada material was catalogued: this necessitated consideration about appropriate language and replacing terms such as ‘slave’ with ‘enslaved’. In thinking through this issue, it has given the archive service a model for cataloguing any further records that include this terminology.
The museum team undertook conversations and focus groups with visitors throughout the run of the exhibition. Many visitors said they came to see how honest the Bank would be in telling this history, with widespread calls for this to serve as the starting point to further work and activity.
Key advice
Bringing in external academics to delve into the Bank’s history was seen as a logical step. Ultimately the use of archival material in the exhibition enabled an important demonstration of transparency in this context. In reflecting on the process, Dr Michael Bennett highlighted the importance of under-pinning the work on archival evidence to ‘let the documents speak for themselves’ and to avoid ‘over-interpretation’.
How will this work be developed in the future?
The exhibition was always intended to be temporary, but the Bank has committed to incorporating information about its involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and public feedback on this into the Museum’s permanent displays. The online resources, including the entire exhibition text as a PDF document, a feature on Google Arts and Culture and a School and Family resource produced by museum colleagues, will remain on the website.
The collaboration has encouraged the Bank to expand its work with academics and students across a broad range of disciplines and not just financial or economic history. Dr Michael Bennett continues to work with the Bank as the research develops and unfolds. Now a Lecturer in Early Modern British History at The University of Sheffield, he brings students studying his ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1640-1807’ module to the Bank and shares his passion and enthusiasm for archives.
Find out more
Contact Mike Anson, Archive Manager, Bank of England: archive@bankofengland.co.uk.
Relevant resources
The National Archives’ Risk Assessment, designed to help when communicating potentially upsetting histories
Archives and Records Association’s health and wellbeing resources, including guidance for staff working with potentially disturbing material or records
The National Archives’ Guide to collaboration for archives and higher education (PDF, 4.8 MB)
Business Archives Council’s Facilitating academic-archivist collaborations in business (PDF, 250 KB)