About thirty UK and US firms have been accused by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists of having profited from black slavery before its abolition in the British Empire and the United States. There were calls for these companies to pay compensation to the descendants of enslaved people. The responses of the accused firms were diverse: […]

John Prideaux was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1615 to 1642, a highly successful head of his Oxford college, bishop of Worcester during the Civil War, and one of Europe's leading scholars. John Maddicott will assess his role in the ecclesiastical politics of his day against the broader background of his social ascent, […]

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to […]

This talk will introduce Edward Long, whose History of Jamaica published in 1774 (and in print ever since) aimed to convince a metropolitan audience that slavery was essential to the wealth of Britain and that black people were naturally born to serve those who were white. Long’s account of Jamaica provides an extraordinarily detailed picture […]

The South Sea Company is famous for giving its name to an early financial crash, the South Sea Bubble of 1720. This event has overshadowed the company’s involvement in Britain’s transatlantic slave trade. In popular histories, the importance of the company’s trading arm has been downplayed in order to highlight the supposed foolishness of investors. […]

This talk will focus on the appeal of the Prose Brut tradition in the Middle Ages with a view to examining the relationship between the large number of manuscripts it survives in (over 200) and relatively little scholarly interest from modern scholars. It takes a broad view of how the text was presented to modern […]