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George III
King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760-1820) -
George IV
King of the United Kingdom and Hanover (1820-1830) -
George V
King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India (1910-1936) -
George VI
King of the United Kingdom (1936 to 1952) and Emperor of India (1936-1948) -
Gladstone, William Ewart
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1868-1874; 1880-1885; 1886; 1892-1894). Gladstone's father, John Gladstone (1764-1851) was one of the largest and wealthiest British absentee slave-owners in the Caribbean, owning several estates in both Guiana and Jamaica. Although William Ewart Gladstone did not claim slavery compensation himself, he supported compensation payouts for slave-owners (including aiding his father in making his own claims), the apprenticeship system, and the West India interest over issues such as sugar duties. Gladstone's position on slavery did change over time, however, and he gradually became more critical towards the institution. His changing relationship on the matter should be seen in the wider context of Victorian Britain's self-representation as an "anti-slavery nation", and its attendant erasure of the legacies of British slavery in the Caribbean. In 2023, several of Gladstone's descendants traveled to Guiana to formally apologise for the family's involvement in slave-ownership and committed to paying reparations in response. In addition to his own complex relationship to transatlantic slavery, Gladstone's time in office was also shaped by the period of New Imperialism, which saw unprecedented European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia. Although Gladstone and the Liberal Party were known for their opposition to imperialism generally, his premiership involved the British takeover of Egypt in 1882. -
Gordon, Charles George
British army officer and colonial administrator. Gordon was Governor-General of the Sudan from 1877 to 1879 and 1884 to 1885. Gordon's death in 1885 during the nationalist revolt in Sudan, led by the Sudanese religious and political leader Muhammad Ahmad, immortalised him as the archetypal colonial hero in Victorian society. George William Joy's famous painting, The Death of General Gordon (1893), presented Gordon as a stern martyr figure making his "last stand" against empire's racialised and infrahuman others. The cult of Gordon took several artistic forms, including bronze statues by Hamo Thornycroft and Edward Onslow Ford, and indeed outlasted the Victorians, as the films The Four Feathers (1939) and Khartoum (1966) exemplify. Lytton Strachey satirised the hero-worship around Gordon in his work Eminent Victorians (1918), sardonically describing the aftermath of the revolt with the words "At any rate, it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring". -
Gough, Hugh, 1st Viscount Gough
British Army officer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gough fought in a number of imperial conflicts across the globe, including in the Caribbean, China, and India. He was Commander-in-Chief in China during the First Opium War (1839-1842) and later Commander-in-Chief in India from 1843 to 1849. -
Green, Richard
British shipowner and philanthropist in the nineteenth century. The family firm Green, Wigram, & Green were involved in constructing East Indiamen for the East India Company. -
Guy, Thomas
British slave-trade investor, bookseller, politician, and founder of Guy's Hospital. Much of Guy's wealth was made through his investments in the South Sea Company, which was involved in the transatlantic slave-trade from 1713 onwards. He founded Guy's Hospital in 1721. -
Haig, Douglas, 1st Earl Haig
British military officer who served in India, Sudan, South Africa and Europe. -
Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Frederick Temple
British public servant and colonial administrator in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was Governor-General of Canada (1872-1878) and Viceroy and Governor-General of India (1884-1888). -
Hamy, Ernest
Trained as a doctor, Ernest Hamy was interested in all human sciences. A student of Paul Broca, he adopted his methods of somatic anthropology to study human skulls. In 1882, he published a synthesis of his studies, Crania Ethnica, Les crânes des races humaines, with Quatrefages, professor of anthropology at the Muséum naturel, in which he gives the measurements taken on the skulls of different "races", considered unequal to each other, and concentrates the study on those he claims "remained at the lowest rung of the ladder of civilizations" (p. VI). A member of numerous learned societies and part of scholarly networks in France and Europe, prolific author of memoirs, books and notes in journals, assistant then professor of anthropology at the Muséum from 1882 to 1908, he worked tirelessly to create the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro. He directed the museum from its creation in 1878 to 1906. -
Hannekom, Wayne Rhodesian soldier who fought to uphold white minority-led rule in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) from 1978 to 1980 during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation.
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Harding, John, 1st Baron Harding of Petherton
British Army officer and colonial administrator. Harding served in several twentieth century conflicts, including the First World War, the Second World War, and the Malayan Emergency. As Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1952 to 1955, Harding advising the British government during the Mau Mau rebellion, before going on to serve as the Governor of Cyprus from 1955 to 1957 during the Cyprus Emergency. -
Hardinge, Henry, 1st Viscount Hardinge
British soldier, politician and colonial administrator. Hardinge was Governor-General of India from 1844 to 1848. -
Harland, Edward James
Prominent English shipbuilder and politician in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century. Harland co-founded the shipping company Harland & Wolff with Gustav Wilhelm Wolff in 1861. Harland later served as Mayor of Belfast (1889-1886) and Member of Parliament for Belfast North (1889-1895). Harland & Wolff was actively involved in supporting Britain's maritime empire with ship-building yards across the UK. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Harland & Wolff also received orders for steamers from the Confederate States of America, although whether these orders were actually carried out has not yet been established. -
Harris, Arthur
Colonial air-force officer and Marshal of the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. Harris was the son of George Steel Travers Harris, an Indian Civil Service officer, and spent his early adult years in Rhodesia before fighting in Africa and Europe during the First World War. During the interwar years Harris served with the RAF in India, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Jordan, where he helped to suppress anti-colonial revolts as well as develop new area bombing techniques. After leading RAF Bomber Command in the Allies' bombing campaign against Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Harris moved to South Africa to briefly manage the South African Marine Corporation, before finally returning to the UK in 1953. -
Havelock, Henry
British Army general in the nineteenth century who fought in Burma, Afghanistan, Iran and India. -
Herbert, George, 13th Earl of Pembroke
Under-Secretary of State for War (1874-1875) -
Herbert, Sidney, 1st Baron Herbert of Lea
Secretary of State for the Colonies (1855) and Secretary of State for War (1859-1861). -
Heywood, Oliver
British banker in the nineteenth century. The Heywoods family had investments in the transatlantic slave-trade. -
Hill, Rowland, 2nd Viscount Hill
British politician in the nineteenth century. -
Hillary, William
British absentee slave-owner in Jamaica and philanthropist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hillary was the founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in 1824. Hillary's connections to figures across Britain’s maritime imperial economy, including politicians, merchants, slave-traders and slave-owners, were important in securing the financial backing needed for the creation of the charity. Some of the charity’s first patrons included figures such as George Hibbert who owed their riches to British slavery. -
Hogg, Alice
Alice Anna Hogg (née Graham), born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1846, was the daughter of William Graham (1817-1885), a Scottish politician, East India merchant, cotton manufacturer, and port shipper. In 1871, she married Quintin Hogg (1845-1903), who was a colonial merchant and philanthropist involved in sugar production in British Guiana. -
Hogg, Quintin
British colonial merchant and philanthropist in the nineteenth century. Hogg was the seventh son of James Weir Hogg (1790–1876), who was twice Chairman of the East India Company. He was also the brother-in-law of Charles McGarel (1788 - 1876), a former slave-owner in British Guiana, through his sister Mary Hogg (1829 - 1913). In 1864, Hogg entered McGarel's sugar merchant firm of Bosanquet, Curtis & Co. and was involved in managing colonial sugar production in Demerara, British Guiana. -
Holloway, Jane
British businesswoman, philanthropist, and the inspiration behind the founding of a women's college at Royal Holloway in London in the nineteenth century. -
Holloway, Thomas
British patent medicine vendor and philanthropist in the nineteenth century. -
Hook, Walter Farquhar
English cleric and Dean of Chichester. Hook's maternal grandfather, Sir Walter Farquhar MD (1738 - 1819), has been tentatively identified as an absentee slave-owner of estates in Jamaica by Legacies of British Slavery. -
Hope, John, 4th Earl of Hopetoun
British Army officer in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hope was involved in the suppression of Fédon's rebellion in Grenada in 1796, as well as the British capture of the French and Spanish West Indies. His son John Hope, 5th Earl of Hopetoun (1803-1843) unsuccessfully tried to claim slavery compensation as executor of the Blackness estate in Jamaica. -
Hughes, Thomas
English lawyer, judge, politician and author in the nineteenth century. Hughes's novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), a recollection of his time at Rugby and the experience of young men in the world of the British public school, was one of the foundational works of the Muscular Christianity philosophical movement. The emphasis Muscular Christianity placed on the importance of physical exercise and Christian instruction was highly influential to the culture of public schools in the Victorian era, many of whom would train young men for future colonial service overseas. -
Huskisson, William
President of the Board of Trade (1823-1827) and Secretary of State for War and the Colonies (1827-1828). -
Ingram, Herbert
British politician, journalist, and the founder of The Illustrated London News, which covered a number of events throughout the British Empire during the nineteenth century and beyond. -
Isaacs, Rufus, 1st Marquess of Reading
Viceroy and Governor-General of India (1921-1926). -
James II
King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1685 to 1688. James II was governor of the Royal African Company and its largest shareholder. -
Jerningham, Annie
British philanthropist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her first husband was Charles Mather of Longridge Towers, Berwick-upon-Tweed. She later remarried to Hubert Jerningham (1842-1914), a British colonial administrator. The origins of Charles Mather's wealth are unclear at present. Legacies of British Slavery has recorded a slavery compensation claim from a James Mather of South Shields (1799-1873), but there is no evidence currently connecting Charles to this family. -
John, Augustus
Welsh painter in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. -
Jones, Alfred Lewis
Welsh colonial businessman and ship-owner in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his life, Jones achieved a dominant position in the colonial shipping trade, as well as accruing many other landholdings and business investments. His career started, aged twelve, as an apprentice in the African Steamship Company in Liverpool in 1857. Jones had become a manager of the company in 1871 and began to expand his colonial investments in West Africa, particularly through his work with Elder, Dempster & Co.. By the 1890s, Jones had secured a vast business portfolio in the region, including shipping, landholdings, banking, and mining. He founded the Bank of British West Africa and the Liverpool Institute of Tropical Medicine in this period. Jones also opened up new commercial connections between West Africa and the Caribbean, serving as the inaugural President of the British Cotton Growing Association from 1902. Jones' colonial wealth was achieved through considerable violence, cruelty, and labour exploitation in Africa, as his close relationship to King Leopold II exemplifies. In 1891, for instance, Jones sponsored May French Sheldon to take a company trip to the Congo in order to downplay the extensive human rights abuses that were taking place in the colony. -
Kingsley, Charles
British clergyman, historian and novelist in the nineteenth century. Kingsley came from a family with ties to British slave-ownership in the Caribbean. His maternal grandfather, Nathan Lucas (1761-1828), was a slave-owner who owned estates in Barbados and Guiana. This personal relationship to the legacies of chattel slavery extended into Kingsley's own life, as evidenced by his support for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, or indeed his involvement in the Eyre Defence Committee in 1865 in defence of Governor Eyre's brutal repression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. Kingsley also recorded his travel experiences in the Caribbean in the work At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871). -
Kinloch, George
Scottish slave-owner and politician. Kinloch owned the Grange estate in Jamaica between 1795 and 1803 and was Member of Parliament for Dundee from 1832 to 1833. -
Kitchener, Horatio
Senior British Army officer and colonial administrator in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kitchener served as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army (1892-1899), Governor General of the Sudan (1899), Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in South Africa (1900-1902), Commander-in-Chief, India (1902-1909), British Consul-General in Egypt (1911-1914), and Secretary of State for War (1914-1916). Kitchener's colonial legacy has been defined, above all, by his decision to use concentration camps against Boer and black African civilians during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), with over 150,000 people interned in British camps across South Africa. An estimated 28,000 Boers and 20,000 black Africans died in these camps during the conflict. -
Laird, John
British shipbuilder and Member of Parliament for Birkenhead (1861-1874). The Laird family had a number of links to slavery and colonialism, as well as to the Confederate States of America. John Laird's father, William Laird (1780-1841), was a Glaswegian merchant and ropemaker who developed the Birkenhead Iron Works opposite Liverpool in the 1820s for ship construction. Direct links between Laird and slave-ownership / slave-trading have not been fully traced, but Glasgow and Liverpool were major British slave-trading ports and it is possible Laird would have supplied slave ships with ropes. John Laird's brother, Macgregor Laird (1808-1861), was a merchant involved in early efforts to open up colonial trade on the River Niger in West Africa. Macgregor financed Richard Lander (1804-1834; see also separate database entry) to undertake an expedition to the region in 1832. During the American Civil War, John Laird Sons & Company built four ships for the Confederate States Navy, which was fighting to preserve the institution of slavery in the United States, in violation of Britain's official policy of neutrality during the war. Two Laird-built ships, CSS Alabama and CSS Lark, were successfully delivered to the Confederacy. The other two ships, El Tousson and El Monassir (renamed HMS Wivern), were seized by the British government in 1863. The US government later brought legal action against the UK for damages caused by these ships, known as the Alabama Claims. John Laird Sons & Company (today operating under the name Cammell Laird) built a number of ships that saw service in the British Empire, such as HMS Birkenhead (1845), HMS Orontes (1862) and HMS Euphrates (1866). -
Lander, Richard
British colonial explorer in West Africa in the early nineteenth century. At the age of 13, Lander traveled to the Caribbean with a merchant and spent a brief year living in San Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominica Republic) from 1817 to 1818. He later accompanied Major W. M. G. Colebrooke on an expedition to Cape Colony in 1823, and Scottish explorer Hugh Clapperton on an expedition to West Africa from 1825 to 1827. Lander made two more travels to West Africa from 1830 to 1831 and from 1832 to 1834, where he died after being attacked by indigenous people. Lander's final travels in 1832 was financed by Liverpool merchants led by Macgregor Laird (see also the database entry for John Laird), meaning that that there is a very strong likelihood that slavery-derived wealth provided the resources to undertake this expedition to Africa. Lander briefly worked in a customs office in Liverpool from 1831-1832 and would have built up contacts in the city from this position. -
Lawrence, John
British Viceroy and Governor-General of India (1864-1869). -
Lawson, Wilfrid, 2nd Baronet
English radical and anti-imperialist Liberal Party politician in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. -
Lever, William, 1st Viscount Leverhulme
English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lever's wealth was generated principally through the manufacture and sale of soap and cleaning products. In the early twentieth century, Lever Brothers developed a number of colonial plantations in the Belgian Congo and the Solomon Islands, operated by subsidiary firms called Huileries du Congo Belge and Lever’s Pacific Plantations Limited, to provide the raw materials for manufacturing soap. -
Lewis, George Cornewall
British Home Secretary (1859-1861) and Secretary of State for War (1861-1863) during the American Civil War. Lewis's maternal grandfather, Sir George Cornewall 2nd Bart. (1748-1819) was the absentee slave-owner of the La Taste estate in Grenada. Sir George Cornewall 3rd Bart. (1774-1835), Lewis' uncle, inherited the estates and was awarded compensation for enslaved people after abolition. -
Lincoln, Abraham
President of the United States (1861-1865) -
Livingstone, David
Scottish colonialist, physician, Christian missionary, and explorer in Africa in the nineteenth century. Livingstone's early life and employment was associated with West Indian slavery. From 1823, he worked in Blantyre Mill, owned by Henry Monteith, who was in a partnership with two Glasgow-West India merchants in the 1810s. Later in life, after several years of experience in Africa, he condemned slave traders, but retained his respect for cotton merchants, who had financed his own education. -
Locke, John
English philosopher, physician and one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers. Locke had an investment in the Royal African Company between 1672 and 1675. As the Earl of Shaftesbury's personal secretary, Locke also served as the official clerk for the Council on Foreign Plantations and helped to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which explicitly promoted hereditary nobility and slavery in North America. -
Lowther, William, 1st Earl of Lonsdale
British politician in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His cousin, James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale (1736-1803) was a landowner, politician, and absentee slave-owner of the Lowther estate in Barbados from 1756 to 1802. History of Parliament describes William Lowther as inheriting 'vast wealth as well as a viscountcy from Sir James Lowther' upon the latter's death in 1802.