Professor Catherine Hall on Capitalism and Slavery


Ealing Historical Association lecture will look at latest research


Professor Catherine Hall. Picture: UCL

October 1, 2024

The next talk to be hosted by the Ealing branch of the Historical Association will be given by Professor Catherine Hall on the subject, ‘Capitalism and Slavery. Where are we now?’. She will look at the changing perceptions of historians of the subject and the most up to date research.

The lecture is taking place on Tuesday 8 October at 7.30 pm at Ealing Green Church, The Green (W5 5QT) with doors opening ten minutes before commencement.

This talk will open with Eric Williams’s classic text Capitalism and Slavery (1944), discussing the main arguments and the critiques which were mounted against it. It will then go on to talk about the project developed at University College London, in part inspired by Williams, the ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ – www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. This research aimed to demonstrate the extent of British involvement with business of slavery – its contribution to the building of the nation’s wealth and power and to the embedding of racial thinking in British culture and society.

Professor Hall will finally reflect on the significance of the eighteenth century historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, drawing on her recent book, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (CUP: 2024).

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.

Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire. She has studied the long relationship between England and Jamaica.

All are welcometo attend . Members pay £15 per annum and for visitors a donation of £5 per talk is suggested with no payment expected from students.

Meetings are usually held on the second Tuesday of each month at Ealing Green Church at 7.30pm, with the exception of the November meeting which takes place at Twyford School at 6.30pm. Talks are live events but with the speaker’s permission the association aims to make a recording available afterwards to those registering on Eventbrite (the booking link will be available on our website one month in advance of each talk)

Programme - November 2024 - June 2025

2024

12 November Emeritus Professor Chris Read, Warwick University, ‘Violence and peaceful persuasion in Lenin's approach to the Russian Revolution 1917-24', speaking to the sixth-form evening at Twyford CofE High school, W3 9PP, 6.30 pm.

10 December AGM & Christmas Social

2025

14 January Dr Andrew Lownie, Senior Research Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Buckingham, ‘Issues in Writing Modern Political Biographies’

11 February Anne Fletcher, author, ‘Widows of the Ice: The Women that Scott’s Antarctic Expedition Left Behind’

11 MarchEmeritus Professor James Manor, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, ‘The Debatable Resilience of Nehru's Liberal Democracy in India ‘

8 April Julia Boyd, author, ‘Off the beaten track: researching and writing social histories of the Third Reich'

13 May Professor Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick, ‘What can you learn from a cookbook (other than how to cook)?’

10 June Dr Ismini Pells, Oxford Department for Continuing Education, ‘Maimed Soldiers, War Widows and the Human Cost of the English Civil Wars: stories from the Civil War Petitions project’

For more details of the association’s programme of talks for the coming season visit its web site.

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