Researching legacies of enslavement in a post‑abolition women’s college

Difficulties and dangers: researching legacies of enslavement in a post-abolition women’s college, five years on.  

By Toyin Akinkunmi and Tiger Chan. This piece reflects the research experiences and perspectives of the authors, who contributed to  Newnham College’s investigation into its financial and social legacies of enslavement as student researchers. 

A post-abolition college and an uncomfortable question  

In the summer of 2021 we began our archival research with a central question: did Newnham College have legacies of enslavement?  

Over the subsequent months we made a digital map, connecting the college to key founding figures and to enslaved people. Alongside this, we wrote a report and presented them both to Newnham College’s Governing Body in May 2022. We recommended Newnham should fund reparative justice and further research, make the report and map publicly available, and produce educational materials from them. 

What we found 

As an institution founded after slavery’s abolition in 1871, we were unsure whether we would find legacies of enslavement. However, we found connections to slavery in Demerara (later British Guiana), Mauritius, Jamaica, Antigua, Brazil, and the United States, through banking, merchant, and cotton textile families in the Liverpool/Manchester area. Multiple women and men who gave to the College garnered or inherited money from enslavement. This surprised some members of College. 

Intellectually and emotionally, the project exposed us to the difficulties and the dangers of researching legacies of slavery. 

What is an appropriate methodology for a post-abolition women’s college? 

We learned that only looking at large donors didn’t reflect the nature of most donations. 

Multiple members of a single family often donated in small amounts. The world of early women’s higher education was small. As a passion project, administrators, staff, and donors overlapped. Supporters often chipped in wherever they could, in time, labour, or funds. Therefore, we looked at communities, not individuals, to capture the fluid and social nature of the College’s founding. We also took a genealogical approach to trace inheritance across generations. 

Some of Newnham’s key champions came from the Liverpool and Manchester area, such the College’s first Principal Anne Jemima Clough. This social network intertwined significantly with several prominent banking, merchant, and cotton textile families, such as the Gladstones, Ewarts, Yates-Thompsons, Calders and Aikins. Newnham College’s Yates-Thompson Library is named after Henry Yates-Thompson, one of Newnham’s largest donors and a member of two of Liverpool’s biggest slaving families, the Yates and the Thompsons. 

Money didn’t just move in one direction from father to son. It often moved through intermarried families and between female friends. Focusing on women meant we were incentivised to see multiple ways to inherit, and multiple types of heirs. 

To represent this interconnected web of supporters, and the multi-directional flows of money, we repurposed a stakeholder mapping software called Kumu (see figure 1). This came with its own challenges. 

How should we represent enslaved people? 

Representing enslaved people with respect and accuracy was challenging, given our reliance on sources that accounted for them as property. We encountered brief flashes of them: a name they probably didn’t go by, a tattoo, how old they were when they were sold or died.  Despite the lack of data we desired, the data we obtained – numerical, accounting – connected a staggering number of enslaved people to the college.  

Should we assign a unique element type to the enslaved, to differentiate their presence and condition from college supporters on our map?  

No, making a new ‘person’ category would replicate a dehumanising violence. Instead, we decided on a thick black arrow connecting enslaver to enslaved, to emphasise enslavement as a relationship that had to be routinely reinforced, rather than the natural state of a person (figure 2).

Should we limit the number of enslaved people on our digital map?  

When we started adding them, we had around 300 elements on the digital map. The number of people enslaved on a single property alone would double that. We worried about making it harder to find Newnham’s key founders and supporters, which we initially considered to be the main goal of our research.  

We chose to let the presence of the enslaved people dwarf the famous Newnhamites, whose lives have been chronicled as valued history. We hoped to disrupt the common rhetoric that slavery was so ubiquitous that it could not, or should not, be accounted for. Looking at the map and knowing we’re only seeing a tiny fraction of those whose exploitation built our College was an overwhelming sensation – as it should be.  

The greatest danger of them all: a call to action

At the end of the studentship, the disquiet we felt at our findings was tempered by our hopes for reparative justice. 

Five years on, the library and archive team, communications team, fellows, and students of the College have made valuable use of the report. The college legacies of enslavement student-staff working group been in conversation with Girton college, the library hosted an exhibition of the research and student members of the group ran a workshop on reparative justice. 

We are frustrated but unsurprised by the slow pace of change. We feel there is room for a deeper material reckoning amongst students and staff with what the legacy of slavery at Newnham means and what it demands. By far the greatest danger when researching legacies of slavery is that the findings function as a confession, rather than an urgent call to action. 

Full report and map accessible via the Newnham librarians. We would like to thank Dr Mezna Qato, our academic supervisor, Frieda Midgeley, the College archivist and Eve Lacey the College librarian for their support of the project.

About the authors

Toyin Akinkunmi is an independent researcher with a BA degree in History and an MPhil degree in World History, both from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on histories of gender, care, and enslavement in the British Caribbean. 

Tiger Chan is an ESRC funded PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Cambridge. Their research focuses on the production and management of ‘hoarding’ as form of material deviance in Singapore. They have been a member of the Legacies of Enslavement Working Group at Newnham College since 2023.