On 25 March, we commemorate the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We are also counting down until the centenary of the Slavery Convention, adopted on 25 September 1926.
To mark the day and kick off the six-month countdown to the centenary, we publish this blog where historians Ryan Hanley (RH) and Jake Subryan Richards (JSR) come together in discussion about historical archives, how they came to be, the unstoppable lives within them, and the act of remembering through them.
Ryan Hanley is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Exeter and Historian in Residence at Anti-Slavery International. He is the author of Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press, 2025).
Jake Subryan Richards is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025), which tells the story of people “liberated” from slaving ships by maritime patrols and then forced into bonded labour by various empires.
RH:
25 March marks the United Nations’ International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In reflecting on this day, I have been thinking about the relationship between remembrance, memorialisation, and the histories of enslavement and freedom.
At least here in the UK, historians are traditionally trained to approach our work in quite a detached, emotionless way. That idea has been challenged recently, particularly by Black feminist scholars working in the US, but in general, we’re still expected to remain as ‘objective’ as possible.
Your work, like mine, deals with the powerful and often very moving life stories of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. It seems strange – maybe even wrong – to deny any kind of investment in the idea of honouring their memory.
So, my first question is: how do you see the relationship between ‘remembrance’ and history writing, and how does this come through in your work on ‘liberated Africans’?
JSR:
Thank you for inviting me to think together about the International Day of Remembrance. The Day marks a system that affected the entire world in the past and the present, so it is a day for all of us.
As a historian, I often think about empathy and what that means – how to play fair with the dead because we will want future generations to play fair with us! In the case of ‘liberated Africans’— people rescued from slaving ships by anti-slave-trade patrols and forced by various empires to work to repay the debt of rescue—I show how the liberated Africans themselves thought that forced labour was wrong.
They did this in many ways. Some submitted legal petitions to protect themselves and their children. Others rose up on slaving ships and then continued these uprisings when they reached the land.
The cover of my book, The Bonds of Freedom, is itself an act of commemoration. The artist Lela Harris has reimagined one of the few surviving photographs of some liberated Africans. The original photograph is blurry and was made for the racist classification of African people. Harris has beautifully refocused our gaze on Aicheta and her baby, highlighting that liberated Africans like her had families and fought to protect them.
RH:
Artists play such an important role in shaping how we think about the history and memory of enslavement, and the transatlantic slave trade in particular. I actually only encountered Lela Harris’ powerful work through your book, so thanks for that!
Again, this is changing nowadays, but there has traditionally been a bit of tension between how artists and historians use historical materials to tell a story. In the past ten, twenty years, there has been a critical reassessment of how the materials we depend on to remember the victims and survivors of enslavement tend to reproduce the perspective of the enslaver or the coloniser.
Even the archives of nineteenth-century abolitionist organisations like the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (which went on to become Anti-Slavery International) are heavily influenced by colonial-era logics. But they are also, very often, the only sources that enslaved people left behind to remember them by.
How do you deal with recognising the limits of the archive and needing to use it anyway in your work?
JSR:
The first step for dealing with this tension is to recognise how lucky we are. One of the joys of history is hearing people from the past speak. Across history, most people have not had their voices recorded anywhere, or the records created have since been lost to us. So to hear a fragment of any voice again is precious, even if it means we historians are shameless eavesdroppers. So many sources remain unknown. They are difficult to access or preserve, or they are not catalogued, or they have been moved, or hidden. So, it is up to us to seek out new knowledge.
Scholars can acknowledge the context of the archive, like who created it, for what reason(s), in what form, and with what consequences (intended or not). And then we can outline who said and did what, and what the outcomes, or likeliest outcomes, were.
Considering you have worked with archives but also printed texts by Black authors, how do you approach your sources?
RH:
You mentioned joy there, in relation to our privilege in doing this work. That raises such an important point. Though today is a solemn commemoration, I think we do well to remember and honour the resilience of enslaved people as well as what they went through. Even when we’re thinking about a tragedy like transatlantic enslavement, it is possible to find joy in these archives, not just survival.
There’s something unstoppable about the lives you find there. Whatever the motivations of the record-keeper, the human relationships – and joy and pleasure are obviously a big part of that – remain, if you know how to find them. In a 2025 lecture, Thaviola Glymph described the archive of slavery as ‘spectacularly boisterous’ – not a graveyard but a place fizzing with life.
I’ve found a lot of evidence of resilience in my work. I tend to use texts written or dictated by people who survived slavery as my starting point, so there’s perhaps a different set of complexities around self-representation to grapple with. When someone tells their own life story, they are still telling a story, after all – and we always need to be aware that enslaved people weren’t often in charge of how their stories were published and marketed. But that question you raised about intended and unintended consequences is important. Why did survivors want to record their experiences? What did they include and what did they leave out? What did they want us to know, and why? How much of this life-writing is a conscious attempt to ‘bear witness’, and how much is it human drive to say, ‘look, I was here – I was born’ ?
As a historian, you have to ask all these questions, even if (especially if) some of them don’t have straightforward answers. Often, the stories we find don’t have neat or satisfying endings. And your work shows us that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire is one of those stories.
Do you often find uncertainty, or unfinished business in your work? How does it affect your approach to research and remembrance?
JSR
When thinking historically, I think it is helpful to keep two kinds of stories in mind. One is the story of the people in the past and their “unstoppable lives”, in your memorable phrase. The other is the story of the source of knowledge about the people. How do we know what we think we know about them? How did that source get created, communicated, preserved, maybe changed, and then passed down to us?
Weaving these two stories together, as I do for African people “liberated” under anti-slave-trade law, is the task of the historian. This weaving also opens our eyes again to how the way things are today is not the way they were in the past. And they do not need to be that way in the future. So, historical thinking opens the creative space for remembrance and for justice. Historical knowledge and the creative work of justice are continual acts of striving. History and justice are never complete. So, we strive on.