Slave Registers and British Guiana: Life and Resistance on Slave Plantations

<p dir="ltr">Slave registers are a major source for the study of British colonial slavery in its final two decades, yet they have been little used by historians. The article employs two case studies to show how these records allow us to reconstruct a collective profile of the enslaved and to sketch fuller portraits of individual persons. The first is James Blair’s Blairmont estate in Berbice, where slave registration records provide valuable insight into family structures. The second case study considers John Gladstone’s Success estate on neighbouring Demerara, epicentre of a major slave revolt in 1823. Here registers, correlated with other sources, yield a fuller picture of the insurgents and enable us to place them in the foreground of the story. We conclude that slave registration records can be used for purposes for which they were never intended, to write richer histories of people and place in the British Caribbean.</p>