The Institute is pleased to announce the publication of a new digital resource on the life of Bryan Edwards (1743-1800), compiled by Honorary Fellow Dr Karina Williamson. The Bryan Edwards website brings together images, genealogies, original documents and sources to give a fuller and more accurate account of the life, writings, and career of Edwards, known in his time as a politician, merchant, planter, enslaver and historian of the British West Indies.
Dr Williamson said,
Black Lives Matter, woke and cancel culture, and toppling statues have all been high-profile examples of recent political, social, cultural and economic debates in the UK, north America and elsewhere. These debates have also included a notable increase in attention being paid to the practice of slavery, slave owners and enslaved people in the Caribbean and Americas since the 1600s.
Bryan Edwards (1743-1800) was a slave owner and a British MP, who wrote the first known history of the Caribbean. He was a staunch defender of the slave trade. His history of the Caribbean included the notorious poem, “The Sable Venus: An Ode” by Isaac Teale.
This website, which is work still in progress, is an academic study into the life of Edwards, his family and people associated with him. These days, studies of slave owners could run the risk of being seen as placing the person (or the author) on some sort of pedestal and perhaps therefore a legitimate target for a cyberspace “toppling”. This is certainly not the intention of this study, nor should it be used in any way to defend slavery, past, present, or future. Through increasing our knowledge of slave owners, especially influential and well-known ones, not only can we better understand how the appalling phenomenon of slavery was developed and sustained, but it may also help ensure that nothing like it could ever happen again. Beyond those with a purely scholarly interest in the history and literature of the Caribbean, this is the only other purpose that the website should be used for. I hope you find it of interest.
The site can be viewed at https://www.bryan-edwards.iash.ed.ac.uk.