In her novel Mansfield Park, Jane Austen has one of her characters, an absentee slaveholder, sojourn in the West Indies to rather vaguely tend to his “business” or “affairs.” The five authors of Legacies of British Slave-Ownership aim to counter this sort of “euphemism and evasion” (1) by foregrounding the importance of slavery to the story of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even twentieth-century British elites.

Restricting their focus to the consequences for those elites of having owned slaves (rather than on the much broader legacies of slavery), they argue that former slaveholders were able rather quickly to reinvent themselves as modern men after losing their battle against emancipation, but that slave owning nonetheless shaped their family histories more powerfully than this distancing suggested. Many former slave-owning families, they find, proved resilient and adaptable enough to prosper handsomely in Victorian Britain, especially in finance and commerce. In fact, many former slave-owners were so well placed that they powerfully contributed to the changes modernizing the Victorian British economy. In light of their findings, the authors contend, it is “impossible any longer to consider the nineteenth-century City” without reference to former slave-owners' role in its rise (112). But for all the former slaveholders' posturing as thoroughly modern beginning with the Era of Reform that swept away their holdings in human property, their family histories show that slave-ownership “had a cumulative weight, in the sense that wealth, status and privilege derived” therefrom “in many cases was sustained for decades beyond Emancipation” (13). Katie Donington's chapter, for instance, traces the Hibbert family's rise from “property in commodities to property in people and finally to investment in land, political position and cultural capital” (203), making it clear that no one of those steps could have been omitted.

Despite the boldness of the quote above about the city, the authors advance their arguments in supremely careful ways. “We do not maintain that the slave-owners created modern Britain,” they disclaim. “But we do not think the making of Victorian Britain can be understood without reference to those slave-owners” (27). So while they find it irrefutable that slave-ownership constituted “a significant component of overall Victorian wealth” (65), they consciously avoid the “temptation to assert its absolute centrality” (251). The project rests upon an impressive database of information relative to British slave-owning families, but the authors seem almost as keen to highlight the limits as the considerable strengths of that source base. This nuanced approach may not satisfy purists in a field that has Eric Williams as its founding father and has been furthered by such brilliantly combative arguers as Seymour Drescher, but it made the book's assertions more persuasive to this reviewer.

The collaborative nature of this volume may in large part explain its cautious tone. While no one chapter is written by the entire group, this book is the product of five authors, all of whom are involved directly or indirectly with the Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-Ownership 1763–1833 project at University College London. Whatever their individual argumentative styles might be, the nature of such group-centered, even institutional, work would seem to militate against audacity. The ongoing nature of this project—and the scrupulousness of the authors—also lends this volume the air of an interim report rather than an attempt at conclusive interpretation.

To be sure, there are times when even this book seems over-argued. In the introduction, the contention that “slave-ownership is virtually invisible in British history” (1) rests upon one source: the absence of this theme in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Given the rising scholarly attention to slavery within British historiography, and the fact that the 2007 commemoration of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in Britain dwarfed parallel celebrations in other countries, the writers of this introduction could have done more to remove the suspicion of having set up a straw man here. And Catherine Hall's assertion that former slave-owners made vital contributions to late Victorian debates on race overreaches its evidence, given that only a few of the writers she cites seem to have had much prominence or influence. It is hard to walk away from that chapter and believe that late Victorian racial thought went in a substantially different direction because of the intervention of former slave-owners.

All that said, however, this volume adds up to a valuable entry that will further (even if it does not inaugurate, as claimed) the integration of slave-owning and its legacy into the narrative of the rise of modern Britain. That it eschews a take-no-prisoners style may well sustain its influence in the long term. And it models the sort of excellent scholarship that can be done in future, drawing on the rich database many of its authors are helping to assemble.