Sheffield and Slavery in the Atlantic World c.1760-1888

This thesis unearths how Sheffield, a seemingly isolated metal-producing town in Britain’s industrial heartlands, engaged with slavery in the Americas between 1760-1888. It reexamines Sheffield’s local history via Atlantic, Global, and New Imperial methodologies, drawing together a wealth of underexplored business records, manuscripts, pamphlets, newspapers, and oral testimonies. Atlantic slavery played an important, overlooked role in Sheffield’s industrial and economic development. Although slavery was not the sole economic determinant, markets generated by the Transatlantic trade and plantation system, particularly in the United States, distinctively influenced Sheffield’s manufacture of cutlery, tools, and steel. Slavery also had a profound impact on local society. Sheffield harboured various debates over slavery that incorporated activists, politicians, traders, and cutlers, and spanned boundaries of class, race, and gender. However, the town’s economic connections to slavery had an inconsistent impact on these debates. Instead, there was a complex shifting relationship between local manufacturing interests and moral discourse. The dissertation explains this through a novel producer-side exploration of the concept of ‘moral geography.’ It argues that shifting spatial frames of reference shaped the town’s commercial and sociopolitical interactions with Atlantic slavery. Enslavement inside Britain’s Empire was understood as a more direct moral responsibility, while slavery elsewhere could be treated as less problematic, a tension revealed prominently during the American Civil War. Therefore, Sheffield’s fluctuating relationships to Atlantic slavery must be explored across a broad periodisation, considering events long before and after British emancipation. Taking this local approach provides an original perspective on Britain’s relationship to Atlantic enslavement, revealing a unique range of multi-domain connections. Sheffield was not simply a city “built on slavery”, nor was it a paragon of humanitarian sentiment. Rather, this thesis advances historiography through a nuanced consideration of the interplay between various actors and vast economic, social, political, and cultural developments within a provincial centre.