Black People, Resistance, and the Legal Archive of Slavery in Britain, 1677-1824

The Black People, Resistance, and the Legal Archive of Slavery in Britain (LASB) dataset contains extracted information about the lives of enslaved people identified in the British judicial record involving enslaved persons from1677 to1824. The data was extracted from the British and Scottish archives and from the Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, a five-volume three-hundred-page anthology of court transcripts from the local, state, and federal levels and includes English, Canadian, and Jamaican cases. The dataset only includes the British cases concerning slavery and the status of enslaved persons in this time period. While the persons in this story appear in the British legal record, they were trafficked from the early English and Caribbean colonies; thus this research connects the diasporic experiences of enslaved persons and the way Black people navigated the geography of slavery in the British Empire. The dataset calls attention to their lives, not just their bondage, and recognizes what they endured, accomplished, and how they navigated the social, legal, and political landscape of Britain.