Tanner Humanities Center

The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 led to an illegal traffic in slaves in Britain’s Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies. Britain’s government attempted to curb this by mandating the registration of the “lawfully enslaved” in every slave-holding colony. Because copies of these registers were kept in a central office in London, they were one of few ways in which an individual could be vouched for across the British empire. Predating birth certificates, slave registration was thus among the first modern forms of identity documentation. In documenting some combination of name, color, employment, age, stature, country of origin, distinguishing marks, and kinship relations these government records participated in codifying how identity was coming to be understood in the early nineteenth-century British world. Despite government claims that this practice safeguarded their property, however, planters fiercely resisted slave registration. This was not only because they saw this measure as unwarranted interference in colonial society. It was also because the registration process went well beyond a population accounting. The requirement to record each individual on a separate line with discrete data, compelled planters to acknowledge that the enslaved were unique persons even while registering them as chattel.