Lunch Hour Lecture | The Black Industrial Revolution

About the lecture:

The Black Industrial Revolution: A Transatlantic History for a Digital Present

To mark Black History Month, Prof Matthew Smith and his research team will showcase a new project of the Centre for the Study of the legacies of British Slavery at UCL, that aims to present the First Industrial Revolution in a new light. The project draws on the expertise of the Centre's researchers and the work of a transatlantic team in Jamaica and London to create new approaches to understanding the connections between British slavery in Jamaica and the expansion of industrialisation in Britain.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Matthew J. Smith is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Prior to this, Professor Smith worked at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica where he was Professor of Caribbean History. He has special interest in the nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica.

About the chair:

Matthew Stallard has been a Research Associate at the CSLBS since January 2020 with a focus on database development and innovative digital techniques to reconstruct personal and community histories of enslavement as part of the Valuable Lives project. He has also worked as project manager on many of the Centre’s public history collaborations, including co-leading the Global Threads project tracing connections between global narratives of resistance, solidarity, colonization and slavery and Manchester’s industrial heritage. He has published extensively on environment, colonization, class, and race in Victorian public discourse and post-industrial regional identity in his Inventing the Black Country research project. He has conducted public and community history projects, engagement events, and oral history research across three continents and worked as a contributor and advisor on the Guardian’s Cotton Capital series. He completed his PhD in American Studies at the University of Manchester in 2017.