There is a lack of understanding across Britain of how the structures of racism function and how those structures have existed across history; and without having a foundation to understand the histories of British racism, it's impossible to understand the complex realities of racism today. In these two videos,
we're going to speak to academics from around the university to help us examine the history of racism and track their impact on modern Britain.
It's easy for Britain to feel detached from slavery.
We're taught it's ancient history and that it took place hundreds of miles away in other countries, but the wealth and benefits of slavery were largely felt in Britain and continue to be felt here today.
Dr Rosie Knight and Dr Michael Bennett have been studying Sheffield's links to slavery, both in the slave trade and how the city campaigned actively to end the slave trade.
I'm Dr Rosie Knight.
I'm a lecturer in American history.
I'm Dr Michael Bennett.
I'm a historian of empire and slavery in the 17th and early 18th centuries.
Sheffield is well known for its history as a centre of radical working class politics, including anti-slavery or abolitionist activity in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
But the city and the region's various connections to the enslavement of Africans in the Atlantic world, which stretch across three centuries, have often been overlooked.
Sheffield is a complex and important case study because it reveals how British links to historical slavery weren't just confined to port cities - Bristol, London, Glasgow, Liverpool - but had important links as well to inland manufacturing centres like Sheffield, like Manchester. Sheffield as a case study also reveals how the economic benefits of slavery weren't just confined to the British elite, but also lowly nail makers.
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Sheffield in the wider region, its manufacturers and businesses, families and individuals had many different kinds of connections to and involvement in the mass enslavement of African peoples in the Americas.
England was expanding overseas and perhaps most importantly, the first English colonies were founded in the Caribbean and North America in this period, with Virginia in 1607, Barbados in 1627 and Jamaica being conquered from the Spanish in 1655.
All of these colonies either started out or would very soon become what historians call "slave societies" in inverted commas.
These are societies in which slavery dominated political, economic and cultural life.
Sometimes, the very instruments of enslaved people's forced labour were created here in Sheffield. Due to its steel industry
Sheffield became an important centre for the manufacture of the plantation hoe and supplied markets in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil.
Plantation hoes were widely used by enslaved people in the production of crops.
For instance, in digging holes to plant crops in the fields. In the US, thousands of formerly enslaved African-Americans were interviewed in the 1930s, and the interviewees recalled standing in the dark leaning on their homes, waiting for their long day's work to commence.
They described the arduous work of hoeing whilst trying to care for their children or hoeing whilst they were only children themselves.
Yet these interviews also reveal how plantation tools could be transformed from objects of forced labour into objects of resistance.
A hoe was a close by weapon for enslaved people who were accosted by their overseers and enslavers when working in the fields, and they could inflict serious injuries.
One interviewee, named Fanny Alexander described how when an overseer went to whip an enslaved woman, the rest of the women all gathered together and armed themselves with their hoes and chased him out of the field.
Besides being weapons, hoes were used in cooking food and became parts of songs and sayings.
And so what on the surface might seem like a fairly simple tool can in fact reveal the multifaceted lives of the people who worked with these tools and the ways that enslaved people use them in ways that manufacturers and enslavers did not intend.
But whilst these tools were being used in the United States, they were being made here in Sheffield.
So Sheffield manufacturers also profited from selling goods into the plantation system, into the plantation economy in the Caribbean and North America, and in 1662 - 1663 we see George Sitwell, a Sheffield based iron master who was born in Eckington and had business operations in and around the Sheffield and Chesterfield region
discussing with London merchants the prospect of producing sugar cane rollers and these rollers and stokes would have been shipped to the Caribbean, where they would have been used by enslaved people to produce sugar in horrific conditions where the loss of limbs and other debilitating injuries were quite common.
So people who hailed from the Sheffield region in this period also travelled overseas to the Caribbean in the 17th century, becoming major plantation owners and enslavers as well.
A good example of this is Ralph Fretwell, who was baptised in Sheffield in 1631.
At age 26
he was in Barbados speculating in the sugar boom and making his fortune in that way through the profits of the labour of enslaved Africans.
Now around 1690, after making a fortune in sugar production and the exploitation of African people, he returned to England and to his native homelands in South Yorkshire, where he constructed Hellaby Hall using the profits made from sugar and slavery.
Now today, Hellaby Hall is a Grade two listed building in Rotherham and is a luxury hotel, and it provides an example of how the profits of the enslavement of Africans influenced the built environment of the Sheffield region and how those legacies are still felt today.
As we look ahead to the 18th century, we see massive growth and expansion in Britain, which is usually credited to the industrial revolution.
But the fact is, this growth was only made possible by the slave trade.
So looking ahead to the 18th century, the colonies in North America and the Caribbean were really significant to the prosperity of Britain during the 18th century.
As Malachy Postlethwayt, the British political economist, candidly put it in 1745, British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation.