Black Lives, British Justice: Black people in London Criminal Justice Records 1720-1841

This dataset brings together all 698 known references to ‘Black’ or possibly Black African heritage people or groups in records of London criminal justice (1720-1841). Each entry includes references to primary sources mentioning the person(s), including in the Old Bailey Proceedings, Ordinary’s Accounts, and Middlesex Criminal Registers. Individuals are trial witnesses, victims, defendants, and people mentioned in passing during testimony. For each entry, a confidence level is offered by the authors, as a person’s ethnicity cannot always be determined with certainty. Evidence for making that judgment is provided. This dataset is useful for anyone interested in Black history in Britain, Black people and justice, or Black London during the age of enslavement.

Significant background material is available on the Old Bailey Online website, which provides additional context for these records. The authors also recommend the following works:

    * Kathleen Chater. Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales during the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660-1807 (Manchester, 2011).
    * Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past (Frank Cass, 1996).
    * Marika Sherwood. ‘Blacks in the Gordon Riots’, History Today, vol. 47 (1997), 24-28.

Each record includes details on the name of the Black individual(s), as well as information on up to three sources in which he/she/they have been identified, and an indication by the authors on the likelihood the person is actually Black.

Each entry has 17 columns of data, all of which are described in full in the ReadMe.txt file.