‘Many of the most successful Quaker merchants and industrialists owed their fortunes to transatlantic slavery.’ Photo: by Tyler Merbler on Flickr
Untold stories: Julia Bush on Bristol Quakers and transatlantic chattel slavery
‘Generations of enslaved Africans laboured to enrich the Dickinson family.’
by Julia Bush
21st June 2024
In 1655, a man called Francis Dickinson took part in Britain’s conquest of Jamaica. He was awarded a land grant for his contribution. He became a Quaker soon after, and thus the Dickinson family in turn became one of several Bristol Quaker families who owned plantations and used an enslaved African workforce. Francis’s eighteenth-century heirs inherited four profitable plantations. Two of his descendants still identified themselves as Quakers even when claiming and receiving government compensation for the abolition of British slavery in the 1830s.
