A letter
in today's Guardian comments on the role of the database at
"uncovering Britain’s imperial past". In a headline sense, I agree. I did some work on Wikipedia on Abel Rous Dottin, an MP from a West Indian slave-owning background, and his part in the launching of the London & Greenwich Railway: family connections were certainly behind some of the initial funding. Not at all the emphasis in the standard history of the L & G.
I thought some people would be interested in the more technical background (which amounts to inheritances, genealogy and land ownership records, politics and commerce); or at least what is being done on Wikidata in this direction. There is a property, P3023, for the database identifier for people. It occurs on 506 items. That sounds quite good, until you realise that the database has around 50,000 people mentioned, so only 1% of entries are so identified.
Of those, 298 have occupation "politician". and 241 are identified in the History of Parliament Online (sterling work by Andrew Gray means for the relevant period to 1832, Wikidata has complete coverage of MPs). That sounds like quite good coverage of the "West India lobby" and anti-abolitionism in Parliament.
On the other hand, one of the conclusions of the research in this area is that many of the fortunes made by Caribbean slave-owners were not in the public eye, in the same way. Further, the database is primarily about those who were compensated after the 1837 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It does have information digging further back: but for some reason the identifiers used are long and apparently random numbers, where those who were compensated form a simple and essentially unbroken sequence.
To sum up, we can reach for our old friend, the "low-hanging fruit", which appears to have been largely gathered so far. Information is sparse, in the database, in the average case: we cannot yet place most of these people, and the "long tail" of those who were given smaller sums is mostly opaque. (Sorry, mixed metaphors there, but never mind.)
There were large sums paid out, particularly to those who had acquired estates in British Guiana: and we don't always know much about them, because they were prominent only in commerce. And those who are central to the database are not in general those who built up and profited most from the plantation system, which peaked in commercial terms at least a generation before 1837. Matthew Parker's well-written "The Sugar Barons" gives the impression that the smaller landholders really were there to "make up the numbers".
The approach, now standard on Wikidata, is to put a dataset into the mix'n'match tool, and gradually cross-match it. That way has not been pursued in this case, because it isn't clear how to proceed, and much of the data is just not there for those receiving compensation (they would be marked N/A for matching, in the jargon). I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who could help with the first point.
Right now, honest piecemeal effort can bring a few more of the people involved into better focus.
Charles