Research seminar: 'Why am I writing about a dead white man again?’ Archival anxieties, anti-slavery networks, and the case for Elizabeth Pease Nichol

‘Miss Pease, I like very much,’ American abolitionist Anne Phillips wrote to Maria Weston Chapman in July 1839. ‘[George] Thompson told us she was his right-hand man, his amanuensis, his counsellor everything… [she] is a very interesting and intelligent woman.’¹ 

In 2024 I finished a long-running project exploring the relationship between British abolitionism and East India Company colonialism in the early nineteenth century. Attracted by a rich archive of public speeches and private correspondence the career and travels of anti-slavery lecturer and East India reformer George Thompson soon became my narrative focus. Yet there were other potential protagonists; ones whose experiences and archives didn’t lend themselves as easily to the story I wanted to tell, but who were perhaps even more interesting as a result. One such, Elizabeth Pease (later Pease Nichol), appears as the silent recipient of many of Thompson’s letters held in John Rylands Library, Manchester. A prominent anti-slavery activist in her own right, Pease was the founder of the Darlington Ladies Anti-Slavery Society and a lynchpin of trans-Atlantic epistolary networks connecting British and American abolitionists. She was an important organising force behind the British India Society, and later in later life also a suffragist, an anti-vivisectionist, and a critic of the Contagious Diseases Act. Yet despite a biography penned in 1899, she has received comparatively little scholarly attention in her own right. This paper reflects on how we choose our research subjects, and how my last project might have been different if I had centred Elizabeth Pease Nichol instead of George Thompson.

¹ Anne Phillips to Maria Weston Chapman, 30 July 1839, in Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists, pp. 77-78.

Professor Andrea Major.

Having received a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2004, I joined the School of History at the University of Leeds in September 2009. My work focuses on the relationship between Britain and India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with a particular interest in colonial philanthropy, social and gender issues such as sati (widow-burning) and slavery, and the impact of empire ‘at home’.