The Price of Knowledge: Universities and Slavery in Anglo-American Perspective

This article centers on the different ways that English and American universities have uncovered, publicized, and responded to their historical connections to transatlantic slavery. It argues that these differences reflect how national publics engage with their institutions of higher learning, and English campuses lack of the physical traces of enslavement that exist at some American universities, allowing the former’s students and faculty to view unfree labor as something that existed elsewhere. The author uses her home institution, the University of Manchester, as a case study of the challenges and prospects for this sort of enquiry in the UK context.