Travel Licence of a Slave man named William

Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples of the Caribbean.

The document is a license to allow an enslaved person named William Henry to Demerara as witnessed or verified by Richard Wickham.

The relevance of this document lies in its proof that the authority required by an owner to take one of his or her enslaved with them to another jurisdiction resided with the Governor of the colony. In the case of this document the Governor who granted the permission was Stapleton Cotton-Lord Combermere - whose name appears on the document. Permission for the owner of enslaved persons became increasingly important following the abolition of the British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807.

Licenses such as this became mandatory for slave owners desirous to take their slaves abroad so that they would not be accused of participating in the illicit trade of enslaved persons.

Following the abolition of the British Slave Trade, abolitionists, urged the British Government to pass legislation in the British Parliament for a registration of all of the enslaved in the British West Indies. This, the abolitionists, claimed would create a detailed census of the enslaved on each plantation and in each colony.

With this mechanism in place, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a slave master in the British West Indies to participate in the illegal slave trade. Documents such as this license were, therefore, directly related to this effort to suppress the illegal movement of the enslaved following the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, and represents the tangible evidence of this effort.

The Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples of the Caribbean contains invaluable source material for studying the history of Barbados and the model of development for the plantation economies of the Caribbean and North America in the 17th-19th centuries. Issues of leadership, control, ownership and status amongst Afro-Caribbean populations are explicitly illuminated in this context. Instead of assuming a simple transmigration of social and political behavior from metropolis to colony, they provide evidence of the symbiosis which developed between the two. Such research is enabled by the ability to access and analyze such documents.