Legacy of the Caribbean

Harewood House is a big, grand country house in Yorkshire, England. Today, Harewood is a museum, welcoming thousands of people every year.

Harewood House was built over 250 years ago, by the wealthy Lascelles family. The money they used to build the house came from the transatlantic slave trade, which was a huge part of society at the time, with many rich families and organisations like the Church and Royal family making money this way.

This was a terrible time in history, when millions of people were taken from their homes in Africa and forced to work on the other side of the world, in America, the Caribbean, and sometimes in Europe too.

Hundreds of years ago, European countries wanted to find ways to grow their empires. Europeans sailed across the world finding lands that were rich with minerals, plants and spices. These lands were already home to Indigenous people who had lived there for thousands of years. Many of them died after the Europeans arrived due to violence and disease.

Europeans looked for people who they could force to work for free, so they could make as much money as possible. Soon, Europeans looked to Africa for workers, buying people from African slave traders or kidnapping them from their homes, before forcing them onto ships and transporting them to the Caribbean and the Americas to work on plantations. Here, they grew luxury goods, such as cotton, sugar and tobacco.

Some people involved in this process became very rich. Like other powerful families, the Lascelles made their fortune by selling sugar and rum made by enslaved people and owning sugar plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada and Tobago. They also bought shares in the ships that transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.

Henry Lascelles was the first in the family to be directly involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. He made enough money to buy the land that Harewood House stands on today.

When Henry died, his son Edwin took over Henry’s land and began building a huge country house. The beautiful architecture, furnishings and gardens that you can see today wouldn’t have been possible without the suffering of enslaved workers on his plantations in the Caribbean.

Enslaved people were forced to work on plantations in terrible conditions. They often worked very long hours in hot weather and were not allowed to rest. They did not have much food to eat and were forced to live in unclean places, and they weren’t allowed to leave. They also faced violence and mistreatment from their enslavers.

Enslaved people were resilient and found ways to resist the life that was forced on them. Some stole food, or refused to work. Others got together and fought back in a big way, fighting their enslavers, destroying buildings and setting fire to fields – this was called a rebellion. It was these acts of resistance that helped to bring an end to slavery for good.

Thanks to the bravery of the enslaved people, and the people who campaigned against slavery across Europe, slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1833. The Lascelles family sold most of their plantations in the early 1800s. The last plantation was sold by another branch of the family in 1975. When slavery was abolished, plantation owners including the Lascelles were given money to cover the loss of their enslaved workforce, but the people that were freed received nothing to start their new lives.

Now we look at Harewood, and many other grand places in Britain, we can recognise that even though they are beautiful, they have a sad and difficult past. Today, Harewood House and the Lascelles family is honest about its history, working to make Harewood a place where people can remember the past and create a fairer future.