As part of the Newnham Legacies of Enslavement programme, Library staff have been seeking to better understand and critically appraise the complex histories of our collections.
Using provenance records, they have been identifying rare books and manuscripts which may have an indirect connection to legacies of enslavement. These might be volumes whose previous owners acquired them from the financial proceeds of slave-ownership or who purchased them with wealth derived from markets that relied on slave-based labour.
Library staff have so far focused on the donations of Henry Yates Thompson. In addition to funding the building of the 1897 and 1907 library buildings, Yates Thompson was a great collector of books and manuscripts and, over a period of time, he and his widow presented some 50 rare books and manuscripts to the College. Other notable beneficiaries were the Fitzwilliam Museum and the British Museum. Henry Yates Thompson’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Brooks Yates, was a slave-owner receiving compensation in 1833, and Henry Yates Thompson was in turn born into affluence, his family’s wealth generated, at least partly, through the Atlantic slave trade. (It is noted that Henry Yates Thompson’s An Englishman in the American Civil War: the diaries of Henry Yates Thompson, 1863 records his personal opposition to slavery.)
Henry Yates Thompson appears to have been meticulous about recording the provenance of his books and manuscripts. This has allowed us to identify two medieval manuscripts and four early printed books as having originally been in the collection of Joseph Brooks Yates. Newnham College Library has digitised one medieval manuscript, Piers Plowman, in Cambridge Digital Library, and added details of its provenance linking it to the Legacies of Enslavement enquiry.