"Bridgerton's Forgotten Enslavers: Inside Jane Austen's Candy-Land"

"Jane Austen's Candy-Land: Inside Bridgerton's Forgotten Slaveowners"
With Tré Ventour-Griffiths

Summary
Economics historians would describe ‘absentee slave-owners’ as people who managed enslaved human property and the land they worked while geographically and psychologically removed from the terror of the plantation. Further, as half of the £20m compensation paid to the enslavers in the 1834 payout when the government compensated the enslavers as a pre-condition for ending the Atlantic Trade, went to the nearly 3000 absentees living in Britain.

This lecture uses Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton as a case study for the ways in which period dramas set in the early nineteenth century, use romance as tool to maintain white supremacy. In other words, not having to learn how whiteness works is how whiteness works. The escapism of Bridgerton and the more recent diversifying of regency capitalism on screen (see: Persuasion, 2022; Hallmark's Sense & Sensibility, 2024 among others), is a process that asks consumers to ignore the British Empire's violence against the Global Majority, by making Black and Brown people part of the furniture of capitalist extraction.

"Jane Austen's Candy-Land" challenges the notion that Bridgerton's world is one of rich nice white liberals that accepts Black folks no questions asked, instead reframing this world as one of colonising absentee enslavers. Here, profits of enslaved labour uphold a culture of debutante balls, stately homes, and whiteness as property. It is time viewers at home start watching Bridgerton and Austen more critically, through the violence of empire that built and sustained the Regency and set the conditions for the making of Victorian Britain.


Bio
Tré Ventour-Griffiths (me) is a multiply-disabled independent historian, creative writer, sociologist and Black history consultant whose work mainly focuses on UK place-based history in the town and rural, life writing, real and imagined hauntings, pop culture, and violence, from the overt to institutional. His work in popular culture looks at the links between systems of violence and cultural production as well as the social commentaries, questions of identity, and history in UK-US popular entertainment. He has written and presented on texts like Marvel films, Star Trek, horror, and period dramas, from Jane Austen to Call the Midwife. As a travelling scholar-creative, Tré writes on Substack under The Avid Pedestrian.

Venue:
Central London, TBC


Event Running Time:
(we recommend arriving at 6:30pm if you're eating, and 7pm if drinks only)
Doors from 6pm
Introduction: 7:25pm
Lecture: 7:30pm
Q&A: 8:10pm

Food:
If you plan on eating at the venue, we recommend arriving as early as possible so the kitchen can get your order out before the talk starts.

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