Funding London’s Elite Music Scene Through the Profits of Slavery in the 18th Century & Beyond: Bio-Bibliographical Work as Reparative History
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 2520 Cimarron Street, Los AngelesNineteenth Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade Lecture by David Hunter, Librarian Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin Until eleven years ago, when David Hunter found Handel’s signature on several share transfer slips in the records of the Royal African Company at The National Archives, Kew, London, no one had thought to investigate the ways in which the profits of the slave trade and the plantation economy made their way into the musical world in London and elsewhere in Britain and its Caribbean and North American colonies. Those ways included subscription to opera and concert seasons, to...