Hi Abraham, Great detective work...there is of course an entire branch of historical work that focuses not on the great events, but rather on the small everyday activities of education, trade, healthcare, holidays etc. I think they call it social history, so you have pretty much initiated the social history of the wooden hand plane in this post! What caught my eye were the mention of the slave artisan, and the Bill for banning import of slaves. Thanks for mentioning the reality of the trade. We in the UK are (mostly) in massive denial or ignorance of how embedded slavery or the financial benefits of slavery were in every institution of the nation. That is changing slowly, as many institutions are not yet prepared to face up to the past. For anyone who is interested, there is a massive database held by University College London researchers where you can look up individual slave owners and traders https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/ and in t includes much data on their activities overseas. Given that much of the UK trade was contemporaneous with the activity in the Americas, maybe it will be a useful resource for researchers trying to better understand what was happening acriss the water. Keep them coming.
Hi Abraham, Great detective work...there is of course an entire branch of historical work that focuses not on the great events, but rather on the small everyday activities of education, trade, healthcare, holidays etc. I think they call it social history, so you have pretty much initiated the social history of the wooden hand plane in this post! What caught my eye were the mention of the slave artisan, and the Bill for banning import of slaves. Thanks for mentioning the reality of the trade. We in the UK are (mostly) in massive denial or ignorance of how embedded slavery or the financial benefits of slavery were in every institution of the nation. That is changing slowly, as many institutions are not yet prepared to face up to the past. For anyone who is interested, there is a massive database held by University College London researchers where you can look up individual slave owners and traders https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/ and in t includes much data on their activities overseas. Given that much of the UK trade was contemporaneous with the activity in the Americas, maybe it will be a useful resource for researchers trying to better understand what was happening acriss the water. Keep them coming.