Rise Up1is the successor to the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition Black Atlantic, reviewed in a previous issue of ABRD (Carson 2024). Like the first exhibition it combines artefacts and texts from museum, archive and library collections with new art works which interrogate and interpret the history and ongoing legacies of slavery, resistance and emancipation in Britain and the Black Atlantic. Both exhibitions owe much to the University of Cambridge’s ‘Legacies of Enslavement’ project.2 They tackle head on issues around national, university, institutional and individual entanglement with the slave trade and plantation slavery, questioning how to react in the present to profits and investments from the outrages and abuses of the past.

This article explores the Detached Papers of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, an underused sub-series within The National Archives’ T 70 collection. These records offer a unique and detailed insight into the British administration of West African forts, and the lives of enslaved people forced to work in these fortifications. While the Royal African Company has been the subject of extensive scholarship, the Company of Merchants – its successor – remains understudied. Through letters, minute books, fort lists, and financial records, the Detached Papers, recently catalogued at item level for the first time, provide a critical and untapped source on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, revealing overlooked narratives of local relationships, familial networks, and the operational structures that underpinned the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. This article focuses on three key areas to exemplify the importance of these records for future research: the cultural and political life of the Fante; the networks and influence of Company Governor Richard Miles; and the identities and experiences of enslaved people in British-controlled forts. By engaging with the fragmentary nature of these records, the article interrogates archival silences to surface the submerged histories of exploitation, agency, and survival within the archives of enslavement.

As we were finalizing the publication of Paul Richards’ article, ‘A novelist among the anthropologists: Barbara Pym and The International African Institute’,1 we were delighted to receive an invitation to the unveiling of a blue plaque to Barbara Pym in Pimlico, London, and a celebration (part concert, part religious service, part tributes from celebrity admirers).