Malik Al Nasir
Malik Al Nasir is a 4th Yr PhD Candidate at the Faculty of History at University of Cambridge, St Catharine’s College. Maliks research is focussed upon mercantile hegemony in the latter days of British slavery and is a case study of Sandbach Tinne, a predominant multinational conglomerate of primarily Scottish slave merchant families who dominated the Demerara sugar trade for almost two centuries.
Maliks pioneering research came to the public's attention when his BBC article “Searching for my slave roots went viral in 2020 just before he arrived at Cambridge. Maliks unique take on the history of this period stems from his methodology, which views everything through a familial lens, rather than periodisation or a focus upon historic events per se.
The prosopography's of the Sandbach Tinne dynasty creates a new understanding of diverse sectors of society where they predominated, everything from the advent of the modern banking system to the development of the railways, the founding of institutes of knowledge production to the establishment of botanical gardens, the slavery compensation scheme to the advent of indentured labour systems in the British empire, the invention of the world’s first press office to the most expensive postage stamp in the world and the development of modern football are all within their gamut of influence rooted in this family.
Prior to Maliks discovery, they were relatively obscure in the historical record and as such, most collections relating to their existence were neither digitised, nor given any prominence. This created numerous problems for the researcher which Malik has since addressed by his creation of The Sandbach Tinne Project. Maliks methodology includes participatory action research, so having identified archives across the UK the US and the Carribean, as well as collections of objects, paintings, sculptures, and sites relating to this conglomerate, Malik has brought together museums, libraries, private archives, and universities, to collectively research, document, digitise and curate exhibits from these previously disparate collections. This has resulted in a BBC documentarywhich won an RTS Scotland award, an exhibit at the Walker Art Gallery that was nominated for a Museums Association Award, and Malik himself winning the University of Cambridge Vice Chancellors Award for Global Social Impact. He also co curated the FITBA research clubin partnership with the National Library of Scotland, and the Scottish FA which ran as a pilot at Kelvin Hall for 6 months in 2023 with a team of community curators.
Malik has identified a collection of extensive records at the Scottish Business archive which relate to the engineering firm Mirrlees Watson & Co who manufactured sugar machinery for the plantations of the Carribean and supplied extensively the plantations of Sandbach Tinne & Co in Demerara. Whilst their order books within the collection provide incredible detail of sugar production and equipment manufacture from 1840 onwards, what they also give us, is a unique record - year on year - of plantation ownership. Until now, Malik has been unable to effectively map sugar plantation ownership in Demerara, as there is no single record of it available to-date. This unique collection incidentally provides the basis for the development of a unique new dataset that will help researchers of the period of Colonial Indian indentureship (1833-1920) which followed enslavement in British colonies. In 2023 Malik curated the inaugural Sandbach Tinne conference at University of Bristol and produced a documentary about it which included historian Prof. David Olusoga.
Maliks research for his PhD is part of a wider study that is the subject of his new book to be published by HarperCollins in 2024 entitled “Searching for my slave roots” which is loosely based upon the BBC article of the same name which secured Malik a full ESRC studentship at Cambridge and a two-book deal with HarperCollins. His first book “Letters to Gil” a memoir of Maliks life in the care system, from where he emerged semi-literate and traumatised at age 18 and how having met poet Gil Scott-Heron he self-educated and graduated all three of Liverpool's universities before embarking on his PhD at Cambridge was published in 2021.
Malik Al Nasir is an author, poet and academic from Liverpool. His memoir ‘Letters to Gil’ is a compelling account of his childhood experiences in a brutal UK Local Authority care system, which at eighteen, left him traumatised, semi-literate, homeless, and destitute. A chance meeting with poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron was to prove life changing, setting him on a path to success. Malik is currently reading for a PhD in history at University of Cambridge on a full ESRC scholarship, and he’s recently been awarded the prestigious ‘Sydney Smith Memorial Prize’ for ‘outstanding achievement’ at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge as well as The Vice Chancellors Award for ‘Global Impact’.
