This multi-faceted study looks at colonial emanations of finance, managerialism, and horticulture at the Deptford Docks and their echoes in the ‘accumulation by dispossession’ of contemporary speculation and real estate development. Historically both a naval dockyard and the site of a commercial ship-building operation, the Deptford Dockyard figures regularly in the diaries and official papers of prominent figures from the 17th-19th centuries, who, as members of the Royal Society, Council of Foreign Planters, the Royal African Company, and the East India Company, describe their desires and excitements in the technological development of ships, botany, finance and ‘adventure’ while orchestrating the violence of the plantation system, enslavement, global finance, and technologies of colonial control.

At the same time, dockyards in the UK and across the British empire were crucial sites of encounter between enslaved people, freed people of colour, and ship and dockyard workers, who used them to share information, analyse the ‘common winds’ of change in acts of solidarity, rebellion and resistance, like that of the Haitian revolution.

Across these histories, the Dockyard can be read as a dispositive – where the burgeoning desires for ecological and technical invention invest an order of racialised violence and worker control, but also where new forms of masterlessness are born.

Today the former dockyard in Deptford is the site of a proposed, globally financed luxury real estate development that, following other London trends, threatens to displace those who inherit and continue to resist the Dockyard’s classed and racialised social order. How can the struggles of groups like Voice for Deptford and Deptford People’s Heritage Museum, who contest the development’s erasure of Black and working-class communities of the past and present, make use of the histories of dockyard resistance to propel our/their own projects of masterlessness?

In this study, Deptford People’s Heritage Museum founder Joyce Jacca works with Dr Janna Graham (Ultra-red, Goldsmiths), local historians, activists, and international groups like the Museum of Maritime Intolerance (Senegal) to develop a conjunctural analysis of the dockyard’s past, present and future.

Points of importance to the history and contemporary struggle over the dockyard can be found on the website and on QR codes in the local area.