The experiences of the women, men and children captives bonded for life to unfree labour were the greatest feature of the plantation world of slavery in the Americas. And yet we know precious little about them. Flashes of lives appear in the records and have been skillfully used by generations of historians seeking a view of slavery from below the great house. Still, systematic large-scale studies of existing large data of the enslaved are few though new methods of historical research promise great rewards. This presentation addresses these possibilities. It will introduce a new phase of work of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS) at University College London, which aims to recentre the enslaved people more completely in the story of British slavery. Over the past decade, the Centre and its Legacies of British Slave-ownership database has become a premier research site for the study of British colonial slavery. With this new project, the CSLBS expands on our previous work on estates and slave-ownership with the creation of a new database and analysis of the slave registers filed in the British colonies every three years between 1817-1832. The presentation will discuss the challenges of writing histories of slavery from the perspectives of the enslaved and how the CSLBS is addressing them, by presenting preliminary findings of a current project on the registers of enslaved people in Port Royal parish in Jamaica.