Cotton.com (2002), Lubaina Himid's portrayal of slavery and the imperative to remember it, and her later work Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007) are located securely in the northern cities of Manchester and Lancaster. Here she conjures the global interconnections that construct those cities’ identities and wealth and shows how these affect the local economy. Her signature work, Naming the Money (2004), is different, foregrounding the multiple geographies that resulted in enslaved Africans being present throughout Europe and the Americas, showing the multiplicity and diffusion of the experience of transatlantic slavery for those caught up in its maelstrom. She uses large-scale and multiple sensory modes to mirror the transnational and North–South ubiquity of the experience of slavery and of its consequences then and now. Himid refuses conventionalised images of degraded and abject enslaved Africans in a work of affirmation and joyful exuberance. When asked ‘Why such exuberance?’, Himid answers:

This carrying of history is shown by the wonderful African-inspired primary colours and designs of the installation (Figures 65–67). Her work as originally conceived for the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle was spread over five rooms with one hundred colourful, cut-out, life-sized figures arranged in groups. A soundtrack comprising music from the African diaspora and European opera was mixed with readings by Himid of elliptical poetic pieces, each one expressing the identity of the characters she has conjured who, having suffered enslavement in Africa, are now slave servants in Europe. Renamed in Europe, they cling to their African identities, and Himid imagines for them their African names and experiences through these readings and also through the texts affixed to the back of each figure, ironically on accounting paper. As the audience wanders through the installation, the backs of the figures with their plain wooden boards are easily overlooked. However, they are key to a full understanding of the work. Each figure has a scrap of cloth from the Hatton Gallery's extensive collection exemplifying the importance of cotton to the trade that has enmeshed these human beings.