The Register that Shatters the Myth of Britain’s Role in Profiting from Enslavement

Welcome to this month’s Cotton Capital newsletter. I’m Ahmed Reid, coming to you from Jamaica, where I am programme manager for the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement team.

The recently published Register of British Slave-Traders, reported exclusively in the Guardian, lists 13,000 men and women who invested in and profited from the trafficking of more than three million enslaved Africans between 1563 and 1807.

The Register captures a broad range of investors, from ordinary men and women in provincial towns to the monarchy. Queen Elizabeth I and many in her court invested in John Hawkins’s 1563 and subsequent missions. They provided Hawkins with money and ships, including the royal shipJesus of Lübeck, which trafficked 359 Africans to the Americas in 1568. Elizabeth I’s successors – including James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, William III, Queen Anne, George I, and George II – were major investors, shareholders, and directors in the state-sponsored Company of Royal Adventurers Trading in Africa, the Royal African Company, and the South Sea Company.

Other investors included famed philosopher John Locke (who ironically championed the concept of natural rights) and Tobias Rustat a University of Cambridge benefactor whose bust is still displayed in the Chapel at Jesus College despite the college’s attempts to seek permission from an ecclesiastical court to remove it). Forty-five vicars from the Church of England and 24 directors and governors of the Bank of England were also investors. As the project’s lead researcher, William Pettigrew, has stated, slavery was not a footnote in British history – it helped shape the country.

Some have expressed surprise at the extent of the involvement. The question worth asking is this: why, 193 years after emancipation, is the true scale of Britain’s role in chattel slavery still not fully understood in Britain?

Pre-existing evidence

The findings are not surprising to scholars in the Caribbean and the wider diaspora. Eighty-two years ago, Eric Williams, the Trinidadian scholar who later became prime minister, argued in Capitalism and Slavery that profits from chattel enslavement “financed the Industrial Revolution” in Britain. Williams, showed how manufacturing towns and industries, including banking, shipbuilding, insurance and warehousing, were integrated into colonial trade, as were some families.

The Nigerian scholar Joseph Inikori, inAfricans and the Industrial Revolution in England, has shown that these linkages provided the scaffolding for Britain’s industrial advancement. During the 2007 Commons debate marking the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, William Hague pointedly stated that: “William Pitt, when he was prime minister, said 80% of British overseas income was derived from our West Indian colonies.” Pitt should know.

Caribbean scholars, among them Williams, Sir Arthur Lewis, CLR James, Walter Rodney, Elsa Goveia, Kamau Brathwaite, Hilary Beckles, Orlando Patterson, George Beckford and Verene Shepherd, have spent their professional careers exposing the magnitude of Britain’s involvement in the trafficking of enslaved Africans and its impact across the Caribbean archipelago. Plantation ledgers, deeds, wills and probate inventories, whether in repositories in the Caribbean, Britain, or across Europe, show the accumulation and transfer of mind-numbing wealth to Britain.

Ship records document the names of ship captains and owners as well as the sadistic violence inflicted on enslaved men, women and children. Those of us who have worked in these archives have spent our careers seeing the names of these monarchs, merchants, vicars, bankers, absentee owners and institutions written alongside the names of the enslaved men, women, and children they owned as “property”. The evidence is not new.

Wall of silence

The reception of the Register reveals much about British attitudes towards chattel slavery and how it is taught in schools (pdf) as well as raising questions about why Britain’s role in chattel slavery has not been fully realised.

The reason, Catherine Hall has argued, is the conscious effort to occlude the archives. Hall argued that forgetting a nation’s violent past is an active process, not an accident, and Britain’s began as soon as the trafficking in enslaved people was outlawed in 1807.

Thomas Clarkson’s history of the abolition campaign celebrated white humanitarian men and omitted Black and women abolitionists and the horrors of trafficking in enslaved people. Abolition of the trafficking in 1807 and emancipation of chattel slavery in 1833 were recast as proof of British liberty and virtue. At the same time, the newly freed people were forced into an unpaid “apprenticeship” while the government paid £20m – or 40% of Britain’s public expenditure – in compensation to the owners of enslaved people. What emerged was an amalgamation of institutions and social and cultural forces to create a wall of silence around the period of chattel enslavement, colonialism and its harmful legacies.

The reaction to the Register shows that what Hall described 13 years ago remains true today. The real strength of the Register is that it will help break the wall of silence around Britain’s trafficking in enslaved Africans and “undo the forgetting”.

Editor’s Picks

• Nearly 4m records of enslaved people searchable online | Aamna Mohdin

• Monarchs, MPs and merchants: the register laying bare Britain’s slave trading past | David Conn

• Caribbean nations draft action plan to push UK to redress reparations over slavery | Natricia Duncan

• Giving voice to a lost history: retracing the steps of the Black lives that shaped Manchester | Chris Osuh

• King Charles III to acknowledge ‘darkest days’ of Britain’s colonial rule during Caribbean tour

Regional Spotlight

Manchester | Did you know that 7 October is World Cotton Day? Created in 2019 by representatives from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali, it aims to address the issues facing the cotton industry today while acknowledging its history. This year, the Legacies programme is co-hosting an event at the Science and History Museum including talks, workshops and live textile demonstrations.

In the evening there will be a panel discussion featuring Duncan Ivison, the vice-chancellor of University of Manchester, Cleo Lake, the first black female lord mayor of Bristol, Adeola Adelakun, the co-founder of Black Creative Trailblazers, and artist Liam Hopkins, to discuss how World Cotton Day can help us work together to reflect on Manchester’s interwoven history. You can book free tickets for the evening event here. Across the city there will also be heritage trails looking at how Manchester’s history is woven into the streets. Keisha Thompson, Legacies of Enslavement programme manager

Sea Islands | October is Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Awareness Month, a time to honour the culture and history of the descendants of enslaved West Africans in the south-east US who retained their unique heritage. Started in 2014, the heritage month includes conferences, festivals, workshops, and film showings in the four states that encompass the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor: Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina. Visitors come from all over the world to attend celebrations throughout the month.

The events kicked off with the Lowcountry Fish and Grits music festival on Hilton Head Island on 3 October with performers including Latrese Bush, a Gullah Geechee woman from Bluffton, who sung the jazz, soul and gospel music that defined her upbringing. The Georgia-based Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters also displayed the ring shout, a traditional ritual rooted in West African culture and Christianity. While moving counterclockwise in a circle, the performers stomp their feet, clap their hands and sing in call and response. The month will culminate with Charleston’s Grand Gullah-Geechee Hoodoo Ball in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on 31 October, where guests will be treated to Gullah Geechee cuisine, live music, spirituality and dance performances. Melissa Hellmann, US race and equity senior reporter

Jamaica | The global reparations movement has been gaining phenomenal pace, shifting from the fringes of international debate to the centre of diplomatic discussions. Caribbean governments have managed to push reparations on to the agendas of the Commonwealth, the UN, and in the parliaments and public domains of countries in the region, as well in the UK.

But within this broader push, one of the often overlooked elements is the call for repatriation – the right of people of African descent to return to the continent from which their ancestors were taken. For decades, repatriation was dismissed as symbolic or utopian. But African governments including Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia are now developing concrete pathways to residency and citizenship for diaspora Africans.

As the Commonwealth leaders summit approaches in November, repatriation is likely to become a prominent part of the conversation about what meaningful repair should look like, and how the Caribbean envisions its relationship with Africa. Natricia Duncan, Caribbean correspondent

What We’re Enjoying

I really enjoyed reading Dominoes by London-based actor, playwright and novelist Phoebe McIntosh. It’s a smart and witty romance that offers a powerful reflection on the legacies of enslavement. The story follows Layla as she prepares to marry her sweetheart Andy, with whom she happens to share the same surname. Thanks to some sleuthing from Layla’s best friend, it emerges the couple also share a complex, unsettling history – threatening to derail their upcoming nuptials. Angela Foster, assistant editor

Dominoes by Phoebe McIntosh (Vintage Publishing, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Looking Ahead

Manchester will host Barack Obama as part of Black History Month celebrations. The former US president will appear at Co-op Live on 15 October for an eagerly anticipated evening of conversation.

Meanwhile, the Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo will join acclaimed screenwriter Russell T Davies on 11 October at Manchester Literature Festival. Chris Osuh, community affairs correspondent

We Want To Hear From You

What would you like to see covered in Cotton Capital?

Let us know by emailing [email protected]. We’ll be back next month.