British crown was world’s largest buyer of enslaved people by 1807, book reveals | Slavery

An unprecedented investigation into the monarchy’s historical ties to slavery has found that the British crown and navy expanded and protected the trade in enslaved African people for hundreds of years.

The book, The Crown’s Silence by historian Brooke Newman, follows the Guardian’s 2023 Cost of the Crown report, which explored the British monarchy’s secret ties to transatlantic slavery.

The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of slaves, purchasing 13,000 men for the army for £900,000.

Buckingham Palace is not commenting on the books, but a source said King Charles, who has previously spoken of his “personal sorrow” for the suffering caused by slavery, takes the issue “deeply seriously”.

Newman said he started working on the book 10 years ago, finding “secret cables” detailing George IV’s fears that an uprising like the Haitian Revolution could occur in Jamaica. He made the discovery while researching an earlier study on the Caribbean island, which was a British colony for more than 300 years.

Newman, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, researched royal archives and manuscripts relating to the Royal Navy, colonial officers, government officials, the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company for The Crown’s Silence.

He said: “The Crown was publicizing their connection to the transatlantic slave trade. They were putting the royal brand on this practice and literally on people’s bodies.”

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, “formerly enslaved people like Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Ottobah Cugoano were appealing directly to the monarchy, sending them the books they wrote, sending them letters, and petitioning them in the newspapers. And the monarchy did nothing.”

“Only when you have the activism of people like you [Black abolitionists] “Sons of Africa, things really changed in the 19th century and the monarchy began to move dramatically away from its previous stances,” Newman said.

“One of the most important revelations is that the crown owned thousands of enslaved people in the Caribbean by 1831. Even as George IV oversaw the Royal Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, he was still technically profiting from the labor and sale of enslaved people. This is something the government is aware of, and they are worried about how it looks.”

Newman notes that enslaved people “owned” by the Crown included workers on plantations lost after the rebellions, or farmers who died without heirs, and World War II. He said people were “purchased on behalf of the king” to work in royal shipyards and naval facilities, a process that began in Jamaica during the reign of George III.

He added: “The white people sent to work on the island were succumbing to tropical fever, and they decided that we should buy slave men and boys that we could train as skilled workers for the king to own – as shipwrights, carpenters, caulkers, servicing Royal Navy ships. Once they decide this is a cost-saving measure for the monarchy, they start to copy it elsewhere.”

The book details how, following the abolition of slavery, Africans rescued from slavers’ ships by Royal Navy patrols were forced into apprenticeships or conscripted into British military service.

Newman said slavery boomed as an industry in the 18th century after the Royal African Company, founded by the Stuart monarchy, lost its monopoly, fueling the expansion of British cities like Liverpool and Bristol, Britain’s insurance and financial sectors and the United States.

From the reign of Elizabeth I until the 18th century, the Royal Navy “played a serious role in expanding the slave trade, protecting slave ships… loaning Royal Navy ships to slave trading companies and stocking them with men and materiel,” he added, with profits flowing back to the crown.

“By the 18th century [the British monarchy] “You don’t need to get involved in these smaller behind-the-scenes ways; it becomes about defending the empire itself in major imperial conflicts like the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution,” Newman said.

“George II and George III begin to think of enslaved men as pawns in this imperial chess game. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, freed Africans were forcibly conscripted into West India regiments and a Crown force outpost in West Africa.”

“Things are actually not better, whether you belong to the monarchy or not. They want it to be better because that’s how it should be if you’re going to have the king as your nominal master, but that’s not how things worked on the ground.”