The big picture

The enormous scale of Britain’s centuries-long trafficking of enslaved African people, supported by parliament and the monarchy, has been laid bare by new research.

The Register of British Slave Traders, the product of a three-year project by a team of specialist historians, documents the investors in Britain’s near 250-year transatlantic slave trade from the first traffickers in the 1560s to abolition in 1807.

The register provides biographical detail for as many of 10,500 investors as possible from historical records, building the most comprehensive single picture so far of those who perpetrated the enslavement of African people.

Britain’s trafficking operations, including royal companies led by kings and, later, a rush of entrepreneurs in Bristol, Liverpool and other port cities, violently transported more than 3 million enslaved African men, women and children to colonial plantations in the Americas and Caribbean.

The Guardian is reporting on significant findings of the project, led by Prof William Pettigrew of King’s College London, and the vast human damage it documents: the relentless involvement of the British monarchy, parliament and financial and business elites; the role of the church in legitimising it; and how the investors’ wealth was woven deep into the country’s fabric and used to fund hospitals, schools, welfare organisations, the arts, science and culture.

Key elements include:

• A series of British kings and queens were leaders and investors in the trafficking of enslaved African people;

• More than 100 MPs were investors in slave-trading companies, including scores in the Tory and Whig parties – the forerunners of today’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats;

• Dozens of directors and original financiers of the Bank of England were investors in the slave trade;

• More than 1,000 women invested in slave-trading companies;

• Forty-five Church of England clergymen were investors in the slave-trading Royal African Company.

The BBC is showing a two-part documentary about the register, presented by the historian David Olusoga.

The publication of the register will provide further evidence for the growing global movement calling on European governments to acknowledge their perpetration of enslavement, issue a full, formal apology and engage positively with discussions for reparatory justice.

Successive British governments have refused to do so, arguing there is no duty to make reparations because enslavement and the slave trade were not against the law at the time.

An official delegation from Jamaica delivered a petition to King Charles last week to seek a legal ruling from the privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether that government position is lawful.

Famous names, hidden histories

It is a legacy of the dehumanisation inflicted on so many African men, women and children that much less was documented about them than about their enslavers. The register draws on copious permanent records for the traffickers: company documents; birth, death and marriage certificates; wills and biographical information, much of it official because many were MPs and members of the elite. Memorials and statues venerate many to this day. The enslaved people were treated as chattel, property, by British law, and there is no lasting documentation even identifying millions of them.

There are ongoing projects dedicated to addressing this deficit and to documenting the lives of the enslaved people as much as possible from the few records that were made.

Of the thousands of British slave traders identified in the register, some are household names: King James II, the last Catholic monarch to rule England, Scotland and Ireland whose statue celebrating him as a “defender of the faith” stands in Trafalgar Square, London; the composer George Frideric Handel; and the philosopher John Locke, both shareholders in the Royal African Company (RAC).

The historians’ broader research found that Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral and many other churches in London, chaired a meeting in 1682 of the Royal Society, the institution dedicated to furthering science, when it voted to invest in the RAC.

It is an illustration of modern Britain’s scant discussion of its enslaving history that the legendary status of these men rarely encompasses recognition that they participated in the slave trade.

It is now better known that Queen Elizabeth I and her inner circle supported the enslaving voyages of the Plymouth-based privateer John Hawkins in the 1560s, lending him Royal Navy ships in return for a share of the profits.

For decades, piratical shipowners enslaved and trafficked people from the west African coast – mostly from present-day Ghana and Nigeria – to the Caribbean and North America. In the 1600s merchants followed, establishing plantations, including sugar in Barbados.

Perhaps the single British person now principally known as a slave trader, among the 10,500 in the register for whom the historians found records, is Edward Colston. He was an RAC investor and assistant, or director, Tory MP for Bristol and benefactor of schools and charities. That is the result of concerted campaigning and public education, culminating during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in the toppling of Colston’s statue.

A twist of historical cruelty

British plantation owners enslaved African men and women and children – who were born enslaved for life – to extract their unpaid labour, enforcing enslavement through extreme violence. It is a further twist of cruelty that this oppression was enforced to deliver treats to people in a modernising Europe: tobacco and sugar.

After the monarchy was restored in 1660, the crown took a leading role in the trafficking and established two royally chartered companies before the RAC was founded in 1672.

Led by James II and his cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the RAC held a monopoly on the trafficking, enforced with the Royal Navy, the military and the state’s legal power. The RAC became the largest single trafficker of enslaved African people in the history of European enslavement, taking at least 150,000 captive men, women and children across the Atlantic.

Those who eagerly joined the king in this royal enslaving company were the elites of a nation developing into a modern state. The register gives character to the names of RAC shareholders, assistants and governors: royal courtiers; Tory and Whig members of parliament; financiers, bankers, merchants; and City of London aldermen, or councillors.

Arguments about Britain’s involvement in enslavement did develop in parliament. But moral condemnation came much later. The dispute that dominated for 25 years was led by independent, or “separate”, traders lobbying for the royal monopoly to be removed so that they too could become traffickers.

Full deregulation was approved by parliament in 1712, and the new British ideology of “free trade” enabled a dramatic increase in the number of African people denied their liberty, enslaved and trafficked.

A significant figure in the register during this pivotal period was Robert Heysham, an RAC assistant elected Tory MP for Lancaster in 1698. Heysham argued forcefully in parliament against the royal monopoly, then became instrumental in growing the slave trade.

“Heysham took the opportunity to outfit his own ships, making human trafficking his core concern,” according to the register.

Heysham later moved to vote with the Whigs, the advocates of free trade, and became one of the largest independent traffickers of enslaved African people during Queen Anne’s early 18th-century reign. On ships with names including Little London, New Adventure, and Liverpool, Heysham and his brother William, who lived in Barbados, trafficked about 9,000 enslaved African people, of whom about 1,350 died in the notoriously appalling conditions of the ships.

“Heysham lobbied persistently to expand the traffic,” the register says, “and worked more than anyone else to ensure that it became a national commercial concern.”

For these records, the historians drew on the landmark Slave Voyages database, which contains records of enslaving ships. The register also builds on the Legacies of British Slavery archive, compiled by historians at University College London, which documents the British “owners” of enslaved people.

Its starting point was the people paid £20m – the equivalent of £2.7bn today, according to the lowest method of calculation – in “compensation” for losing their human “property” when parliament abolished enslavement in 1833. That payment of public money to the enslavers, with no compensation ever paid to enslaved people, is still deeply felt today as an enduring injustice by those calling for reparations.

As Britain’s 18th-century transatlantic slave trade expanded, its participants spread from London elites to opportunists in other ports.

Bristol became particularly dominant and the register sets out many of the men who made fortunes there: Richard Farr, a ropemaker who became “one of Bristol’s most prolific and important slave traders”, outfitting at least 38 enslaving ships that trafficked more than 10,000 people to plantations; William Tyndall, who was “deeply engaged in slave trading in Jamaica”; and James Laroche, who over 42 years until his death in 1770 outfitted “at least 105 slave ships that carried more than 30,000 people into captivity”.

The details add to research carried out in Bristol documenting the extent to which the city’s political power bases, architecture and financing, as well as cultural institutions including the Bristol Old Vic theatre, were built on the trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Merchants in other port cities, including Lancaster, also became seriously involved and Liverpool became dominant from about 1750, driving another vast expansion of the trafficking.

Enslavement and trafficking as state policy

That year, parliament passed legislation winding up the RAC and institutionalising free trade in the transatlantic trafficking. The act incorporated official wording that plainly set out the enslavement and trafficking of African people as state policy – and the racism at its core.

“The trade to and from Africa is very advantageous to Great Britain, and necessary for supplying the plantations and colonies … with a sufficient number of negroes, at reasonable rates,” the act stated.

For that purpose, “the said trade ought to be free and open to all his majesty’s subjects”.

The only stipulation was that slave traders should pay 40 shillings to join a company that would maintain the RAC’s old enslaving forts and settlements in Africa.

Many of the Liverpool men who seized this opportunity were working-class tradesmen who became the city’s establishment. Liverpool’s local politicians solidly supported the slave trade, tripling the size of the docks to facilitate it.

Prof Edmond Smith of the University of Manchester, one of the register’s lead historians, has found that 51 Liverpool mayors were traffickers and the city corporation repeatedly lobbied parliament against abolition of the slave trade.

Liverpool traffickers in the register include Arthur Heywood, who “participated in 80 slave-trading voyages between 1744 and 1780, transporting an estimated 21,648 captive African people” to Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts, Virginia, Maine and other ports in America”.

Heywood established the Liverpool bank Arthur Heywood and Sons, which became linked to Barclays through a series of takeovers.

Bryan Blundell, who had worked as a mariner on ships from the age of 12, built a Liverpool slave-trafficking family business, became mayor of the city and founded the Blue Coat school.

William Earle, a mariner and merchant, participated in 117 slave-trading voyages that trafficked an estimated 36,565 captive African people. His family’s involvement made them “one of the most prominent slave-trading dynasties ever in Britain”.

The register’s historians have documented that British manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution was linked to the trafficking. “Triangular” trading routes began with goods, including guns from Birmingham, exported from England to be traded for enslaved people in west Africa.

The trafficking of enslaved Africans perpetrated by British men – and the surprising number of women identified in the register, more than 1,000 – was far from the guilty national secret it has since become. The register shows it was a very public, prestigious, royally supported and legislated-for imperial enterprise.

In March 2026, a large majority of countries voted for a UN declaration, led by the president of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, describing the historical trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity”.

Britain abstained, issuing an official explanation that it objected to the wording because it created “a hierarchy of historical atrocities”. The government also argued there was no duty to make reparations because slavery and the slave trade “were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law”.

The explanation said the government recognised “the abhorrent nature of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade” but declined to state that Britain perpetrated it. Instead it referred to enslavement as a “most painful” element in “history that we share with other nations”.

The Register of British Slave Traders, documenting thousands of people from monarchs to mariners who took part in the atrocity, provides the latest clear record of Britain’s share in that most painful history.