British royal family links to the transatlantic slave trade, Digi Mart USA News (United Kingdom): Hundreds of enslaved African people had the letters “DY” burned into their flesh in the late 1600s to identify them as the property of the then-Duke of York, the man who would become King James II. Britain’s slave trade was a hugely lucrative commerce carried out with the backing of the British monarchy.
From Elizabeth I’s loan of ships for early voyages to royal investment in trafficking companies, generations of monarchs spent 300 years funding, profiting from or supporting slavery. This history is behind calls for King Charles III to apologize during his Caribbean tour, and for the British Government to begin financial reparations for what a United Nations resolution this year described as the “gravest crime against humanity.”
The Royal African Company, a de facto collaboration between the City of London and royalty, was responsible for transporting 150,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic, more than any other single institution in the history of the slave trade. Enslaved people kept in the company’s forts and factories in West Africa were branded, and others sent to Britain’s nascent colonies by the royalty-backed South Sea Company were scarred with a symbol of the royal crown.
The King acknowledged the monarchy’s links to the transatlantic slave trade in an emotional address to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. He described it as a “shameful chapter of history” that fills his soul “with the most profound personal sorrow.” He stopped short of a formal apology, something Prime Minister Andy Burnham has signaled he is “open” to.
As a constitutional monarch, Charles can act only on the Government’s direction.
Downing Street has promised plans for a “debt reset” for Commonwealth countries, but ministers have made clear that compensation to the victims of slavery, meaning reparations, is off the table. Charles instead signaled that he was “finding ways for us to work in modern partnership to address the wrongs of the past with action for the future.”
Historians say the royal family’s involvement extends across centuries. Clarence House was commissioned in 1825 by the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, who actively campaigned against abolitionists by arguing for the retention of slavery before its final abandonment in the British empire in 1833.
Professor Brooke Newman of Virginia Commonwealth University, author of The Crown’s Silence, told The i Paper that the historical evidence of royal complicity is “unambiguous… and impossible to ignore.”
Professor William Pettigrew of King’s College London, who led the Register of British Slave Traders project, estimates Britain was responsible for the trafficking of 3.3 million slaves. The project lists 13,000 investors whose money facilitated enslavement.
In a new book, Britain’s Slave Traders, Pettigrew argues that much of what makes the UK distinctive, including endowments, hospitals, docks, canals and the British Museum, has roots in the profits and ethos of slavery.
Pettigrew said James II had the deepest connection to slavery of any British monarch, calling him the most important British slave trader of the 17th century. Newman argued that the monarchy should issue its own apology and establish a reparative fund independent of any government decision, saying “an apology without concrete action risks being little more than another symbolic gesture.”
