The merchants of Bristol were unofficially involved in the transatlantic slave trade at least 35 years earlier than previously thought, according to new research revealed by a University of Bristol historian.
And among those wealthy merchants sending ships from Bristol to West Africa, then onto the Caribbean and North America with enslaved people, then back with goods like sugar, was a Thomas Colston - a principle investor in one of the first ships.
According to Dr Richard Stone, from the University’s Department of History and Centre for Black Humanities, the new evidence is proof of something that was long suspected - that Bristol’s merchants were involved in the ‘triangular trade’ long before they were supposed to be.
