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

After abolition, Africans liberated from slavers’ ships by Royal Navy patrols were coerced into apprenticeships or conscripted into military service, the historian Brooke Newman said. Illustration: Alamy

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

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