There is a British culture of celebrating the abolition of slavery without acknowledging that the country enslaved and trafficked millions of African people for centuries.
The newly published Register of British Slave Traders, which documents the thousands of investors in Britain’s near 250-year trafficking of more than 3 million enslaved African people, shows that it was a state-backed operation, fully supported by both major political parties at the time, the Tories and Whigs – the forerunners of today’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively.
