Over the past 10 days, a series of registers, documents and reports have been published, all revealing the scale of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The overall picture is one of a nation powered by enslavement and investment in it. This week, I spoke to Chris Osuh, a community affairs correspondent at the Guardian, about these new revelations and Britain’s persistent difficulty in confronting its own history.
Last week, a Register of British Slave Traders, compiled by historians, was published. Its length and detail exposed that the British financial system was much more involved in enslavement than previously thought. Scrolling through the names is chilling in its prosaicness. There are owners and co-owners of slaving voyages from London to various locations in the Caribbean. There are investors in the Royal African Company, an English trading company that trafficked more Africans to the Americas than any other. There are ordinary people – soap boilers and cheesemongers, surgeons and diplomats – all with various interests, shares, ownerships and investments in the trading of Africans. The register is 636 pages long.
