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00:02Five years ago, a group of historians began work on one of the most ambitious studies ever undertaken into Britain's
00:09role in the Atlantic slave trade.
00:12Their research is now publicly available on a new database, the Register of British Slave Traders.
00:19We began the project with the very clear ambition to do the most comprehensive assessment of all of the British
00:27based investors in the transatlantic slave trade.
00:29That list now is somewhere around 13,000.
00:32Those 13,000 people invested in a trade that over hundreds of years trafficked over 3 million Africans to the
00:41plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean.
00:44The people who were enslaved aren't mere numbers but were men, women and children who were carried off from their
00:50homes,
00:51shipped in one of the worst forced migrations in history and then enslaved thousands of miles away never to return
00:58again.
01:00In its early decades, the trade was operated as a monopoly by the Royal African Company, established by the monarch
01:08and dominated by the elite around the royal court.
01:12Godfrey Neller, who is an important court painter, is an investor in the slave trade and many of the women
01:17that he painted were also investors in the slave trade.
01:20This episode tells the story of how the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and how the privatisation of the
01:28slave trade enabled England and then Britain to become one of the dominant slave trading nations.
01:35The Royal African Company had opened the doors to West Africa in the slave trade and the age of independent
01:41traders revolutionised the very scale of that.
01:44Edward Chaffers invested in 32 Atlantic crossings. He was also investing in collieries. He was investing in the Liverpool and
01:53Leeds Canal.
01:54That initial phase is in London and that second phase is principally in the provinces.
01:59So the ending of the monopoly was the big bang moment for Britain's slave trade.
02:25In the vaults of the National Maritime Museum in London lies a vast collection of art.
02:34And many of the paintings preserved here record the long history of the Royal Navy.
02:41Among them are relics of a largely forgotten chapter from that history.
02:51These two prints look like many of the hundreds of prints and paintings held here in this collection that depict
03:00epic battles.
03:02This one is from the year 1830.
03:06This ship on the right is the Spanish slave ship, the El Almirante.
03:13And the smaller ship chasing it, firing its guns, that is HMS Black Joke.
03:20A ship of the so-called preventative squadron of the Royal Navy.
03:25A part of the Navy that was dispatched to the coast of West Africa to suppress the slave trade.
03:32And you can see depicted on the deck of the Spanish ship enslaved Africans.
03:40By the time the Black Joke intercepted this ship, the Royal Navy had been in conflict with the slave traders
03:47for more than two decades.
03:49Because in 1807, Britain hadn't just ended its own slave trade.
03:55It had committed to using the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trades of other nations.
04:02And yet, before this, for one and a half centuries, the Royal Navy had been the defender of the British
04:11slave trade.
04:12And then, almost overnight, the Navy became a sort of global policeman committed to the suppression of that same trade.
04:27The Black Joke was famous back in the 1820s and 1830s.
04:32And the campaign against the slave trade was celebrated in Britain.
04:37That military and diplomatic mission was to last right up until the early years of the 20th century.
04:45Generations of British sailors took part in this epic campaign,
04:49in the Atlantic and later in the Indian Oceans.
04:53And thousands of them died of tropical diseases and in battles at sea.
04:59And yet, today, that history is barely remembered.
05:02The only relics it has left behind are old paintings like these and documents in the archives.
05:15But in Africa itself, on the coastline that the ships of the Royal Navy once patrolled,
05:21that history is imprinted onto the landscape.
05:26At the mouth of the Gambia River, in the tiny West African nation of the Gambia, lies Fort Bullen.
05:43The coast of West Africa is studded with slave fortresses built by the nations of Europe.
05:50But Fort Bullen was built after Britain had abolished the slave trade.
05:55This place wasn't designed to hold captured Africans.
05:58It was designed to prevent the ships of other European nations and the local African slave traders from using this
06:05river to continue with the trade.
06:08The guns in this fortress had a clear field of fire over the river.
06:12This is one of the last pieces of surviving infrastructure from Britain's long war against the slave trade.
06:24But the irony is, is that that final chapter in the story of Britain and the trade brings us back
06:30here to the Gambia River.
06:32The river on which some of the first English merchants got their first foothold into the trade.
06:42If you leave Fort Bullen at the mouth of the river and take a journey 20 miles inland,
06:48you find the ruins of another British fort with a very different history.
06:57This is Fort James, a fortified island used by the Royal African Company from the early years of the English
07:07slave trade back in the 1660s.
07:12Inside these walls, the company's agents conducted their business and wrote their dispatches back to London.
07:21Outside the walls stood the slave yards and the slave houses in which, over the years, thousands of enslaved people
07:30were held before being shipped to the islands of the Caribbean.
07:35What happened here, and in places like it, allowed England to establish itself within the Atlantic slave trade.
07:46But as reports written on this island reveal, the company's ships were not the only vessels on this river.
07:55In 1678, the Royal Africa Company's agent here at Fort James was a man called Mr. Thomas Thurlow.
08:03And in March of that year, he wrote this report describing the company's trading activities here on the Gambia River.
08:11And he lists the commodities the company was trading in. First on that list are slaves.
08:18He then lists teeth, by which he means elephant teeth, which is what people in the 17th century used to
08:26call ivory tusks.
08:27The company was also, he says, trading in wax and in hides, so animal skins.
08:32And he explains that they are buying these commodities, human and otherwise, from the Portuguese, but also from natives, so
08:41local African slave traders.
08:43And he explains that this river will yield yearly between 500 and 600 slaves.
08:51But he then goes on to warn that while the Portuguese bring their goods to the island, they bring them
08:59here to Fort James,
09:00If they begin to grow rich, they will carry their goods to any interlopers strange ship.
09:08And what he's talking about here is one of the great challenges facing the Royal African Company, the challenge of
09:14the interlopers, private independent traders who are ignoring the royal monopoly and coming here to Africa to break in to
09:23the trade and enslave people.
09:35William Pettigrew, who has led the new research project, has studied the astonishing powers that were granted to the Royal
09:42African Company against the interlopers.
09:46With the charters granted to the company came the possibility of enforcing the monopoly through what were called vice admiralty
09:54courts.
09:55These were courts that enabled the company to intercept merchants who infringed on the monopoly, to imprison them without legal
10:02due process.
10:03So this is outside the common law, without juries, I presume?
10:07There was no role for a jury trial in this process, and it was therefore deemed to be, you know,
10:12a fundamental infringement of the English constitution.
10:16I mean, to have the power of justice is to have a power that's normally associated with the state rather
10:21than with a company.
10:22That's right. But you've got the monarchy front and centre as investors, but you've also got the king of England
10:28in the 1680s as the chairman of the company.
10:30You've got the Royal Navy at the disposal of the company. So this business, this traffic is part and parcel
10:37of the activity of the state by the time we get to the 1680s.
10:40Were there any other companies who had these sorts of powers?
10:44No. Not even the East India Company enjoys the same privileges.
10:48But there are people who do attempt interlopers, who do try to break into the trade.
10:53There are a number of well-known attempts that ended imprisonment for those merchants, imprisoned in forts in West Africa.
11:01There's a famous example of the Wilkinson brothers, who had mounted an illegal slave trading voyage, intercepted by a Royal
11:10Navy frigate.
11:12And Henry Wilkinson was then imprisoned at Cape Coast Castle.
11:15And William, his brother, describes how oppressive the experience of being incarcerated by the African company is for his brother,
11:24that his brother commits suicide.
11:28Now, these fortresses, they are used to hold enslaved people.
11:32That's right.
11:33There were also English slave traders being imprisoned in those forts.
11:37Alongside enslaved African people.
11:39But the really shocking, astonishing thing from our perspective is to imagine that those people, English independent slave trading merchants,
11:50who were imprisoned, they saw themselves as being enslaved by the African company.
11:56With no sense of irony?
11:57Not as far as we can tell.
12:07By the 1680s, the Royal African Company was transporting 5,000 Africans into slavery every year, and generating large profits
12:18for its investors.
12:19But at that moment, the Stuart dynasty, who had pioneered the English slave trade, were themselves consumed by crisis.
12:30In 1688, King James II, who had personally invested in the Royal African Company, who was the company's governor and
12:39who attended so many company meetings, was deposed in what later became known as the Glorious Revolution.
12:46In 1688, James fled to France, and the throne passed to his daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, Prince William
12:53of Orange.
12:55Now, the Glorious Revolution was the catalyst for the formation of a new type of English state.
13:01And one of the many issues that was debated and contested after the fall of James and the arrival of
13:08William was the future of the English slave trade and the royal monopoly.
13:19The slave trade left behind millions of records.
13:24The slave trade left behind millions of records.
13:24They are today scattered in archives and libraries across the country.
13:28Accounts of individual expeditions, insurance documents, and endless lists of the people who made and who lost money in the
13:37trade.
13:40In the National Archives are the share transfer books of the Royal African Company.
13:46They list the buying and the selling of company shares.
13:50And the ledger from early 1689 records transactions that took place during the Glorious Revolution.
14:01Inside this transfer book is this letter which has been pasted into the book.
14:08And that's because it had arrived in London from Paris, which you can see from this letterhead here.
14:14It contains instructions from an investor in the company for his shares to be sold off, to be liquidated.
14:24And at the top of the letter, it gives us the name of that investor, which is James II.
14:31By the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, now resident in the
14:39Kingdom of France.
14:41This is James, now in exile in France, but still technically king, instructing his agent to transfer his stock of
14:51£3,000 capital or principal money in the Royal African Company of England.
14:58And at the bottom is James' signature and the Royal Seal.
15:05But in this same transfer book, just a few pages back, it records another transfer of company stock that took
15:14place just two days earlier.
15:17And this is the opposite transaction.
15:19This is a new investor acquiring company shares.
15:23It reads, I do transfer £1,000 of my stock in the Royal African Company of England unto His Highness
15:33William Henry, Prince of Orange.
15:38This is the future William III, who was soon to be proclaimed king.
15:44And underneath this transaction, it gives us the name of the company investor who facilitated this transaction.
15:51And his name was Edward Colston.
15:59The thousands of people whose names appear in the transfer books of the Royal African Company had invested in the
16:06slave trade, knowing that behind the monopoly was the power of the state and the monarch.
16:11But the enforcement of the monopoly had created enemies, the families of interlopers imprisoned on the coast of Africa and
16:20the English merchants excluded from the trade.
16:25With James II gone, the company desperately needed the support of the new regime.
16:34It's an act of knee-jerk desperation. Once James II had departed the country, this is a person who essentially
16:41established the company and led it.
16:43The company sort of naturally is looking for an alternative source of support.
16:47So it's hoping that William will be as generous and as invested in the company as James was?
16:53Yeah, absolutely. William's not really interested in the company. The African Company is left isolated.
16:58So those it had alienated, those who had been imprisoned by the African Company are now seeking vengeance.
17:06One of the key mechanisms for opposing the African Company's monopoly is through pamphlets.
17:14And we know of over 200 of these.
17:16One of the earliest pamphlets was written by William Wilkinson.
17:21And this is the brother of Henry Wilkinson.
17:23Who had died in Cape Coast Castle, a prisoner of the Royal African Company.
17:27That's right. And one of the things that William seeks to do is to summarise that tyrannical behaviour.
17:34So the title is The Intrigues and Arbitrary Proceedings of the Guinea Company.
17:38He means the Royal African Company.
17:39Yeah. And it starts with a summary of that mistreatment.
17:42By virtue of this charter, oppress their fellow subjects by taking their ships, imprisoning and starving their seamen,
17:52illegally condemning the said ships and goods without any jewellery.
17:55This is so important.
17:56What's most offensive about the African Company is the fact that it proposes to imprison people without the right to
18:03a jewellery trial.
18:05And here's Wilkinson laying that out. This is what happens to my brother.
18:08Who committed suicide.
18:09That's right.
18:10How were these pamphlets used?
18:13These were given to MPs. In fact, in lots of cases, you can see a fold down the centre of
18:17the page,
18:18which shows you that it was being folded up and waived during a parliamentary debate.
18:22Does he make an argument in favour of how privatised, deregulated slave trade would benefit the country?
18:30You can see this paragraph here.
18:32Whereas if a free trade were granted to the subject, it would raise a desire in great undertakers and moneyed
18:38men to prepare considerable quantities of goods and build many ships.
18:41We're talking here about a kind of economic free for all where the entrepreneurial energies of the English people would
18:47be channelled into this,
18:49developing not just a greater financial involvement, but also expanding manufacturing.
18:54And many thousands of poor would be employed, which at present want bread.
18:59This is an opportunity to expand our engagement with the trafficking of enslaved African people that would actually put the
19:07poor to work.
19:08It would solve social problems.
19:09So the rich would invest in making commodities for the trade and building ships, but then that wealth would trickle
19:15down to the poor.
19:16If only we could push this company aside.
19:19Exactly.
19:19One of the great liabilities of the African company is that it had focused its energies in London.
19:26Parliament is a national organisation.
19:28So you can see all of these boroughs around the country and counties protesting about that.
19:34This is a very good example.
19:36There aren't that many in British history where the economic power and dominance of London is actually successfully contested.
19:43An economic opportunity is spread more evenly around the country.
19:52The end of the Royal Monopoly in the late 1690s created a new economic opportunity for the levelling up of
20:00the economy.
20:01No longer would one company and one city control such a lucrative trade.
20:08And merchants from towns and cities across the country now rushed to establish themselves as slave traders.
20:17During the 17th century, around 130,000 Africans had been carried into slavery by the Royal Monopoly companies.
20:25Across the 107 years between the start of the 18th century and the abolition of the trade in 1807,
20:34around 2.8 million Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic by British traders.
20:41An increase in capacity of around 300%.
20:52The city that made the most of the end of the Royal Monopoly was Bristol.
21:00Bristol was literally in the perfect position on the west coast of the country,
21:05which means that this river, the Avon, flows out into the Bristol Channel and then straight to the Atlantic.
21:12Bristol was then the third biggest city in England and this port was the second largest in the country after
21:19London.
21:20Bristol was full of merchants and manufacturers who had already broken into the trade in the goods produced by enslaved
21:27people.
21:28Sugar and tobacco.
21:31And what all of that meant was that for a moment, between the 1720s and the 1740s, Bristol actually overtook
21:41London
21:41and became the number one slave trading port in the whole country.
21:47Over 2,000 ships set sail from this port for the coast of Africa.
21:52And those 2,000 Bristol ships between them shipped around half a million men, women and children to the plantations.
22:08Profits from the trade and the trade in the goods the slaves produced flowed into the city and helped fund
22:15an urban renaissance.
22:16The first half of the 18th century, when Bristol dominated the slave trade, was a golden age for the city.
22:30The slave traders built themselves grand new homes in places like Queen's Square, but they also set out to make
22:39Bristol a more cultured city.
22:41One group that included some of Bristol's wealthiest slave traders clubbed together to fund the building of a new theatre.
22:49Known today as the Bristol Old Vic, it is the oldest continuously operating theatre in the English speaking world.
22:58Nicholas Radburn, one of the researchers behind the register of British slave traders, has been digging into the backgrounds of
23:05the men who funded this theatre.
23:09What we have here is an agreement to establish a theatre, which will become the Theatre Royal in Bristol, or
23:15now the Old Vic.
23:16So this place?
23:17This place, exactly. With the name of the 40 original subscribers, and this is from 1764.
23:23So each of these men is investing £50, for that they get one share in this theatre.
23:29Yes.
23:30And £50 in the 1760s today, that's worth about £8,000, £9,000.
23:34Yes, so a substantial sum of money.
23:36And what do we know about these men?
23:38Well, we know by cross-referencing their names with our database, that many of them were deeply engaged in the
23:45trans-Semitic slave trade.
23:46So to give an example, we have here Thomas Farr, and he participates in partnership with his brother in the
23:52slave trade.
23:52They're one of the largest slave trading families in 18th century Bristol.
23:56Wow. Who else?
23:57We have here, as well, Henry Bright.
24:00Now, Bright's a really good example of why a focus solely on investment in slave ships out of Bristol tends
24:06to obscure, to a degree, the overall engagement of these men in Atlantic trade.
24:11Because Bright apprentices as a barrel maker, then he goes to Jamaica as an agent for a Bristol company.
24:17And what he'll do in Jamaica is sell enslaved Africans who are arriving on Bristol slave ships.
24:22So he's a representative of Bristol slave traders, but in the island of Jamaica.
24:26Exactly. And when he returns to Bristol with the wealth he's made in Jamaica, he's able to establish himself here
24:32as a merchant, engaging not only in the slave trade, but also in the trade in slave-grown produce.
24:37And these men are choosing to spend the wealth that they've generated here in Bristol?
24:43Yes. And there's a good reason for that. They come from this place. They tend to be marginal men who
24:49are looking to raise themselves up socially, who are looking to get to the pinnacle of society through trading in
24:54people.
24:54And they want to put their imprincher on the city to say, I've made it. And they do that by
24:59investing in institutions that they know will outlive them, but will still bear their name.
25:04So there's a certain immortality that comes through the investment in these institutions.
25:09What did these men get for their £50?
25:12They get one of these tokens, which was given to each of these subscribers. This is a silver token.
25:19It says, King Street Bristol Theatre. And on the back, the proprietor of this ticket is entitled to the site
25:29of every performance to be exhibited in this house.
25:32And it's number 23. Yes. So number 23, we presume, of these original 40 subscribers.
25:39Mm-hm. So if you're a holder of that token, you can arrive here at the box office and gain
25:44access to this show for free.
25:46And these are still valid? They're still valid today, yes.
25:49Two and a half centuries later? Two and a half centuries later, yes.
25:52God, that's astonishing. Mm.
25:57This theatre is just one of many institutions here in Bristol that have origin stories that link them back to
26:05the slave trade.
26:08The merchants who made fortunes in Bristol also built the grand assembly rooms on the same street as the Old
26:15Vic.
26:16They funded the building of new schools, new hospitals, and many of these institutions can be found in the register
26:24of British slave traders.
26:26And this same pattern of money from the trade funding charities and the building of new institutions was repeated in
26:35cities across the country.
26:39Because although Bristol was the city that made the most of the end of the royal monopoly, it was not
26:45alone.
26:46Other towns in some surprising parts of the country also rushed into the trade.
26:55And how the trade spread across the country has been a key part of the research that has built the
27:02new register of British slave traders.
27:06The research showed that Whitehaven was a significant slave trading port.
27:10This is only a small port in the very north of England, and it was here a guy called John
27:14Lowther.
27:15Established an enterprise that combined industrial investment on the mainland with the growing port to connect linen manufacture, coal mining,
27:23with the importation of tobacco from plantations, and also through the port, the sending of slaving vessels to West Africa
27:30and then on to the Caribbean.
27:32Scottish boroughs begin to lobby Parliament after the Act of the Union, claiming that they need to have full access
27:38to the traffic and enslaved African people.
27:40Glasgow really emerges as a Western-facing slave trading port.
27:44Another thing that the research shows is the growth of Lancaster as a slave trading port, which will eventually be
27:48Britain's fourth largest slave trading port.
27:50In 1700, it's a sleepy place with about 5,000 people, not much trade to speak of, and a decaying
27:56castle.
27:57By the end of the 18th century, a new quayside is laid out, new streets are laid out, and that
28:02has created an 18th century-looking city that persists to this day.
28:07The Burrage family of Lime Regis had taken the opportunities they understood to be presented by the liberalisation of the
28:14trade back to their home ports.
28:15The Burrage family mount four crossings.
28:19The liberalisation of the slave trade spread wealth and commerce through towns and cities across Britain.
28:31But in the same years, the first decades of the 18th century, a new trading company was established here in
28:38London.
28:41A company that ensured that London's merchants, along with the British state and the monarch, were to remain involved in
28:50the trafficking of human cargoes.
28:56The South Sea Company is remembered today for having triggered the most famous financial disaster to ever before the banks
29:05and investors of the City of London.
29:08That disaster is recalled today whenever markets crash.
29:12But at the time, in the 1720s, it was seen as a national scandal.
29:19The subject of this satirical print by the artist William Hogarth is the South Sea Bubble.
29:26The vast inflation and then the sudden collapse in the value of shares in the South Sea Company.
29:32And one of the London landmarks in this image is this, the monument to the Great Fire.
29:38But in Hogarth's image, it is now a monument erected to the memory of the destruction of the city by
29:46the South Sea Bubble in 1720.
29:49And all around the monument is a scene of absolute chaos.
29:54There are people arguing and fighting.
29:56There is a pickpocket stealing from a man who's in such despair that he doesn't even notice.
30:03This old woman, right in the corner, starving and emaciated, she represents trade.
30:11Legitimate trade, rather than the speculation in the value of shares.
30:16But there is one detail that just isn't in this image.
30:21And it is almost never mentioned whenever the story of the South Sea Bubble comes up.
30:25And that is that the South Sea Company was a slave trading company.
30:38The business model of the South Sea Company rested in part on a document drafted in 1713,
30:45that was part of the peace negotiations at the end of a war.
30:51This is a copy of the Asiento, which, as you can see, is a contract for allowing the subjects of
30:58Great Britain
30:59the liberty of importing Negroes into Spanish America.
31:05Now, Spanish America is the vast empire Spain had built in the New World,
31:10an empire that relied heavily upon the labour of enslaved Africans.
31:14But Spain didn't become a major slave trading nation until much later,
31:20until the 19th century after Britain had ended its slave trade.
31:25What Spain did was it issued these contracts, these Asiento, to other nations,
31:31to the Dutch, to the Portuguese, and now to the British state,
31:36who, in effect, then subcontracted the Asiento to the South Sea Company.
31:46This is a company that is deeply enmeshed with the British state and engaged in the slave trade.
31:53Absolutely. That's exactly what it is.
31:55I think we automatically presume that the British slave trade supplied enslaved people to the British Empire.
32:01But this is the Spanish Empire.
32:03Exactly. The Spanish, with their sprawling empire, did not really want to get involved in the West African coastal trades.
32:10They didn't really know any of the local rulers. They didn't have forts there.
32:14There's a very complicated trading arrangements that you need to understand, and it helps to actually have a middleman.
32:21And that's what they do. They use the French or the Dutch or the British.
32:25Whoever's got the most efficient, if we can use that, the most efficient way of carrying out this horrific trade,
32:32the Spanish essentially get them to do it for them.
32:36So by the early 18th century, it's the British who are the most efficient slave traders,
32:42and therefore it is the British to whom the Spanish turn and give them the Asiento.
32:46That is correct. But it does help that this is a country that's maybe coming later to the trade, but
32:53is now the most efficient.
32:55Yeah. So there are two British slave trades in this period.
32:59There's an independent one, which is emerging in cities like Bristol, but there's also a London-based trade, which is
33:06now with the South Seas Company.
33:07That's right. And people forget that London is the first slaving port. It's not Bristol.
33:11Because it's a really financially complicated trade. I mean, we're in the city of London.
33:15The banks that were here in the 18th century and the insurance firms, they're deeply involved in this as well.
33:21Absolutely. And you're not going to get very far without financing, because it's a very capital-intensive entity.
33:27To send one ship anywhere is very expensive, and you have to wait a long time before you get any
33:31money back.
33:34The people who buy those shares in the South Sea Company, do they know what the company's doing?
33:40Yes. Do they know they're investing in the slave trade?
33:42Oh, yes, they do. I mean, certainly it would be well known, because it was in the newspapers that a
33:47certain number of warships were going to these ports.
33:49They also have reports in the newspapers that said how many people had been trafficked on a particular ship.
33:58So it was very open, and as well, you know, some of the people who were trafficked by the Royal
34:02African Company,
34:03we know one or two might be brought back as the captain's personal enslaved person that they then sell locally.
34:11So here in London?
34:12Here in London, often in something like a pub or a coffee house.
34:16So you're seeing enslaved people here in London, and you're reading in the newspapers of the activities of this company.
34:22So it's not a secret?
34:23It's not a secret.
34:25And the South Sea Company is very famous, but it's not famous for being engaged in the slave trade.
34:30It's the South Sea bubble, a financial market crash in 1720 that keeps coming up every time there's a financial
34:36scandal.
34:37But people aren't really aware of what the company did.
34:40The slave trading side of it has been erased out of the history.
34:43The idea of ruin is always about the investor who's lost some money.
34:47But the ruination, the damage is being done to the enslaved people, and they are not in any of the
34:54pamphlets or prints.
34:59Among the investors who lost money when the South Sea bubble burst was Sir Isaac Newton.
35:06The great scientist lost £20,000, a large chunk of his life's savings, worth around £4 million in today's money.
35:19But there were some investors who made rather than lost fortunes.
35:25One London merchant who sold his shares at the right time, getting out before the bubble burst, was Thomas Guy.
35:33He made a profit of £175,000, some of which he used to found the hospital that still carries his
35:42name.
35:43Guy's Hospital.
35:47But the crash of 1720 was not the end of the South Sea Company.
35:52It survived and it retained the Asiento.
35:56And each year it bought thousands of enslaved people from local African traders and shipped them across the Atlantic.
36:04And to manage the trade, the company established bases across the Spanish Empire.
36:10In ports like Buenos Aires, Havana and Portobello.
36:23The new research for the Register of British Slave Traders examined ledgers held here at the British Library that record
36:31the business dealings of the South Sea Company.
36:37These ledgers have revealed some new and shocking details about how the company conducted the slave trade.
36:46Nicholas Radburn, as well as researching the traders of Bristol, has read those ledgers.
36:54One of the things we did was work our way systematically through the records of the South Sea Company, which
37:00are held here in the British Library.
37:01And this is one of the ledgers that you looked at?
37:03Yes.
37:04And it says here, this is the mark, that henceforward is to be put onto the bodies of the Negroes
37:12to be sold.
37:13So this is a brand in both senses of the word. I mean, this is the company's logo, but it
37:20is literally that logo is to be burnt onto the flesh.
37:24That's right.
37:25Of human beings.
37:26Exactly.
37:27To mark the ownership of those human beings by the South Sea Company.
37:32And it's the company's logos, SSC, interlaced, South Sea Company.
37:38And over above those letters is the crown of Queen Anne.
37:42This is a letter that's going out to the factors, the slave trading agents of the company in Jamaica, ordering
37:49them to brand the bodies of the enslaved.
37:52Men, women and children.
37:54And there's no dispensation for children?
37:56No.
37:57No.
37:59Wow.
38:01And so tens of thousands of Africans live the rest of their enslaved lives with the British crown burnt into
38:09their skin?
38:10Yes.
38:14This is another document that you looked at as part of the research.
38:18Mm-hm.
38:18And this is accounts of the company's managing body at the court.
38:23That's right.
38:24And this is from 1725?
38:26Yes.
38:27And five years after the famous South Sea bubble had burst.
38:31What this letter reveals, not only is the South Sea Company continue to be heavily involved in the slave trade
38:37after the bubble has burst,
38:39but also the people who are running the company, the directors, are intimately engaged in the business of slave trading.
38:45They're writing to the factors in Buenos Aires and they've received word from the factors.
38:50It now comes out that you never mark the Negroes, giving for reason that the French never did it and
38:56that Dr. Dover said your mark being so large might endanger the Negroes.
39:01Yes.
39:02So the company court of directors have heard that their agents in Buenos Aires are not branding the enslaved people.
39:09Yes, that's right.
39:11And Dr. Dover is their surgeon and he gives a medical reason why they haven't been doing it.
39:16Yes.
39:16He says the mark being so large it might endanger the Negroes.
39:20And what he means by that is endanger their health.
39:22Not only would it be incredibly painful, but they might get an infection and then die.
39:26And it's in the company's interest, and the court of directors know that, to not have these people die, to
39:31not have them get infections.
39:33Yes.
39:33So this is an appeal for a bit of mercy, but it's also about profits.
39:39It is.
39:40Their response is unequivocal and direct.
39:43They say that we think it therefore high time to put this method in practice and positively direct that for
39:51the future you mark all the Negroes you sell.
39:54Mark the Negroes on the left shoulder, heating the mark red hot and rubbing the part first with a little
40:00palm or other oil.
40:02And taking off the mark pretty quick and rubbing the place again with the oil.
40:06It is so detailed.
40:08Mm-hmm.
40:09Yeah.
40:10They're not just instructing for this branding to take place, they're explaining how they want it done.
40:16Yes.
40:20And does it tell us who the Court of Directors were in this meeting in 1725?
40:25It does.
40:25Their names are all provided at the end of this letter.
40:28Who they are?
40:28Your affectionate friends, the Court of Directors.
40:31Your affectionate friends?
40:33Yes.
40:34And what do we know about the men whose names appear as members of the Court of Directors?
40:38They tend to be members of the London elite, who are intimately connected not only with each other, but also
40:45with other trading companies, some of which were engaged in this transatlantic slave trade.
40:49So, to give you two examples, John Isles and John Rudge, both of them were either directors or governors of
40:55the Bank of England.
40:56Both were heavily involved with the East India Company.
40:59Both were MPs.
41:01Both were major landholders.
41:03Isles will be, a year after this, elected as the Lord Mayor of London as well.
41:07These aren't people who are, you know, marginal members of society, but rather the pinnacle.
41:12And they make this decision irrespective of the fact that their own doctor on site in Buenos Aires is saying,
41:19this is too painful, this is too brutal.
41:21Absolutely.
41:22They reject his advice.
41:23They overrule him, yes, absolutely.
41:29What did you think when you first came across this?
41:32I'm familiar with reading material that's, you know, captures the brutalities of the slave trade.
41:38It's inherent to the business, right?
41:41But this letter in particular stopped me in my tracks.
41:45Yeah.
41:45Because it's so chilling and so clear, the violence that's being done directly from people that we, in our popular
41:55imagination, think are divorced from the day-to-day realities of slave trading on the ground.
41:59That's what's so shocking, is that this would have been a very polite and civilised meeting.
42:04That's right.
42:04By people who would then go on to their families.
42:07Exactly.
42:07This was a decision made in the course of a day's work.
42:11Yes, absolutely.
42:19The South Sea Company shipped around 34,000 people across the Atlantic and into slavery.
42:26The company and its agents in the Spanish Empire repeatedly struggled to maintain relations with Spain, and often struggled to
42:35generate a profit.
42:37In 1750, the company abandoned the Asiento.
42:42But by then, far more profitable and far more effective slave trading companies had emerged.
42:53In the second half of the 18th century, the trade moved north.
42:57It became dominated by one river and one city, Liverpool.
43:10Back at the start of the 18th century, Liverpool had barely existed.
43:15It was just a small fishing town of around 5,000 people.
43:19The trades in enslaved people, the commodities used to buy them, and the products they produced transformed this city.
43:28Because here, those trades reached a new level of sophistication and created previously unimaginable profits.
43:43Malik al-Nasir, a Liverpool historian, descended from enslaved people, has studied the decades in which Liverpool dominated the trade.
43:54What was it about this city that meant that it became the dominant slave trading port?
43:59I think there are a couple of factors.
44:02Geography is one of them, of course. We have the river.
44:04And it is a very big river.
44:06It's a big river.
44:07It's like an inland estuary.
44:08Exactly.
44:09And it's got a natural harbour that gives Liverpool a geographical edge, if you like.
44:14Because there's a lot of space here to build docks, and that's what we see in Liverpool over the 18th
44:19century, is the building of more and more docks.
44:21And that's been primarily driven by the merchant classes who developed the infrastructure of the city to accommodate their business
44:29ventures.
44:29Liverpool begins around the middle of the 18th century to emerge as a very significant seaport.
44:37You then start to see the expansion of shipbuilding, sail making, rope making.
44:43And the big merchants who come to dominate the trade in this city, they're very connected, aren't they?
44:49Liverpool in the 1750s is a very small town, so they all knew each other.
44:55So although these are independent merchants, and they are, in theory, in competition with one another, they are really cooperating.
45:02The reason you find a high degree of cooperation between the merchants of Liverpool, more so than perhaps you would
45:09see in somewhere like London, was the fact that they all intermarried.
45:13A lot of people made a lot of money from enslavement, and they really wanted to preserve that wealth.
45:18One merchant's house, if you like, that was perhaps in competition with another merchant's house, the children of both merchant's
45:25houses would marry.
45:26They would use each other's services, so if one of them owned a bank and the other one owned an
45:30insurance company,
45:31they would both use one's banking services and they would both use the other's insurance companies.
45:36Instead of eating up the competition, you married the competition, and as a consequence of that, you consolidated wealth and
45:44power.
45:44The Liverpool slave traders don't just come to dominate the trade, they come to perfect the slave trade, find ways
45:51of making it more profitable.
45:52They're working on how to increase their profits by making the trade more efficient and by expanding into new markets.
46:02Traditionally, there's always been British influence in the northern part of West Africa, around Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia.
46:12Liverpool merchants expanded south, and they went into Benin, what we would call today Nigeria, and then further south into
46:21Angola.
46:22They were able to increase the amount of enslaved people that they were trafficking exponentially.
46:27For that, they needed more ships.
46:30So there's a feedback loop.
46:31It was necessary then just to feed the monster, as it were.
46:34You know, they created this demand.
46:36The demands in the Caribbean and the Americas were increasing.
46:40So the more you could get, the more you could sell.
46:43They upscaled the whole operation to make it decidedly more profitable, and that is what differentiated them from the likes
46:51of Bristol.
46:51So the slave trade is like the spark that kind of fires an engine that then just kind of keeps
46:56running.
46:57The slave trade was really the catalyst, the reason, if you like, that the whole economic boom happened.
47:04Without the slave trade, that economic boom would not have taken place here.
47:08I mean, you're talking about 80% of the enslaved people that Britain was enslaving were being enslaved by people
47:16from Liverpool.
47:16From this one city.
47:17From this one city.
47:22Liverpool's slave traders used their vast wealth not just to expand their operations, but also to secure political power.
47:35This is Liverpool Town Hall.
47:39Built in the early 1750s and partly funded by the city's slave traders.
47:46On the outer walls of the town hall are images of Africa and Africans.
47:53On the inner walls are portraits of the Liverpool slave traders who rose to become Liverpool mayors.
48:01That portrait up there is of a man called Peter Whitfield Branca.
48:06And what the database tells us is that Branca was involved in 45 slave trading expeditions.
48:14He began in the 1770s as a slave ship captain.
48:19So working directly in the trade off the coast of West Africa and in the Caribbean.
48:24But by the 1780s he starts to be listed as a captain and also an owner.
48:31That means he's a part owner, an investor in these expeditions.
48:36And Peter Branca is one of those Liverpool traders who's able to translate his wealth into political influence.
48:43He becomes a bailiff of the city but also ultimately a Liverpool mayor.
48:49Just over here is a portrait of another Liverpool slave trader who again appears in the database.
48:56This is John Bridge Aspinall.
48:59And the database tells us that he was involved in one way or another in 116 slave trading expeditions.
49:09Again, Aspinall was able to translate wealth into power.
49:13He was another Liverpool mayor.
49:16He's actually painted in this rather grand portrait wearing the robes of office.
49:21And the Aspinalls carefully intermarried into other Liverpool slave trading families.
49:28Which means that John Aspinall was actually the brother-in-law of Peter Whitfield Branca.
49:36In another part of the town hall is yet another portrait of a Liverpool slave trader who again became mayor.
49:46Now this is John Earl.
49:48What his entry in the database tells us is that he was an investor in what is believed to be
49:55the very first ship to have left Liverpool for the coast of Africa to legally engage in the slave trade
50:03after the collapse of the royal monopoly.
50:05It is the Liverpool merchant.
50:09Here is John Earl as one of the two investors and it tells us that the ship left Liverpool in
50:15the year 1699.
50:18The database also tells us that over the next two decades John Earl invested in another 12 slave trading expeditions.
50:27But John Earl was able through these expeditions to establish his family as one of Liverpool's slave trading dynasties.
50:38The Earl family name can still be seen across modern Liverpool and in this they are not unusual.
50:47Many of the streets of Liverpool carry the names of slave trading families.
50:55What is unusual about the Earl family is the number of documents they left behind.
51:01Through their account books, business ledgers and contracts, Edmund Smith, one of the historians on the register of British slave
51:09traders, has been able to follow how the profits generated by this family were reinvested in new industries in Liverpool
51:18and beyond.
51:21So John Earl, whose portrait is up at the town hall.
51:24He's the first generation of the Earl family to invest in the slave trade, but he isn't the last, is
51:29he?
51:30Absolutely. And his son, William Earl, you can see here, followed in the footsteps, but at a scale that his
51:35father, John Earl, probably couldn't have imagined.
51:38William grows up with the slave trade. He starts his work on board ship and becomes a captain.
51:43So he's involved in the slave trade directly?
51:45Absolutely. There are documents telling him how to purchase enslaved people, how to carry them, how to control them.
51:51And that same expertise, when he returns to Liverpool, feeds into his own investment in more slave trading voyages.
51:57We know from your database that John Earl invests in 13 slave trading expeditions.
52:03William, his son, is it many more?
52:05It's vastly more. It's more than a hundred slave trading voyages that are transporting over tens of thousands of people
52:12from Africa to the Caribbean and to North America.
52:15What does William do with all of this money that he's making from the slave trade?
52:20Like many slave traders, the profits from slavery are passed on into industry.
52:25And what we see here is a co-partnership to establish a sugar house in Liverpool, where they take raw
52:31sugar from the Caribbean and transform it into refined sugar that can be sold on.
52:35We have William Earl listed among the signatories alongside other slave traders like Blundell and Hodgson.
52:42On this next document, he's setting up a business, an ironmongering alongside his two children, Thomas Earl and William Earl.
52:52We're now two generations away from John Earl, who first got in the slave trade.
52:57And now this is investment in industry.
53:00Yes. At the same time, we also see their investment into the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
53:05And here we can see a list of proprietors of that canal.
53:08So this is from 1789, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. This is the biggest canal in the country.
53:15This is a major piece of industrial infrastructure.
53:17It runs through Lancashire, which is growing because it's a source of coal.
53:22We see at the same time another co-partnership to establish collieries in Lancashire.
53:27And this all comes together to create what we know as the Industrial Revolution.
53:32This idea that the slave trade was a kind of separate business, and therefore we think of it as a
53:38separate history,
53:38that completely breaks down because all of these documents show how integrated the slave trade and money from the slave
53:45trade was in all these other industries.
53:47It's such a clear trajectory from William Earl, the slave trader, the captain of slave ships, to just his sons
53:54and then his grandsons having a huge amount of wealth that has its roots in the transatlantic world, but has
54:02now diversified across all manner of different things.
54:04Yeah, it's now in canals, it's in factories, it's in making of iron goods, things that we don't think of
54:10as being connected to the slave trade.
54:12Yeah. And the most successful slave traders are always looking for ways to invest that capital in places where it
54:20can be profitable,
54:21but also where it can give them a chance to establish themselves in that new British elite of industrialists.
54:27So how significant in the development of the Industrial Revolution and all the transformations that came with it, how significant
54:34was money that came from the slave trade?
54:37Understanding how the whole system worked, how this whole national story worked, requires us recognising that slavery was an endemic
54:44feature within that.
54:45It doesn't make the inventiveness or industrialising entrepreneurship any less relevant, but it does mean that we have to understand
54:54that they were connected.
54:58As well as the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, later generations of the Earl family invested in the railways.
55:05And like other slave trading dynasties, they put their wealth into mills and into factories.
55:11And all around Liverpool and the north-west of England, money from the slave trade, as well as from slavery,
55:18became one of the sources of the capital that funded the Industrial Revolution.
55:27The research that has built the new register of British slave traders gives us, for the first time, a comprehensive
55:34picture of who Britain's slave traders were.
55:38The wealth they invested, and what those who profited did with that money.
55:43And all of that information, now contained within the database, is to be made public.
55:50The information is there for anyone who has a computer to use.
55:54The hope is that others take it for their own interests, for their own research, and within their own communities.
56:00So this is really a starting point.
56:01What do you think we might gain as a nation from being able to sort of come to terms with
56:07this history?
56:07This history can be really difficult to face.
56:10It's important to recognize that we are not responsible for this trade.
56:16But this is our shared past, and we are beneficiaries of that system.
56:22We live with many of the ways of thinking and the systems that were put in place during this period.
56:27The idea that some people are justifiably harmed for the profit of others is inaugurated at scale in this moment,
56:34and we're still grappling with that.
56:36But there are those people who just find any mention of this history as something that they take as a
56:42sort of an attack on British history rather than British history.
56:46To dismiss this aspect of British history is to dismiss British history itself.
56:52I think one of the principal aims of what we've been trying to do is to place the slave trade,
56:55I think rightly, as one of the central features of British history.
56:59Whether that be the English Civil War, or the Glorious Revolution, or the establishment of learned societies in science,
57:07to claim that this is somehow being imposed on the British history narrative is, I think, now perhaps not sustainable.
57:29The new database is just the latest stage in a long process that has dragged the story of the slave
57:36trade,
57:37out of the shadows.
57:38We now know more than ever about how the trade expanded.
57:43How in the 17th century it started as the preserve of a tiny elite around the steward kings.
57:51And then how in the 18th century it created a new merchant elite in cities like Bristol and Liverpool.
58:01And how wealth generated from the slave trade spread into institutions and into industries across the country.
58:11And what all of this demonstrates is that although this is an uncomfortable history,
58:17at times it is a shocking history.
58:19It is part of our national story.
58:28you
58:38different
58:39how in the 19th century it is been a whole