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00:14In 1732, the houses of Queen Square, here in the heart of Bristol, were some of the grandest in the
00:21city.
00:34They were home to families who were making their fortunes in the city's boom years.
00:43We know who was living in these houses in 1732 because of the land tax records.
00:49They tell us that this house, number 37, was home to a Matthew Thomas.
00:55He lived there with his wife Elizabeth and their children.
00:58His neighbour here was Widow Raxall, Anne Raxall.
01:04She had just lost her husband, Nathaniel, who died young, aged just 44.
01:10And next to them, at number 35, was a Richard Farr, Jr.
01:16There is now a new place where we can find these same names.
01:22And it is here, the Register of British Slave Traders.
01:33What this tells us is that Matthew Thomas was an investor in two slave trading expeditions that left the port
01:42of Bristol.
01:43Here is the entry for Nathaniel Raxall.
01:47He put his money into four slave trading expeditions.
01:51And Richard Farr was an investor in 20 slave trading voyages that, between them, carried more than 6,000 men,
02:01women and children into slavery.
02:05But it's not just these three houses, and it is not just these three families.
02:12More than half of all the householders listed as living here in 1732 also appear on this Register of Slave
02:22Traders.
02:27The Register is the culmination of one of the biggest and most ambitious studies ever undertaken into Britain's role in
02:35the slave trade.
02:43For five years, a group of historians have searched through thousands of documents in archives across the country and in
02:50the Caribbean,
02:51piecing together a comprehensive picture of who the slave traders were.
02:56And for this series, we've been given exclusive access to their findings.
03:02We began the project with the very clear ambition to do the most comprehensive assessment of all of the British
03:10-based investors in the transatlantic slave trade.
03:12That list now is somewhere around 13,000 people.
03:15We're not talking about a trade that's peripheral, but rather one that's connected to all of the different parts of
03:21the country,
03:22that involves a huge amount of national wealth and a huge amount of very powerful people.
03:25I was shocked to find this web of connections stretching across the north of Britain that really brings to light
03:32a more endemic feature of slavery.
03:3413,000 individual lives were changed by participation.
03:39With the profit side of the slave trade, three million more were fundamentally altered by the desire for profit.
03:46Anyone can now log on and discover who the slave traders were, where they lived, how much money they made,
03:54and the links between modern British companies and institutions and the trade in human beings.
04:02What emerges is a new picture of a trade that was spread further across the country than we might have
04:08imagined,
04:09not just in the slave trading ports like Bristol and Liverpool.
04:16It's also a story that stretches far back into the British past.
04:23Because to find a start date for this history, we need to travel back four and a half centuries.
04:48In the British library is a remarkable relic from the first years of the English slave trade.
04:57The date here at the top of the page is 1563, five years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
05:11Now, this is a document that is really, really hard to read.
05:15But what it is, as it tells us, is a list of names, the names of the adventurers.
05:21These are the men who, at this moment, are putting their money into a new expedition that they hope will
05:29generate them significant profits.
05:32And some of these names were very well known in the 1560s.
05:37Among them is William Cecil Knight.
05:42This is William Cecil.
05:45He was Queen Elizabeth's principal advisor, arguably the most influential, the most powerful figure in the whole country after the
05:55Queen.
05:55At the top of the list is the Earl of Pembroke.
06:00Here he is in his armour with his coat of arms.
06:04He was a Tudor courtier.
06:07He was a member of the Queen's Privy Council, her cabinet.
06:10And he'd been involved in the Tudor court since the days of Henry VIII.
06:15Below this list of courtiers is another list of names.
06:20And these are the London merchants.
06:22These are the money men.
06:24So we have a William Garrett.
06:28Here he is.
06:29He was a significant London merchant and a former Lord Mayor of London.
06:34Just beneath him is another London merchant, William Chester.
06:39He was also an MP and he had significant links to the court and to Elizabeth.
06:46Now, the Queen's name does not appear in either of these lists.
06:51But she was involved in this expedition.
06:54And that's because she was loaning the expedition one of her ships.
06:58And it's named here the Jesus of Lubeck.
07:03Here is a picture of the Jesus of Lubeck.
07:07And it was a giant 700-ton warship.
07:12It had been bought for the Tudor navy by Henry VIII.
07:15And it had been used in an attempt to salvage, to raise from the seabed,
07:20another of Henry's ships, the Mary Rose.
07:23But in 1564, the Jesus of Lubeck was off on this expedition financed by these men.
07:44The Queen, William Cecil and the London merchants were willing to support this expedition
07:50because it was led by an English adventurer who just two years earlier had returned from the New World
07:56with an astonishing haul of wealth and treasure.
08:09A portrait of that adventurer is on display here at the National Maritime Museum.
08:18This is the face of John Hawkins.
08:25John Hawkins was many things.
08:28He was a merchant. He was a brilliant naval commander.
08:31He was a privateer, a state-sanctioned pirate.
08:34But in 1562, he had become something else.
08:39England's first slave trader.
08:42Because that year, he'd sailed to the coast of West Africa.
08:46There, he attacked local settlements and Portuguese slave ships.
08:51He captured 300 Africans and then sailed across the Atlantic
08:56and sold those captives to Spanish plantation owners in the Caribbean.
09:01What he'd demonstrated was that the English could break into the Atlantic slave trade,
09:08a trade pioneered and dominated by the Portuguese and the Spanish.
09:18The new expedition that William Cecil and the London merchants had backed
09:23was to be the second slave trading expedition of John Hawkins.
09:29And the document that lists the names of the investors contains another list,
09:35the victual list, the supplies to be loaded onto the ships
09:39that were then to set sail for the coast of Africa.
09:43And that list contains some telling details.
09:46Among the supplies were shoes for 500 Negroes and meat for the Negroes.
09:58The clear purpose and intent of this second expedition was, like the first,
10:04to capture human beings and carry them across the ocean.
10:20In the last weeks of 1564, the ships led by John Hawkins
10:25to have passed by this coastline here in West Africa.
10:33In the 16th century, ships tried whenever they could to stay within sight of land,
10:38which means that if I'd been standing here back then,
10:42I would have been able to look out and see them as little dots on that horizon.
10:47They headed south and then they turned east.
10:49They were tracing the outline of the African continent.
10:53But, of course, the English hadn't pioneered.
10:56They hadn't invented this trade.
10:57They were just bit players and they were latecomers.
11:00But these first early Tudor expeditions,
11:04they were the beginnings of an English and then a British slave trade
11:09that was not to come to an end for another 243 years.
11:14Not until 1807, when the British ended the trade
11:18and the last British ships left this coast.
11:30Hawkins headed for the Sierra Leone River,
11:33the target of his earlier expedition.
11:36And there he captured hundreds of Africans
11:40by raiding Portuguese slave traders.
11:43And he and his men also carried out raids on African villages
11:47to capture others.
11:53Crossing the Atlantic, he sold the captives to plantation owners
11:58in the Spanish colonies of South America.
12:02And from there, for the second time, Hawkins sailed home to England.
12:11The profits from the expedition shared between Hawkins,
12:15the London merchants, and the Queen were astonishing.
12:20By one estimate, they made a profit of 60%.
12:29One of the sources that allows historians to calculate those profits
12:34are letters written in London by the Spanish ambassador,
12:39Diego Guzman de Silva.
12:41Letters that he dispatched to his master in Madrid, King Philip II.
12:46De Silva informed the Spanish king that Hawkins had arrived back in London
12:52with 50,000 gold coins.
12:55Gold that today would be worth 20 million pounds.
13:01And this information was of interest to King Philip,
13:04because in the 1560s, English slave traders had no business
13:08trading in the Spanish Empire in the New World.
13:14How the world had been carved up and the English excluded
13:18can be seen in one of the great treasures held by the British Library,
13:22an atlas from the time.
13:27This atlas has a really remarkable backstory.
13:31It really does. It's known as the Queen Mary Atlas.
13:34So it's Mary Tudor who marries King Philip II of Spain in 1554.
13:40And this atlas was a wedding gift for Philip.
13:43It's an amazing object about a moment that England
13:47nearly becomes part of the Spanish Empire.
13:50And we can see this by looking at this map here,
13:53which is the spread of Western Europe.
13:55This is the British Isles.
13:56This is the British Isles.
13:57And what's interesting is this coat of arms.
13:59You have England on the right, but look on the left.
14:02That should be Spain. It's been defaced.
14:05We think it could actually be Elizabeth I who inherits this atlas.
14:10And she is now running a Protestant country.
14:13And she says, this is not the image I want.
14:17Let's just scratch that out.
14:18I love the idea of the Virgin Queen, Gloriana,
14:21with all of that dignity from those portraits,
14:24scratching out the Spanish flag.
14:26Getting really angry.
14:28This page shows South America and, up here, the Caribbean.
14:33Don't forget, this is representing the world
14:36as Philip II wants to see it.
14:38So you can see Cortes and the conquistadors taking this area
14:42with the Spanish flags up here moving up into the Caribbean.
14:47The atlas also shows Africa. Let's look at that page.
14:50Yeah.
14:51What you've got here is the shape of West Africa
14:53running down into sub-Saharan Africa and the Cape of Good Hope.
14:57And then on the left-hand side, here in the West,
15:00you can see South America.
15:01So in 1494, the globe has kind of been carved up
15:05between Spain and Portugal.
15:06The Treaty of Tordesillas draws a line down the Atlantic
15:09and says everything to the West Spanish,
15:11everything to the East Portuguese.
15:12So all these Portuguese flags all the way down.
15:15So when Hawkins is off the coast of Africa
15:18capturing enslaved Africans,
15:20he is breaking into a Portuguese zone of influence.
15:23And when he sells them in the New World,
15:25he's breaking into the Spanish Empire.
15:27Hawkins is an absolute chancer.
15:29He is really playing hit and run with the Spanish and the Portuguese.
15:34But Hawkins has already demonstrated
15:36that the profits of the slave trade are so enormous
15:39that Elizabeth is willing to throw the dice on this.
15:44England is a tiny, tiny bit player at this point,
15:46trying to break in to a global empire of the world
15:52which is predominantly shaped by what Spain
15:55and the Portuguese empires are doing.
15:57So any way in which you can enrich your crown,
16:00if you have to do that quietly by supporting people like Hawkins
16:03and saying, if it goes wrong, I claim no connection to it,
16:07but if it goes well, I'll take the money, thank you very much.
16:10That's part of the gamble.
16:11It's part of keeping this tiny little Protestant state going.
16:16So yes, you'd invest in slaves.
16:17Yes, you'd invest in this kind of very, very dangerous political game,
16:22but there's no sense of a morality here.
16:25That's what's so awful about this.
16:27You look at something as beautiful as this atlas,
16:29but what underlies this is something really very dark,
16:33very sinister about the movement of people
16:36and the enslavement of people across this space.
16:45Having generated such vast profits for the most powerful people in the land,
16:50it was perhaps inevitable that in 1567,
16:54Hawkins would set sail again on a third expedition.
17:00Again with the royal warship, the Jesus of Lubeck,
17:04among the six ships in his fleet.
17:10A critical document that tells us what happened to that expedition has survived.
17:18This is not a list of investors and it is not a list of profits.
17:23It is a letter that's held here at the National Archives.
17:27It is signed, John Hawkins,
17:29and it is dated the 25th day of January, 1568.
17:36Hawkins was writing to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's great counsellor.
17:42And what he's describing to Cecil is a disaster.
17:45He explains that of the six ships that he'd left England with,
17:50he had arrived in Cornwall at a place called Mounts Bay
17:54only with the minion left of all our fleet.
17:59Among the English ships lost was the Jesus of Lubeck, Queen Elizabeth's own ship.
18:05And Hawkins goes on to explain the nature of this disaster.
18:10If I should write of all our calamities, I am sure a volume as great as the Bible would scarcely
18:18suffice.
18:18He goes on to explain that the voyage had been successful.
18:23They had reached the coast of West Africa.
18:25There they had captured hundreds of Africans by working alongside a local African leader.
18:31They then crossed the Atlantic and sold hundreds of those captives to Spanish plantation owners in the New World.
18:38But a great part of our treasure, merchandise, shipping and men were devoured by the treason of the Spaniards.
18:49The English ships had been in a harbour in Mexico when a Spanish fleet had arrived.
18:55At first, they'd agreed a truce, but the Spanish had reneged on that deal and they'd attacked the English ships.
19:02What followed was, as Hawkins says here, a calamity.
19:13The database, built by the researchers, tells us what happened next after the disaster of the third Hawkins expedition.
19:23The database lists the expeditions of John Hawkins and it lists all of the ships he used.
19:30But what follows is not another list of further, later, Tudor slave trading expeditions, because there are none for the
19:38rest of the 16th century.
19:40There are none during the rest of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
19:44Because after the disaster of the final Hawkins expedition, the English slave trade came to a halt.
19:53But through the decades that followed, the trade in enslaved Africans to the European colonies of the Caribbean and the
20:01Americas continued without the English.
20:05Historians have identified 1,679 voyages dispatched to the coast of Africa during those decades by the European rivals of
20:17England.
20:18Between them, those expeditions transported around half a million people to lives of slavery.
20:27But around 100,000 Africans never reached their destinations.
20:33They died in the infamous Middle Passage.
20:45The English, although excluded from the slave trade, remained, like other Europeans, fascinated by Africa.
20:53A continent believed to possess extraordinary wealth.
20:57A place with which Europeans might trade for gold and ivory.
21:07It was in the hope of winning access to those trades that in 1618, Queen Elizabeth's successor, James I, the
21:16new Stuart King of England, established a trading company.
21:21The company of adventurers of London trading to the ports of Africa.
21:28And the focus of the new company's attention was one of Africa's many rivers.
21:33The Gambia River, in the far west of the continent.
21:39And a series of small, modest English expeditions were sent here.
21:46One arrived in the year 1620.
21:52On board that expedition was a man called Richard Jobson.
21:55And his role was to discover the fate of an earlier expedition.
21:59To explore the river and, if he could, to trade with the local African people.
22:05Exchanging goods brought from England, ideally for gold.
22:08And when he returned home to England, Jobson wrote a book, an account of his time on this river.
22:15It is called The Golden Trade, or A Discovery of the River Gambra and the Golden Trade of the Ethiopians.
22:23Ethiopians was just a general term for all Africans back in the 17th century.
22:28Now, in this book, Jobson describes the potential of the gold trade on this river.
22:34But he also describes being a witness to another trade that was being conducted right here.
22:40The trade in slaves.
22:42A trade between local African traders and other European merchants.
22:46In the book, he describes feeling the presence of the slave trade almost immediately upon entering this river.
22:55He writes that the people who are inhabiting or dwelling in the mouth of the river.
23:01Or within certain leagues of the first entrance.
23:04So, very close to where I am now.
23:07That those people were very fearful to speak with any shipping.
23:11And this was because they have been many times by several nations surprised, taken and carried away.
23:20Carried away into slavery.
23:22There is a passage later in the book where Jobson describes his encounter with the local African slave trader, Buko
23:31Sano.
23:31And he writes about a moment when Sano showed unto me certain young black women who were standing by themselves.
23:41Which he told me were slaves brought for me to buy.
23:45And Jobson's response to that offer is really interesting.
23:51This is what he writes.
23:53We were a people who did not deal in any such commodities.
23:58Neither did we buy or sell one another.
24:01Or any that had our own shapes.
24:04Sano responds by saying that slaves were the only merchandise they carried down into the country.
24:11And that they were sold there to white men who earnestly desired them.
24:16And Jobson says that those other white men were another kind of people.
24:22Different from us.
24:24Different from the English.
24:27We don't know how representative the views of Richard Jobson were in the England of the 1620s.
24:35In the reign of King James I, half a century after the last of the Tudor slave trading expeditions.
24:43Was Jobson speaking for himself?
24:46Or was he describing attitudes that were widespread?
24:50And what did the English think of the wealth being generated by the trade and by slavery in the empires
24:58of Spain and Portugal?
25:00What we do know is that even while Jobson was rejecting the advances of an African slave trader on the
25:09Gambia River,
25:10what was happening in the Caribbean was about to draw the English back into the trade in human beings.
25:19It was in the 1620s that England took control of new colonies in the Caribbean.
25:25The islands of St Kitts, Nevis and most importantly Barbados.
25:31And it was on Barbados that an economic revolution began when the island was turned over to sugar cultivation, sparking
25:40a boom.
25:41By the 1640s the demand for labour to work the sugar cane fields was so urgent that there was a
25:49slow and tentative revival of the English slave trade.
25:55That revival can be seen in the data gathered by the historians who have built the new register of British
26:03slave traders.
26:04The names of English ships along with the names of their investors appear on the database for the first time
26:11since the calamity of the last expedition of John Hawkins.
26:16The Voyage of the Star in 1640 to 1641 is the first voyage that we know of which is organised
26:20directly in England and almost 300 captives are trafficked.
26:25One individual in particular John Wood stands out as a prominent investor here and he appears in the London port
26:31books in 1640.
26:33He's assembling trade goods such as linen, iron, Sheffield knives.
26:38He's dispatching this venture to West Africa to trade for captives.
26:42The intensification of the English slave trade in the 1640s really happens in the middle of that decade.
26:48There are 11 voyages for 1644 and 12 for 1645.
26:52And at that moment in time the English civil war is raging, a traumatic moment in the history of the
26:59nation.
26:59I mean it would seem more natural that a trade would kind of collapse during, you know, with such a
27:05kind of rupture.
27:06I think it's surprising that the trade continues during the civil war.
27:09Yes, you know, if there was a moment for people to step away from a risky experimental business, it was
27:15during a moment of domestic catastrophe.
27:18But actually what we find here is the importance of prioritising the expansion of the violent transportation of enslaved African
27:25people.
27:27The defeat of the Royalists, the execution of King Charles the First and the emergence of a new English Republic
27:34led by Oliver Cromwell was not the end of the conflict.
27:41The heirs to the steward throne, the two brothers, Prince Charles and Prince James, fled into exile.
27:54But the Royalist struggle against Cromwell continued at sea, with the formation of a Royalist Navy.
28:02A force that was led by a man who was to play an unexpected role in the next stage of
28:09the English slave trade.
28:13His portrait is on display in the Queen's House in Greenwich.
28:20This is Prince Rupert, the first Duke of Cumberland and Count Palatine of the Rhine.
28:26But he was also the nephew of the executed king, Charles the First.
28:31And he was the cousin of two future kings, Charles the Second and James the Second.
28:37And Rupert was just about the most feared and the most infamous military commander from the age of the Civil
28:44Wars.
28:45And it was under Rupert that the Royalist Navy set out to attack the ships of Oliver Cromwell's England in
28:52the Caribbean and across the Atlantic.
28:55And in 1652, Rupert took his royalist fleet up a river on the west coast of Africa.
29:11The river Rupert arrived in was the same river that 30 years earlier Richard Jobson had sailed up and been
29:19shocked to be offered Africans being sold as slaves.
29:26And three decades later, the trades in slaves and in African gold were still being conducted on these waterways.
29:43Prince Rupert sailed his ships far up river and he saw just how deep into the continent this river extends.
29:52He may well have heard the stories, the legends, that somewhere at the end of this river lay ancient gold
29:59mines.
30:00And he may well have seen how the trade in gold, but also the trade in slaves, operated on this
30:06river.
30:07The partnerships between European merchants and African traders.
30:11And so Prince Rupert, the cousin to two future English kings, had seen with his own eyes the economic potential
30:20of this part of the African continent.
30:27Eight years after Prince Rupert had sailed up the Gambia River, his fortunes and those of the House of Stuart
30:34were transformed.
30:44In 1660, Charles Stuart, along with his brother James the Duke of York, left their comfortable exile in France and
30:52returned to England, where Charles became King Charles II.
30:57The following year he was crowned in a lavish ceremony here at Westminster Abbey.
31:08The coronation of 1661 of course followed the traditions of the past, but many of the objects at the centre
31:18of this ancient ceremony were newly created.
31:22And that was because back in 1649, the crown jewels of England had been melted down on the orders of
31:30Oliver Cromwell.
31:31So new jewels, including a new crown, had been commissioned at enormous expense.
31:39Those crown jewels, created for the coronation of Charles II, have, in the centuries that followed, been used repeatedly in
31:48the coronations of British kings and queens.
31:52The ceremony that took place right here was a masterpiece of political theatre.
32:00It used expense and pageantry and glamour to paper over the cracks of a nation still deeply scarred by the
32:09wounds of the Civil War and the Republican era under Cromwell.
32:13It also helped to camouflage the fact that the English state was deeply in debt.
32:20And yet, despite all of the spectacle and the pageantry, despite the unquestioned enthusiasm for the new regime, the Stuart
32:29monarchy was in need of new projects, new trades and new institutions that would help it to rebuild its own
32:37fortunes,
32:38to firmly re-establish the institution of monarchy and to help it expand the economy of England.
32:56William Pettigrew, who has led the new research project, has searched through the archives to uncover where the restored monarchs
33:05of England invested their wealth
33:07and directed their attentions.
33:10They were seeking to offer reassurance to a divided nation, which the Republican period had singularly failed to do.
33:18So they're looking for various different new directions they can take the country to bring people together.
33:23And what sort of trades, what sort of institutions do they invest in?
33:28One of them is the royal fisheries.
33:31They're also interested in developing a state-sponsored management of what was understood at the time to be a cutting
33:39-edge new trade, the trade in enslaved African people.
33:43So this trade that had developed from the 1640s privately, the states, the monarchy, now want to take control of
33:50it?
33:50That's right. By the time you get to 1663, they charter a joint-stock monopoly company.
33:57The company of Royal Adventure is trading into Africa, because at that point the city of London becomes very involved.
34:03How long is the charter given to this company?
34:06The monopoly described by the charter is meant to last for a thousand years.
34:11A thousand years?
34:11Yeah.
34:12And the monopoly is key because the monopoly says that if you're going to risk your capital, put your money
34:17into this venture, you're the only company allowed to embark in this trade, so you won't face competition.
34:23So it kind of skews the risk, it makes it a better investment.
34:26Exactly.
34:27The monopoly is kind of meaningless without the means to enforce it.
34:32So the apparatus of the states, the law, but also the Royal Navy, which is developing around this time, that
34:39can be deployed in defence of this one company's right to engage in the slave trade?
34:43Yeah. So in that sense, it's a project that receives sort of unrivalled state backing.
34:48It's clear evidence of the extent of the steward's determination to lead this business, this traffic in particular.
34:57What knowledge or experience of the trade with Africa is there within this elite around the court and the royal
35:03family?
35:03Not much. There is one exception to that, though. Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
35:09This is somebody who'd actually had direct experience of being in West Africa.
35:14That was pretty unusual for members of the royal families of Europe.
35:19This was his trip up the Gambia River, which was just a few years early.
35:22That's right. Where he saw and was excited by not only the possibility of gold mining, but also he's observing
35:29the slave trade.
35:32He's among the initial list of investors.
35:34So it's pretty clear that Rupert is a prime mover in the whole organisation, if not, you know, the inspiration
35:42for it.
35:43So King Charles II and the institution of monarchy around him, they see this trade as modern, as the future.
35:52It's clearly meant to be a forward-looking collaboration between factions within the political nation who had been killing each
36:01other only years before.
36:04It becomes a kind of a vehicle for reconciliation.
36:08So the slave trade becomes a place where the wounds of the past could be healed.
36:12That looks like an important part of the agenda here.
36:23The company of royal adventurers trading into Africa, with the wealth and the power of the monarch, the court and
36:31the London merchants behind it, doubled the number of English ships carrying enslaved people to the plantations of the growing
36:39English empire in the Caribbean.
36:43And the monopoly ensured that it was the only company permitted to engage in the trades in African gold and
36:52African humanity.
37:00Although the monopoly had been granted in the name of King Charles II, it was his brother, James the Duke
37:07of York, the future King James II,
37:10and who was most directly involved in the operation of the company.
37:15And company records reveal just how involved.
37:19These are scans from the minute book of the company of royal adventurers trading to Africa.
37:25This is the official record of company meetings, and it tells us all the decisions that were made at each
37:32meeting, and it tells us who was in attendance.
37:35So these are members of the company's court, the committee or the board that runs the company.
37:42And at the top, it tells us that the governor was also in attendance, and that the name of the
37:48governor was the Duke of York.
37:50This meeting is held on the 19th of August, 1664.
37:56The next meeting was held on the 26th of August, and again, the governor, James the Duke of York, was
38:03also in attendance.
38:05There's a meeting also here on the 12th of September, and in that meeting, James has himself written into the
38:13minute book.
38:13He writes, I will add to my stock £2,000, and he signs James.
38:20So he is increasing his personal investment in this company by £2,000.
38:25So week after week, meeting after meeting, James is present.
38:32Sometimes he is listed not just as governor, but as his royal highness, the governor.
38:38And we know that some of these meetings were actually held in James' private apartments in Whitehall Palace,
38:45than the London residents of the English monarch.
38:49And that's because James' role in these monopoly companies of the 1660s and into the 1670s,
38:56it wasn't ceremonial. He wasn't just a bigger head.
39:00He was personally, financially invested in these companies, and he was at the centre of decision-making
39:07as they expanded England's role in the Atlantic slave trade.
39:16With its finances in place and its shareholders drawn from the elite and the London merchants,
39:26the company took control of outposts on the coast of West Africa,
39:33including here, an island in the Gambia River,
39:40a fortress that had once belonged to the Dutch.
39:45All that is left today are ruins.
39:53The very act of seizing this island, of building defences, of bringing cannon here,
39:58of basing agents and traders within its walls,
40:01all of that spoke to the commitment of the company to the African trade.
40:06The trade in gold and other commodities, but also the trade in human beings.
40:12And this tiny island, in this huge African river, it feels about as far from England as you can get.
40:19And yet, it was what happened here and in other forts along the coast of Africa,
40:25upon which the fortunes of the company, but also of its wealthy, its aristocratic,
40:31and its royal investors, now depended.
40:36The company's fort on the Gambia River was renamed Fort James, after James, Duke of York.
40:43And from bases like this, the company was able to ensure that its investors did well from the slave trade,
40:50by supplying the plantation owners on the islands of the Caribbean with the slave labour they demanded.
41:03In 1672, the company was given a new charter and a new name.
41:08It became the Royal African Company of England,
41:11still operating from the same forts on the African coast,
41:15and still with James, Duke of York, as its governor and a lead investor.
41:27As the company expanded, it began to attract new investors.
41:34Most of the people whose names appear in the share transfer books of the Royal African Company,
41:40as the buyers, or the sellers, of company shares have long been forgotten.
41:48But one of them, in recent years, has been dragged out of the historical shadows,
41:53and become infamous today in the 21st century,
41:58although his role in the slave trade is misunderstood.
42:04Not that long ago, very few people outside of Bristol had ever heard of this guy, Edward Colston.
42:11He is famous today because of this Victorian statue of him that was toppled back in 2020.
42:18And this is where it now lies.
42:21It's in one of Bristol's museums, and it is still covered in graffiti.
42:26And there is red paint painted onto his hands to signify that he has blood on his hands.
42:33But what many people didn't get back in 2020, when this statue became famous,
42:39is that Edward Colston was not a Bristol slave trader.
42:44He was born in Bristol, and he gave lots of money to the city of Bristol,
42:49but Colston was a London slave trader.
42:52He was an investor in, and for a while, he was the deputy governor of the Royal African Company.
42:59And during his years involved in the company,
43:02it transported around 70,000 men, women and children into slavery.
43:13Edward Colston, from a wealthy Bristol family, was one of the Royal African Company's major investors.
43:21And his name appears repeatedly in the company minute books, recording his attendance at company meetings.
43:27But the share transfer books of the Royal African Company from the 1680s show that the possibility of investing in
43:36the slave trade had began to come within the reach of people from outside the elite,
43:42and beyond the networks of the London merchants.
43:46Lila O'Leary Chambers, a member of the research team, has trawled through thousands of pages of company accounts to
43:54discover who these new investors were.
43:58These ledgers tell us who was buying and selling shares in the Royal African Company.
44:02This is from 1687, and it's one of a series of dozens of ledgers.
44:08Each volume will have hundreds of people contained within it.
44:11What sort of people are investing in the Royal African Company?
44:14We're now expanding into the City of London more generally, and we see merchants,
44:19we see people that have memberships in the guilds, and we see both men and women investing.
44:24So are some of these people what we would today think of as sort of middle class?
44:29Certainly at the upper portion of the middle class.
44:31They may or may not own landed property, but they have capital that they can use to invest.
44:38So it is in a way becoming more democratized.
44:41There is more people from lower down, still in the top, but the kind of lower part of the top
44:48of society,
44:48who can afford to invest in the trade and who want to invest in the trade.
44:52Yes, and I think the important thing to note about these shares is that in addition to an economic value,
44:57they also come with a bigger say in the functioning of the company.
45:02Here we see one investor named Peter Paravancini, who was actually born in Italy and then came to England.
45:09He described himself at that point as a poor lad, and he used a combination of apprenticeship to a merchant
45:16tailor
45:17and investment in corporations like the Royal African Company to build himself in both financial and political stature.
45:23And by 1683, he was actually a London alderman.
45:27So you can see that he's really enmeshed himself in the life of the city at that point.
45:31And here he is in 1687, and he's selling 500 pounds worth of stock in the Royal African Company.
45:40And 500 pounds in 1687 is a considerable amount of money.
45:44So this has been part, investing in the company, investing in the slave trade,
45:49has been part of a story for this investor of social mobility.
45:54Exactly, yes.
45:55And I think the kind of fascinating things about these documents is that you do actually see the signatures,
45:59so you can kind of get a sense of a little bit of how they viewed themselves and how they
46:04wanted to leave their mark.
46:05It's quite a dramatic signature with a big flourish.
46:08It is, yes, yeah.
46:09It is.
46:10As well as in this ledger seeing people who are from lower down the social spectrum,
46:14there's also a lot of women named as investors.
46:18That's a really important part of the story of the Royal African Company.
46:22Corporate structures allowed women to get a foot in the door in different types of financial ventures,
46:29the Atlantic slave trade being an important one.
46:31And we have an example here of Susanna Phipps.
46:34200 pounds worth.
46:36What do we know about Susanna Phipps?
46:39So Susanna Phipps gets married three or four times each time her name changes.
46:43Changing her name.
46:44Exactly. And so tracing her across those many iterations of different names is a challenge in and of itself.
46:50But her family's story with the Royal African Company moves beyond investment.
46:55Her grandson, James Phipps, ends up being one of the sort of chief factors at Cape Coast Castle.
47:01So he's working for the company on the coast of West Africa directly in the slave trade.
47:06Yes. While he's there, he has a marriage with a woman who is of mixed African and Dutch descent named
47:13Catherine Phipps.
47:14And she is an active trader in her own right.
47:17Even though she's mixed race African herself, she is trading in the slave trade as well.
47:21She is, yes. And she's important for James Phipps because she has access to networks that he doesn't.
47:27He has several children with her.
47:30His daughters are sent back to England.
47:32And Susanna, who we see investing in the slave trade, you know, in 1687, ends up partially caring for these
47:40mixed race children.
47:41So these are two mixed race girls being educated in England whose mother was an African slave trader and whose
47:49grandmother, whose care they're in, is an investor in the slave trade.
47:53This is really striking when we think about the role of women as financial actors in the Atlantic slave trade.
48:00But very few of these investors would have been to West Africa or to the Caribbean.
48:04They wouldn't have seen the trade in operation.
48:07But what do they know about just the realities of this trade?
48:12I think that there are certainly investors that might know less than others.
48:18But what I would say is that more people than you would think understand pretty clearly what's going on.
48:24So, for example, when a Royal African Company ship launched a slaving voyage,
48:30often the captain or the surgeon would get a kind of bonus for how many people they were able to
48:37actually successfully keep alive.
48:38What was called either dead money or head money.
48:41And in order to...
48:42This is the bonus paid for each African brought to the new world, to the Caribbean, alive.
48:47Exactly. That could then be sold.
48:49To understand the concept of head money, you need to understand the concept of what people call wastage.
48:55Yes.
48:55That 10, 15, 20 percent sometimes of people on board these slave ships weren't going to make it.
49:01They were going to die.
49:02Yes. And it's cold, hard economic calculation.
49:05You're not going to invest in a company that you don't understand.
49:07These people are very financially literate for the most part.
49:12They are making strategic choices about when they buy and sell shares.
49:16And that is informed by a somewhat robust knowledge of the trade.
49:19It's informed by knowledge of political change, of market price.
49:23You know, so they're compiling a huge amount of information often into making the choice to invest in Atlantic slavery.
49:38As the Royal African Company expanded, it was not just individuals who invested.
49:43The new research has catalogued investments made by institutions.
49:50One of which was the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
49:56Known today as the Royal Society.
49:59The oldest and one of the most respected learned societies in the world.
50:07Established in 1660, the same year as the first of the Royal Monopoly slave trading companies,
50:13it was one of those institutions to which the Stuarts attached the Royal Prefects and to which they provided Royal
50:21Patronage.
50:22And in the archives, the Society's history is preserved in meticulous detail.
50:28This ledger contains the minutes of meetings of the Council of the Royal Society.
50:34The Society's governing body.
50:36And they discuss lots of different things at these meetings.
50:40Which books to buy for the Society's library.
50:43Which works by Society members are worthy of publication.
50:47And how to manage and how to invest the Society's money.
50:52This meeting took place on November 22nd, 1682.
50:57And at the top, it lists the members of the Council who were present.
51:02And the first of them is the President, Sir Christopher Wren.
51:06The great architect.
51:08And in 1682, he was still working on the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral.
51:13And he'd begun work on the Royal Chelsea Hospital, the home for army veterans.
51:19Also at the meeting was a Mr Hook.
51:23Now that is Robert Hook.
51:24The great scientist.
51:26The great polymath.
51:27And as ever, Robert Hook was working on lots of different things at the same time in November 1682.
51:34And among them was his writings about comets.
51:37Because Halley's Comet had just appeared a few months earlier in the skies.
51:42But at this meeting in November 1682, the members of the Council were engaged in debating much more mundane, much
51:51more down-to-earth matters.
51:53How to invest the Society's money.
51:56And it tells us that upon consideration of laying out part of the stock of the Royal Society to the
52:04best advantage, it was concluded that £200 original stock in the African Company should be bought.
52:12And that, of course, is the Royal African Company.
52:17And it tells us in the minutes that a Mr Hill was to carry out this transaction on behalf of
52:25the Society.
52:25Now, this is Mr Abraham Hill.
52:30He's also listed here as a member of the Council.
52:33And he was the treasurer of the Royal Society.
52:36And it is possible to follow this transaction across the days and across London.
52:44Because we find Abraham Hill in the minutes of another meeting that took place on the 28th of November, six
52:51days later.
52:52And this was a meeting held at African House, which was the headquarters of the Royal African Company on Leadenhall
53:01in the heart of the City of London.
53:03And it was a meeting of the Court of Assistance, the board of the Royal African Company.
53:09And here on this page is the name Mr Abraham Hill.
53:16Now, he carries out two transactions, both for £200 of Royal African Company stock.
53:25Now, we think that one of these transactions was a personal private investment.
53:31And that the other was the £200 he was investing on behalf of the Royal Society.
53:39So this, this is the moment when one of England's greatest institutions,
53:45a society at the heart of the English Enlightenment,
53:49of the drive for science and experiment and reason,
53:52that that society became an investor in the slave trade.
54:04In the years the Royal Society held shares in the Royal African Company,
54:09it received a little over £132 in dividends.
54:14£26,000 in today's money.
54:22The links between the Royal Society and the slave trade have been researched by the society itself.
54:30The same spirit of open investigation, upon which the scientific principles of the society have always rested,
54:38are being applied to its own history.
54:41But the Royal Society is just one of many institutions that benefited financially from the trade in enslaved Africans.
54:53The research carried out for the register of British slave traders has uncovered more connections,
54:59and collated the names of institutions onto their database.
55:05You will have uncovered the histories of organisations that don't know their own histories,
55:11that don't know of these connections to the slave trade.
55:15What do we do with this knowledge?
55:17One of the things that we started is to let some of these organisations know about these connections.
55:21I think it's true to say that most organisations of a certain age may have assumed a connection
55:26and they may not know precisely what that consists of,
55:28and this data can help them to understand that and confront it.
55:32I think we established early on that if we're looking at an institution that has roots into the 17th or
55:3718th century,
55:38the likelihood is more than not that there will be links to the slave trade in one way or another,
55:43whether that's businesses that still operate or charities.
55:46I think that just shows how endemic the trade was in the British economy.
55:49Women could take the proceeds from investing in the slave trade
55:52and use them as a way to gain access to institutions that they otherwise would have been excluded from.
55:57For example, women leave substantial gifts to Oxford and Cambridge colleges.
56:02They wouldn't have been allowed to study there.
56:03There must have been moments when you're looking at numbers and figures and investments on bits of paper
56:09that you remember that this is about the trafficking of men, women and children.
56:14There must have been some difficult moments in the research.
56:16Yeah, absolutely.
56:17What we've done overall is to kind of introduce 13,000 individuals,
56:24give them personalities, give them prominence,
56:28whilst understanding that the over 3 million enslaved African people
56:32who they've transported almost remain completely anonymous.
56:45Before the restoration of the Stuart dynasty and the establishment of the first of the royal monopoly companies,
56:52the English share of the European slave trade was around 5%.
56:57By 1683, England's market share had risen to 54%.
57:04By that year, those royal companies had transported around 70,000 Africans into slavery.
57:12And two years later, the Royal African Company achieved a new and unprecedented level of power and influence,
57:20when King Charles II suddenly grew ill and died.
57:26The successor to King Charles was the man whose statue stands here on the edge of Trafalgar Square,
57:33his brother, James, Duke of York.
57:35When he came to the throne in 1685,
57:38it meant that the governor of the Royal African Company was now also the ruling monarch.
57:44Company investors, both private individuals and institutions,
57:50could now look forward to the continued growth of England's share of the Atlantic slave trade
57:56and the continued growth of their profits.
58:03But what followed was not a boom for the Royal African Company,
58:08but the fall and exile of King James
58:11the emergence of a new and rival set of companies and investors
58:16who were to transform the slave trade.
58:23Next time, a new, deregulated, privatised age begins,
58:28spreading the slave trade to towns and cities across Britain.
58:32loading the slave trade in the old traineeee...
59:02..this day, it was Ireland and what they did when the�