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

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

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

The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000.

Buckingham Palace does not comment on books, but a source said King Charles, who has previously spoken of “personal sorrow” at the suffering caused by slavery, took the matter “profoundly seriously”.

Newman said she had started working on the book 10 years ago, having found “secret correspondence” detailing George IV’s fears of an uprising like the Haitian Revolution happening in Jamaica. She made the discovery while researching an earlier work about the Caribbean island, which was a British colony for more than 300 years.

Newman, who is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, researched royal archives and manuscripts relating to the Royal Navy, colonial officers, government officials, the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company for The Crown’s Silence.

She said: “The crown used to trumpet their connections to the transatlantic slave trade. They put the royal brand on this practice and literally on people’s bodies.”

In the 18th and early 19th century, “formerly enslaved people, like Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince and Ottobah Cugoano, were directly appealing to the monarchy, sending books that they’ve written, sending them letters and petitioning them in newspapers. And the monarchy is doing nothing.

“It’s only as you have activism on the part of people like [Black abolitionists] Sons of Africa that things really start changing in the 19th century and the monarchy starts to dramatically pivot away from their previous stance,” Newman said.

“One of the key revelations is that the crown owns thousands of enslaved people in the Caribbean up until 1831. Even when George IV is essentially overseeing the Royal Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, he is still technically profiting from the labour and sale of enslaved people. This is something the government are aware of and they’re concerned about how it looks.”

Newman said enslaved people “owned” by the crown had included workers on plantations that had been forfeited after revolts or planters dying without heirs, and people “purchased in the king’s name” to work at royal dockyards and naval installations, in a process that began in Jamaica under George II.

She added: “White people sent to work on the island were succumbing to tropical fevers and they decide we need to purchase enslaved men and boys we can train as skilled labourers who will be owned by the king – as shipwrights, as carpenters, as caulkers, servicing Royal Navy ships. Once they decide that this is a cost-saving measure for the monarchy, they start replicating it elsewhere.”

The book details how after abolition, Africans liberated from slavers’ ships by Royal Navy patrols were coerced into apprenticeships or conscripted into British military service..,

Slavery exploded as an industry in the 18th century, after the Royal African Company, founded by the Stuart monarchy, lost its monopoly, fuelling the expansion of English cities such as Liverpool and Bristol, Britain’s insurance and finance sectors, and the United States, Newman said.

The Royal Navy was “critically involved in expanding the slave trade, in protecting slaving vessels … loaning out Royal Navy vessels to slave trading companies and stocking them with men and supplies”, she added, from the reign of Elizabeth I until the 18th century, with profits flowing back to thecrown.

“By the 18th century, [the British monarchy] don’t need to be involved in these more minor behind-the-scenes ways – it becomes about defending the empire itself in major imperial conflicts like the seven years’ war and the American Revolution.

“George II and George III start thinking about enslaved men as pawns in this imperial chess game. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, liberated Africans are forcibly conscripted into West India regiments and a royal forces station in west Africa.

“Things are not really better regardless of whether you’re owned by the monarchy or not. They want it to be better because it should be, if you’re going to have the king as your nominal master, but that’s not the way things played out on the ground.”