Whenever my late wife Nancy would give a talk on her 2023 book Defeating Slavery, someone in the audience would invariably ask a question such as: “Well, weren’t the British ahead of the United States in abolishing slavery?” or “Weren’t the British more progressive than us when it came to opposing slavery?”
Those type of questions were, unwittingly, the product of a carefully cultivated image – especially by promoters and publicists of the Royal Family — that the Monarchy and the British in general were almost mere bystanders in the slave trade, abolitionists at heart, who got rid of that horrid institution as soon as they could possibly do so.
This myth of the benign, passive British monarchy is blown to pieces by a new book, The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas, written by Dr. Brooke Newman, a Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London.[i]
The liner notes for the book’s cover set the stage very succinctly:
For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist nation, one that, unlike the United States, rejected human bondage and dismantled its Atlantic slave empire without tearing itself apart in violence. An abolitionist nation headed by a just, humane monarch who liberated enslaved Africans and recognized their descendants as free and equal subjects of the British Crown. As Prince Willam put it recently, “We’re very much not a racist family.”
This is the myth that Dr. Newman dismantles, receipt by receipt, royal charter by royal charter. While then-Prince Charles claimed in 2023 to have opened the Royal Archives to make slavery records more accessible, Newman points out that this did not involve any new release of records. The record of the Crown’s sponsorship and investment in the slave trade is not to be found in one set of archives, but is widely dispersed, fragmented, and deliberately designed to obscure the truth by “commodifying” enslaved human beings.
Ellizabeth I: The Beginnings
Newman takes this sordid story back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the mid-16th century, when British traders attempted to break into the Spanish and Portuguese near monopoly of the slave trade. In 1563, John Hawkins, a Plymouth-based merchant-adventurer, had kidnapped Africans from Portuguese slaving ships, and taken them across the Atlantic to be sold in the Spanish Caribbean. When Hawkins returned to England with his ships’ holds bursting with gold, jewelry, sugar, and other commodities, cash-strapped Elizabeth immediately understood the potential, and eagerly provided one of her largest warships in return for a share of the profits of his next slaving venture. His second trip was wildly successful, with Elizabeth and other investors reaping an estimated 60% return on their investment. As Newman puts it, Queen Elizabeth thus secured her legacy as the first English monarch – but certainly not the last – to profit directly from the transatlantic slave trade.
The Stuarts Expand the Slave Trade
The next significant expansion of transatlantic trade, and with it, the slave trade, is under the Stuarts. The English established a series of plantation colonies in the Caribbean in the early 17th century, and the planters, facing a shortage of indentured servants, quickly realized that enslaved Africans could be the solution to their labor shortage.
King James I, who had granted a monopoly to the Guinea Company is 1618, died in 1625, leaving a substantial Crown indebtedness to his successor, Charles I. Charles tried to handle this debt with revenue from Virginia tobacco and other crops which were raised in the Caribbean. Despite complaints from traders and merchants, Charles granted a 31-year monopoly to the Guinea Company in 1631. The first English colony to engage in the widespread use of slave labor was, ironically, the Puritan-founded colony of Providence off the coast of Nicaragua.
Cromwell’s “Western Design”
The Commonwealth period did not represent any pulling-back from England’s imperial aspirations. On the contrary, Oliver Cromwell played a critical role in the expanded use of England’s naval power to undergird an enlarged slave-labor empire in the Americas; this was known as Cromwell’s “Western Design” to challenge Spain’s colonial empire. The royal-chartered Guinea Company was re-oriented toward the slave trade from its previous concentration on gold and precious commodities. One of the Commonwealth’s “crowning” achievements was bringing Jamaica under English control. Jamaica’s eventual success in sugar production, along with the rise of Barbados, says Dr. Newman, “transformed the English Crown’s Atlantic Empire into a slave empire.”
The Stuart Restoration Invests in the Slave Trade
When Charles II succeeded to the throne in 1660 in the Stuart Restoration, he inherited enormous Crown debts accumulated by his late father, Charles I, and he embraced the imperial expansionism undertaken by Cromwell and the Commonwealth. Newman says the Restoration marked a decisive, aggressive shift into the monarchy’s direct financial and institutional investment into the slave trade and slave labor.
The restored King almost immediately granted exclusive trading rights on the West African coast to the aptly named Company of Royal Adventurers, a joint-stock company whose investors included a virtual “Who’s Who” of the Royal Family and its courtiers. Although the company’s charter was silent on the subject, secret instructions to the company from the King’s brother James (the Duke of York, and the Lord High Admiral) included trafficking in enslaved Africans; the slaves were to be sold to Spanish and Portuguese planters in Africa or Europe. But the slave trafficking quickly became trans-Atlantic, with the Royal Adventurers transporting large numbers of slaves to Jamaica and Barbados.
When the Royal Adventurers company was rechartered in 1663, its charter was explicit in giving the company exclusive rights – a royal monopoly — over the “buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for and with any Negro Slaves Goods wares and Merchandize whatsoever.” The monopoly was to be enforced by the Royal Navy. Half of the proceeds of any seizures – including slaves – was to go to the King, and the other half to the company’s subscribers or shareholders. James was appointed Governor of the Company.
The Company provided enslaved Africans to both English colonies in the Caribbean, and, by contract, 3000 Africans a year to the Spanish colonies.
The Royal African Company Takes over the Slave Trade
In 1671, the Company of Royal Adventurers was reorganized, and the next year it was chartered as the Royal African Company (RAC). The RAC was granted exclusive control of all trade in African commodities (including “Negro Slaves”) for the modest term of one thousand years. The RAC was given state-like powers and privileges, including the power to declare war against any of the “heathen nations” along the African coast, and the power to erect Admiralty courts.
For a time, the Royal African Company dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the first decade of its existence, its share of the trade jumped from 33 percent to 74 percent. In fact, during the entire period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to an historian quoted by Dr. Newman, the RAC “shipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution.”
During the reigns of Charles II and James II (1672 to 1688), the RAC is estimated to have shipped 100,000 slaves to the Americas, the vast majority to the English Caribbean colonies. Approximately 76,000 survived the passage. By the early 1720s, the RAC had transported more than 150,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
The proceeds and profits flowed directly to the Royal Family, especially to James, first as the Duke of York, and then as James II. To emphasize the point, the Duke’s initials, “DY” were branded onto the bodies of hundreds of slaves, including children, who were owned directly by the RAC and held at the company’s headquarters as “Castle Slaves.”
The “Glorious Revolution:” A Glorious Expansion of Slave Labor
When James took the throne in 1685, he was immediately made Governor of the RAC, and he intensified enforcement of the royal monopoly, including through the royal colonial Governors and the Royal Navy. But, ostensibly for religious reasons (James had converted to Roman Catholicism), he was deposed in 1688 and forced into exile, and the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange, was invited to assume the English Crown. But within two weeks of James’ flight – even before William was offered the throne – the RAC made William Governor and gave him £1000 of RAC stock.
As Dr. Newman puts it: weeks before Parliament declared William and his wife Mary joint sovereigns, “William became the public face of the monopoly slave-trading company the Stuarts had long championed.”
Within a short time of Wiliam and Mary assuming the throne, the long-simmering dispute over the RAC’s slave-trade monopoly came to a head – one of the early “free trade” battles. The Chesapeake planters (i.e., Virginia and Maryland) had been complaining for years that the RAC monopoly was hindering the growth of the slave economy, by unduly increasing the price of enslaved labor. Free trade, they argued, would be much more efficient in lowering their costs by cheapening the cost of enslaved labor. And by increasing their plantations’ productivity, free trade would increase the flow of revenue into the royal coffers.
Slave owners in the Caribbean agreed with the Chesapeake enslavers, that free trade in Africans would solve their pressing labor shortages.
In 1698, after investigations and hearings by the House of Commons and the Board of Trade, Parliament ended the RAC monopoly by allowing others of the King’s subjects to traffick and trade in slaves.
But by this time, there had already been a huge increase in the slave economy in the Caribbean as well as the Chesapeake, along with a corresponding increase in customs revenue to the Crown.
And, it is worth noting, by the year 1700 the number of enslaved laborers in the Chesapeake regions had quadrupled from its level 20 years earlier. However, this was dwarfed by the increase that took place in the Caribbean colonies, where there were six times as many Africans in bondage as in all of mainland North America.
No matter who the monarch was – Tudor, Stuart, Dutch, Danish, or German — the slave trade continued to enrich the institution of the monarchy. In 1702, William had died without heirs, and under the 1701 Act of Settlement, the crown passed to Princess Anne of Denmark.
Queen Anne: The Asiento and the South Sea Company
William’s RAC shares passed to now-Queen Anne, and the RAC immediately invited Anne’s consort, Prince Frederick of Denmark (also Lord High Admiral) to become RAC Governor. At the RAC’s request, Anne and Frederick repeatedly provided Royal Navy forces to protect RAC slave ships along the African coast and in the Caribbean. Despite their support, the RAC could not meet the demand for enslaved labor, again calling its role into question. The RAC petitioned Anne for an end to open trade; she referred the petition to the Board of Trade. The Board’s inquiry found that free trade had dramatically increased the supply of slaves to the colonies, which the monopoly had failed to do. In 1712, the 1698 act was allowed to expire, and the RAC lost most of its share of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Queen Anne’s priority, in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession, was to restore the international balance of trade, and to gain access to the slave market in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. In treaty negotiations, Britain won the asiento de negros – the contract to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies. Anne and British negotiators also argued that this would assist Britain in paying its war debts. The asiento contract obligated the British to supply 4,800 healthy adult male Africans per year to Spanish America.
Queen Anne assigned the asiento contract to the South Sea Company (SSC), recently created by Parliament to deal with Britain’s huge national debt; owners of government debt were encouraged to swap their debt holdings for SSC shares, which could be traded on the London Stock Exchange. The fact that the SSC had the monopoly on the slave trade with Spanish America was a big boost to public subscription to SSC stock. The SSC’s success was premised on the assumption that the SSC’s right to supply slave labor to the Spanish colonies would itself bring great riches to the SSC and Britain.
Queen Anne, one of the SSC’s largest shareholders, touted her relationship to the company to bring in public support. With the SSC directors lacking experience in Caribbean and African commerce and in the slave trade, they turned to what was left of the Royal Africa Company to help meet the requirements for delivery of the 4,800 enslaved Africans. But delays and internal disputes within the SSC over the allocation of profits jeopardized fulfillment of the contract. When Anne died in 1714, the whole enterprise seemed in danger. The SSC directors appealed to the Lord Justices for a reallocation of profits so that more was retained by the company.
George I and the South Sea Company
The new Hanoverian King, George I, immediately proved to be an enthusiastic backer of the SSC, including providing naval support, and displayed great optimism for the future of the slave trade to Spanish America. His eldest son George, now the Prince of Wales, requested SSC shares, and became its Governor. Documents survive to this day which demonstrate the extensive links between George I, George II, and the slave-trading South Sea Company.
Despite their efforts, the SSC fell short of meeting its quota under the asiento. Between 1714 and 1718, the SSC shipped 13,102 enslaved African to Spanish America – of which only 10,521 survived the trans-Atlantic journey. This fell well short of the 19,200 healthy enslaved Africans the SSC was obliged to supply.
Meanwhile, the contraband slave trade flourished, among Jamaican smugglers and others, and this cut into the SSC’s efforts. To attempt to stem this “illegal” trade, SSC directors ordered their agents to brand African men, women, and children with the SSC company mark (see illustration). These royal symbols encouraged people to buy shares, i.e. “invest,” in the South Sea Company.
A Bubble Floating on the Slave Trade
With the King and the Prince of Wales ostentatiously pouring investments into the SSC, the public eagerly snapped up SSC shares, driving up their price. But in August 1720, share prices began to drop sharply; between August 17 and Sept. 28, SSC shares fell from £1000 to £190, bankrupting many who had borrowed money to buy SSC stock.
In her recent talk at the Library of Virginia, Dr. Newman emphasized that the SSC “was not just a Ponzi scheme, even though that’s typically how we think about it now.”
She reported that the company had transported a total of about 43,000 Africans to the Americas. In her book, she notes the importance of the monarchy-sponsored slave trade in providing revenues used to increase the government’s surplus, and for building up the military capacity undergirding the rise of the British Empire.
George II and the “King’s Negroes”
When the Prince of Wales succeeded to the throne in 1727, he was already deeply immersed in the SSC and the slave trade, and it was a simple matter for him to continue as Governor of the SSC. George II became the first British monarch to directly buy and own slaves, when his Royal Navy began to purchase “seasoned Negroes, boys and men,” to labor in the naval shipyards in Jamaica. These men and boys, and later women and girls, became known as the “King’s Negroes.”
It was during the reign of George II that Britain came to dominate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, surpassing Portugal.
As Dr. Newman puts it, “Britain’s eighteenth-century empire was a slave empire and the Caribbean colonies its linchpin.” Slave-produced sugar became the most important commodity in Britain’s world trade, and taxes on sugar imports grew into the largest single source of revenue to the Crown.
In the first half of the 18th century alone, British ships took 975,000 captives from African shores, of which 167,000 died during the Atlantic crossing. Most of the survivors landed in the Caribbean slave colonies, primarily Jamaica and Barbados; others were taken to Britain’s North American colonies and sold there.[ii]
French expansion in the Caribbean and North America threatened all this, and the British public favored an aggressive policy toward France, leading to the outbreak of war in 1756 (known as the Seven Years War in Europe, and as the French and Indian War in North America).
George III: The Empire fractures
In 1760, George III inherited the British slave empire as well as the global war that was launched to defend it.
As a teenaged Prince of Wales, George had expressed reservations about slavery, but as King, he cast whatever compunctions he had aside, and quickly came to regard slavery as a necessary evil. Newman says he went further, utilizing enslaved people for his benefit. He attempted to consolidate the British territorial gains during the war, by using slave labor to transform these new colonial territories into profitable agricultural colonies using the model of Jamaica.
An example of how aggressively King George III pursued this policy is Cuba. In 1762, Spanish Havana fell to the British. At the end of the war, Cuba was returned to Spain as part of a deal in which Spain ceded all of Spanish Florida east of the Mississippi to Britain.
But meanwhile, in the just ten months during which Britain occupied Cuba, its enslaved population increased by 80 percent! This was accompanied by a rapid growth of Cuba’s emerging sugar industry, based on slave labor. The legacy, historians have noted, was a lasting one.
Dr. Newman points to something that Nancy Spannaus stressed in her Defeating Slavery book –- that the Crown repeatedly rejected, and vetoed, efforts by Virginia and other colonies to regulate and curtail the slave trade. This was one of the major grievances cited by American patriots during the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence. And what angered the colonists even more, was that the same monarch who had perpetuated the slave trade was now encouraging those slaves to rise up against the Americans in support of the King – Virginia’s weakened and desperate Governor Dunmore being a prime example of this.
British “Abolition:” Slavery by Another Name
After the Revolutionary War in America, a strong and articulate movement for the abolition of slavery took hold in England, led in part by two former enslaved men. But the monarchy dug in its heels in opposition, with one of the royals, William, the Duke of Clarence, being particularly outspoken in the House of Lords against abolition and in support of enslavers. The sole exception to the Royal Family’s rock-solid unanimity on the subject of slavery and the slave trade was cousin Frederick William, the Duke of Gloucester, who sided with the abolitionists. King George III privately saw his own priority as defending and expanding the British Empire, which he saw as threatened by an end to slavery. In public, he of course stayed above the fray, as required by his position.
In 1807, over Royal opposition, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. While prohibiting British ships from carrying out the slave trade as of January 1, 1808, Brooke Newman points out, “this made little impact on the lives of the seven hundred thousand individuals who remained enslaved in the Caribbean.”
The pro-abolition Duke of Gloucester was quickly recruited to the “African Institution,” a group formed by William Wilberforce and other abolitionists to bring “civilization and improvement” to Africa. But this actually meant (in Dr. Newman’s words), “the imposition of British norms and economic ambitions” upon Africa, which the Institution regarded as “sunk in ignorance and barbarism.” They also held the view that if Africans rejected the Institution’s civilizing mission, this would itself prove the necessity and worthiness of British intervention.
The Africa Institution saw as one of its highest priorities, ensuring the enforcement of the Abolition Act. What did this mean?
The Abolition Act declared slave ships and their cargo contraband, eligible for capture and seizure. To reduce its own expenses and to enforce the law, the Crown “incentivized” anti-slave-trade activities, by demanding the conscription of Africans freed from slave ships into indentured servitude, involuntary apprenticeships, or military service. “Liberation” was no such thing.
African men, women, and children who were seized from slave ships by the Royal Navy were, in legal terms, “condemned as prize of war, or as forfeited, to the sole use of his Majesty, his heirs, and successors” — as stated in official Colonial Office documents.
And, to further “incentivize” such practices, British military officers were awarded financial rewards for each man (£40), woman (£30), and child under age 14 (£10), who were captured and handed over to colonial authorities.
In other words, Africans “liberated” from slavery lost any freedom of choice and action, for the rest of their lives. As Dr. Newman puts it, “this was essentially slavery by another name.”
The same practice was enshrined in the 1833 Emancipation Act, to which King William IV gave his assent, after Parliament passed the bill under enormous public pressure.
The Emancipation Act supposedly abolished slavery in the British Empire. But, as with the earlier Abolition Act, the bill simply established a new form of bondage in the Caribbean colonies, in order to preserve the plantation system. £20 million in compensation was paid to slave owners out of the public treasury – what one might call “reparations for the enslavers” — while “freed” slaves got nothing. And worse, they were apprenticed to their former enslavers for four to six years; the apprenticeship system meant working up to 45 hours per week without pay. Infractions by “former” slaves would result in floggings, whipping, and hard labor in workhouses or penal gangs. They remained destitute and propertyless. (There were obvious parallels to what happened with emancipated blacks in the defeated Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction.)
(British taxpayers – not the monarchy – remained on the hook for at least 175 years for the loans that the British government took out to fund the £20 million compensation paid to enslavers. Taxpayers didn’t finish paying off these loans – worth billions in today’s money — until 2015.)
Victorian “Spin Doctors” Reinvent the Monarchy
William IV died in 1837, and was succeeded by the 18-year -old Queen Victoria. Believing Victoria to be more sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause, hundreds of thousands of women signed petitions to the new Queen calling for an end to the apprentice system and full emancipation. And colonial legislatures, hoping to avoid further Parliamentary intervention in their affairs, resolved to terminate all apprenticeship programs on August 1, 1838 — the date when a partial end to the system had been mandated under the 1833 legislation.
Once, again, the supposed end of slavery simply gave rise to slavery by another name. As Dr. Newman portrays it, to meet the Empire’s labor needs in its overseas colonies, the British government shifted to other schemes for immigration to the colonies, such as importing convict labor and indentured laborers from India and China.[iii]
The cultivation of the image of Great Britain as an enlightened liberal power, leading the charge against slavery world-wide while bringing civilization to the darker races, had been promoted by the abolitionists for many years, but in 1840 the monarchy stepped forward to lead this reframing effort.
That was when Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who had just recently married Queen Victoria, addressed a cheering throng at a public meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa –- otherwise known as the “Africa Civilization Society.” Prince Albert had just been appointed as its president.
As has been the Royal Family’s “party line” ever since, Albert presented the world’s biggest slave trader as in fact leading the campaign to abolish slavery. Albert told the enraptured crowd that “I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings … have not yet led to any satisfactory conclusion.” He promised that Britain would not rest until abolition was accomplished, under the leadership of Queen Victoria and her government.
Dr. Newman, in her book and in public appearances, emphasized that neither the Royal Family, nor its various governments, despite all the statements of “regret” and “sorrow,” have ever actually apologized for their role, nor have they taken responsibility for their centuries of sponsorship and financing of the slave trade. Instead, they have deliberately twisted and erased true history, to portray themselves as the leaders in overthrowing that which, in reality, they sponsored and perpetuated.
As valuable as Dr. Newman’s research is, there is another aspect which she does not discuss in the book — the extent to which the Royal Family’s enormous fortune today is a product of its investment and protection of slave labor and the slave trade. In a 2023 series entitled “Cost of the Crown,” the London Guardian published the results of an extensive investigation into the Royal Family’s wealth, which apparently did explore this question, with Dr. Newman’s help. We will report on the Guardian’s findings in a future posting on this blog.
Meanwhile, I can say with confidence, that my wife Nancy would have been delighted with Dr. Newman’s exposure and destruction of the myth of the progressive, “abolitionist” British monarchy. While Nancy had summarized some of this history, including the Royal Africa Company, in her Defeating Slavery book,[iv] Dr. Newman’s extensive research and documentation of the Royal Family’s direct role would have been of great interest to her.
(Updated July 11, 2026)
[i] Brooke M. Newman, The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas (New York and Boston: Mariner Books, 2026). 441 pages.
In this review, I have also utilized videos of two book talks given by Dr. Newman: One at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture on April 28, 2026, and a second at the Library of Virginia, presented on June 4, 2026.
[ii] Less than 5% of the total of 12.5 million slaves estimated to have been transported across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1867 came to North America, according to John W. Franklin of the Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C. Quoted in Nancy Spannaus, Defeating Slavery, p. 13.
[iii] The 1833 law officially banning slavery in the British Empire provided an exemption for British East India Company territories. Although officially, slavery in India was to end ten years later, in 1843, holding a slave did not become a criminal offense until 1861. Cited in Spannaus, Defeating Slavery, p. 19.
[iv] See Chapter 1 of Defeating Slavery, pp. 13-21.
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Tags: abolition, Africa, British Empire
