A critical commentary on Church Commissioners’ historic links to African chattel enslavement
The Church of England is not built on slavery.
First, a note from Nigel’s editor: Due to a copy/paste error (mine, not his), only the first half of Tuesday’s article was sent out. My apologies. Paying subscribers can find the full article here.
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The following long piece on the relationship between the Church of England and slavery is going out without any paywalls because of its importance to Anglicans, Britons, and anyone who cares about the objectivity of history. Please share widely.
A Note to the reader on Formatting: As a means of distinguishing our comments from the report we are commenting on, our contributions are those with the dark blue line to the left of the text.
Executive Summary:
1. The Church Commissioners (who look after funds for the Church of England) have launched Project Spire to make reparations to communities of ‘African descent…in the UK, Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and North America’ in the belief that during the eighteenth century the Church purchased financial instruments that invested in the slave trade and chattel slavery in these places and across the Atlantic region in general. The work of a panel of historians and the accountants Grant Thornton has pointed to investments in South Sea Annuities as especially troubling as it is claimed that these investments were based on slavery.
2. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement (9 May 2025) Professor Robert Tombs of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has demonstrated that an error has been made in this research. South Sea Securities and South Sea Annuities have been confused. He has shown that the Annuities were government bonds (we would call them gilts) administered by the South Sea Company. Those who purchased them were investing in government debt, not slavery.
3. In subsequent correspondence published in the TLS (23 May 2025) Professor Richard Drayton, a member of the panel of historians, has accepted this point. He has tried to argue that, nevertheless, there was some ‘reciprocity’ between the two types of investment but admits there is no evidence to support this contention. More recently (6 June 2025) in another letter to the TLS he has used the argument that the eighteenth-century British economy was irreducibly tainted by slavery, and the Church was therefore guilty by default. Professor Drayton’s arguments have been answered by letters published in the TLS by Professor Tombs, Professor Richard Dale, and Professor Lawrence Goldman (30 May, 13 June 2025).
4. Professor Drayton and Professor Paul have recently composed a long report, published on the Church of England website, which attempts to justify their position now that a crucial element of their research has been found to be mistaken. It can be accessed here:
The document that follows this executive summary is their report with our interpolated comments on their findings and views. We think it important to demonstrate directly and unambiguously those aspects of their advice to the Church which are questionable, contested and wrong, both historically and ethically.
5. Our most important findings may be summarised as follows:
a. By purchasing South Sea Annuities in the 18th century the Church of England was not investing in the profits of slavery but lending funds to the British state and receiving interest in return.
b. There is no evidence that these investments in Annuities were connected in any way to chattel slavery.
c. The subsequent claim made by Professors Drayton and Paul that the Church of England is nevertheless responsible for slavery in some unspecified way because everyone in eighteenth century Britain was generally responsible for slavery is flawed both historically and ethically.
d. Historically, it ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who subscribed to the anti-slavery movement, including notable Anglicans such as the leaders of the Clapham Sect, and it holds responsible millions from the unenfranchised labouring classes who had no stake in, or choice over, slavery. It fails to make clear that, according to the most accurate research we have, only approximately 10% to 20% of ‘the wealthier classes’ in this period were linked directly to slavery. The vast majority of the population were uninvolved with the institution.
e. Ethically, it holds people in the past responsible for things over which they had no control and to which they did not give consent. Without consent there surely cannot be the assumption of guilt. It smears millions of our ancestors as complicit with slavery when they were not.
f. Generally, those who have advised the Church of England have exaggerated the impact of slavery on the economy and finances of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. This is a common fault in much academic work on the history of slavery. It has been answered in the recent work of Professor David Eltis, the leading historian of the slave trade, in his book Atlantic Cataclysm (Cambridge University Press, 2025), who has argued forcefully that slavery had only a limited impact on the British and wider European economy, and that the economic transformation during this period (‘the Industrial Revolution’) would have occurred with or without the existence of slavery.
g. The Church’s historical advisors have also failed to cost into their calculations the remarkable expenses borne by British taxpayers after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 in the extirpation of slavery across the globe, a crusade largely led by British diplomacy and the Royal Navy. The work of Professor Nigel Biggar and others has been ignored. Without it, the true moral calculus required in the assessment of ‘guilt’ cannot be made – though we think the ascription of blame to our ancestors who thought and lived quite differently from us to be a pointless and foolish pursuit.
h. Finally, our comments, criticisms and factual corrections all demonstrate that these are contentious historical issues about which academic historians and other authorities differ, often profoundly. It is unfortunate that the Church of England has only taken formal advice from one set of historians rather than sought wider and more balanced views.
i. Our overall conclusion is that Project Spire is based on unsound history, which is encouraging unfounded accusations of societal blame, and leading to poor ethical judgments. Because the case for reparations is now very much weaker, if not illusory, we urge the Church of England to pause Project Spire, seek the advice of other scholars, and reflect. To pay reparations on the basis that ‘everyone in the eighteenth century was guilty’ will not stand historical and public scrutiny.
Signed:
Mr Jonathan Baird
Professor Nigel Biggar, Lord Biggar of Castle-Douglas
Professor Richard Dale
Professor Lawrence Goldman
Dr. Ian Paul
Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert
Lord Tony Sewell CBE
Professor Robert Tombs
Biographies:
Mr Jonathan Baird (MA Cantab, History; MBA Insead) is a former banker and businessman, and a Member of General Synod (Laity).
Professor Nigel Biggar, Lord Biggar of Castle-Douglas, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at theUniversity of Oxford, and author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) and Reparations: the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (September 2025). He is a priest in the Church of England.
Professor Richard Dale is Emeritus Professor at Southampton University and author of The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2004). Lawyer (Lincoln’s Inn), economist (London School of Economics), PhD in law and economics, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Previously a senior executive with N M Rothschild. Houblon Norman Fellow at the Bank of England and Rockefeller Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Professor Lawrence Goldman is Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He was previously the General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-14) and Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Revd Dr Ian Paul studied pure and applied maths at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton before working in FMCG business. He studied theology in Nottingham and completed a PhD on the Book of Revelation. He has combined parish ministry with theological education over three decades. He is a member of the General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council.
Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert is an educator, writer and campaigner for social cohesion, and Director of Don't Divide Us (https://dontdivideus.com/)
Lord Tony Sewell CBE is a member of the House of Lords and chaired the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that produced the Sewell Report in 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities
Professor Robert Tombs is a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge and among other books and articles on French and British history, he is the author of The English and Their History (Penguin, 2014; rev edn., 2023).
A CRITICAL COMMENTARY on Church Commissioners’ historic links to Africa chattel enslavement
Independent responses to claims criticising the historical basis of the Church Commissioners’ research
Edited from contributions by Richard Drayton and Helen Paul
Commentary:
It may be helpful to begin by explaining the basis of the essential disagreement between us.
The Church Commissioners have premised the decision to commit £100 million to reparations (aspiring to increase this to £1bn, in part by contributions from others) for communities ‘of African descent…in the UK, Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and North America’ on the investment of the eighteenth-century Church in South Sea Annuities. It has been claimed that these financial instruments were based, in part, on profits made from the labour of slaves on British colonial possessions in the West Indies. But this is an error. The advisors to the Church have confused South Sea Securities, shares issued in the 1720s, which were indeed linked to the labour of slaves, with South Sea Annuities, which were government bonds – we would call them gilts – in which the Church, other Georgian institutions, and individuals, invested. South Sea Annuities were purchased by investors who were paid an annual interest on their subscription and had their capital returned in full on the maturity of the bond. These annuities were administered by the South Sea Company (SSC) on behalf of the government: the SSC acted solely as the agent for the sale of government debt. And those who purchased the debt were not investing in slavery but lending funds to the government. At certain points in the period under scrutiny, such as during the French Wars between 1793-1815, ‘investing in the funds’ was viewed as a patriotic act, indeed a public duty.
The University of Cambridge and some of its colleges also purchased South Sea Annuities in the eighteenth century, and this has also been misunderstood by researchers who, in recent years, were contracted to advise the university on its links with slavery. The confusion of South Sea Annuities with South Sea Securities has found its way into the catalogue of a current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where it is used to undermine the University’s reputation. This has prompted a distinguished group of Cambridge-educated historians, some of whom have spent their careers teaching in the university, to write to the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor to point out the mistake. The correspondence can be read here on the website of History Reclaimed: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-fitzwilliam-museum-fact-and-propaganda/
Subsequently, Professor Robert Tombs published an article in The Times Literary Supplement on the history of the SSC and pointed to the error made in Cambridge and by the Church of England (‘South Sea Trouble. Where Cambridge and the Church of England get it wrong on reparations’, TLS, 9 May 2025, pp. 7-8). Professor Drayton responded in a published letter (TLS, 23 May). He was answered (TLS, 30 May) not only by Professor Tombs but by the historian of the South Sea Company, Emeritus Professor Richard Dale of the University of Southampton, author of The First Crash. Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2016). Professor Drayton responded again (TLS, 6 June) and was answered by Professor Lawrence Goldman (TLS, 13 June).
Professors Tombs, Dale and Goldman have focused on the true nature of South Sea Annuities: they are central to the Church’s belief that it was complicit with slavery in the eighteenth century. Professors Drayton and Paul in this paper on which we’re commenting extend their discussion into a host of subjects which are, as readers will see, strictly irrelevant to the matter of fact at issue. Nevertheless, their long paper makes claims (and more errors) which must be challenged and corrected in case readers believe them to be ‘historical truth’.
Just as there are many interpretations and views of the scriptures, so there are many different versions of history. As our comments will show, the paper by Drayton and Paul is open to many objections and cannot be taken as an incontestable basis on which to build Church policy.
For reasons of space (and to ensure that we do not try the patience of readers) we have not commented on every claim and argument advanced by Drayton and Paul. To ease reading, we have also omitted all the original footnotes. They can be accessed from the original document here: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/independent_responses__to_claims_criticising_the_historical_basis_of_the_church_commissioners_research_-_may_2025_2.pdf
These historical disputes cannot be ignored by the Church. The original argument advanced for the payment of reparations was relatively straightforward: the Church received ill-gotten money earned, in part, from slave trading by the South Sea Company, and is therefore duty-bound to return a very significant amount to the ancestors of those afflicted by slavery. But once the nature of the Church’s investments in South Sea Annuities is understood correctly, there is no longer the same rationale – indeed, perhaps not any rationale at all - for reparations on the scale planned.
Church Commissioners historic links to Africa chattel enslavement
Independent responses to claims criticising the historical basis of the Church Commissioners’ research
Edited from contributions by Richard Drayton and Helen Paul
About Richard Drayton: Professor Richard Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and wrote his PhD at Yale. From 1992-4 he was Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine's, Cambridge; 1994-8, Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford; and 1998-2001, Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. In 2001 he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History and Fellow of Corpus Christi, and from 2009, the sixth Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, EHESS in Paris, CUNY in New York, and FU Berlin, and held visiting fellowships at CASS in Beijing, Sydney, Munich, and FU in Berlin. In 2001 he won the Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association, in 2002 the Philip Leverhulme Prize, and in 2021 was awarded the Humboldt Prize in recognition of his "lifetime research achievements". In 2016 he received the Barbados Jubilee Honour in recognition of his service to Barbados in the United Kingdom.
About Helen Paul: Dr Helen Paul is a lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton and an Honorary Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at UCL. She was educated at Oxford and St Andrews. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and currently a council-member and trustee. She was previously the Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society. She is an economic historian specialising in the early modern period and has written a monograph on the South Sea Bubble.2
Commentary:
Professor Drayton was a member of the Oversight Group, tasked in July 2023 by the Church Commissioners to produce a report advising the Board of Governors on establishing a new impact investment fund and grant-funding programme in response to its “research findings of historic links to transatlantic chattel slavery” (https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/church-commissioners-announce-members-oversight-group-advise-response-historic).
This report, entitled “Healing, Justice, and Repair: Oversight Group Recommendations to the Board of Governors”, was published on 4 March 2024.
It is, therefore, misleading—at least—to describe these responses to criticisms of the historical basis of the Church Commissioners’ policy as “independent”. The Oversight Group, to which Professor Drayton belonged, was initiated by the Commissioners. It proceeded on the erroneous assumption that the historical ‘research findings’ were accurate. And its report was endorsed by the Commissioners in its entirety. In this document, Drayton’s views are being used to defend a policy in the formation and promotion of which he was thoroughly involved and in which he has a reputational interest. It is therefore, not ‘independent’ in the sense that any unsuspecting reader will understand the word. In effect, Professor Drayton is being allowed to mark his own homework.
Background
Since the March 2024 publication of the Oversight Group Recommendations to the Church Commissioners for England Board of Governors report, some public figures have published articles refuting aspects of the Church Commissioners’ research into its historic links with African chattel enslavement; for example, on the significance or otherwise of the investment in South Sea Company Annuities. This criticism has given rise to cynicism for some about the validity of the foundational research underpinning the Church Commissioners’ response (named internally as ‘Project Spire’). On 14 June 2024 Gareth Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of the Church Commissioners, published an article in the Church Times to speak to some of the thematic issues raised indirectly: Why links to the slave trade do matter (churchtimes.co.uk) This paper is designed to provide historical background through the informed perspectives of two historians who are expert on this period and its history.
Comment:
It would have been honest and courteous, if after vaunting their own credentials, Professors Drayton and Paul had dignified their critics with names, instead of referring to them dismissively as merely “some public figures”. We do not presume to discern the authors’ intentions, but we observe that this has two effects. First, it hides from the reader the critics’ own credentials, which might be considerable. And second, it dispenses the authors from having to respond exactly to what their critics have written.
It is also regrettable and uncharitable that the authors have chosen to tar criticism made in good faith with the brush of ‘cynicism’. It is perfectly possible to harbour reasonable doubts without being cynical.
Note on present day monetary values
There are a number of different methods which could potentially be used to find the present-day equivalent of historical values. The website Measuring Worth outlines the difficulties and also provides different methods to translate older sums into today’s values: Measuring Worth - Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets The £100 million initially pledged by the Church Commissioners is not intended to be a like-for-like payment. Firstly, the initial Project Spire work uncovered a great many benefactors who were made wealthy through their links to enslavement. However, it was not intended to be exhaustive. There will be more benefactors whose links to enslavement have not been fully explored. For instance, some of Edward Colston’s money eventually passed to Alexander Colston but we have not traced all the inheritances and dowries which acted to transfer wealth from one party to another.
Claims that the Church Commissioners’ response has been based on flawed research
The ledgers were compiled by a firm of accountants, Grant Thornton. The academic research was provided by the late Professor Arthur Burns and by Dr Helen Paul. Professor Burns was an expert on church history, including the finances of the church. Dr Helen Paul is a lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton and an Honorary Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at UCL. She was educated at Oxford and St Andrews. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and currently a council-member and trustee. She was previously the Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society. She is an economic historian specialising in the early modern period and has written a monograph on the South Sea Bubble.
Claims that the Church Commissioners’ research should have been peer reviewed
Peer-reviewed publications are usually written for an academic audience. For instance, an academic journal will send a proposed article to anonymous peer reviewers. Likewise, an academic monograph proposal will be sent for peer review. However, documents intended for a public audience usually go through a different process of internal review. Arthur Burns, Helen Paul and Richard Drayton, the historians who advised the Church Commissioners, have, however, had their advice reviewed by senior figures in British social and economic history and the history of British involvement in the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans.
Comment:
It would have been appropriate for the authors to name these “senior figures”, since it is important to know whether or not they include impartial authorities that do not share the authors’ assumptions and political biases. For reasons best known to themselves, however, they chose not to be so transparent.
Claims the Church Commissioners’ research data sources may be incomplete and inaccurate
This is understandable given the scope of the project and the difficulty of ensuring accurate transcription for thousands of entries. It is good research practice to detail methodology, noting the limitations of one’s evidence and analysis. The reliability of research that did not note its methodological limitations would be highly uncertain. Any large-scale transcription project would run into similar problems. For instance, there are known errors in the Slave Voyages database (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Understanding the Database (slavevoyages.org)), which its creators are well aware of. Difficulties in establishing the fine detail, which are inherent in work of this nature, do not invalidate the findings of fact.
An Accurate History of Queen Anne’s Bounty.
As so much of the historical and moral dispute over the Church of England’s investments in slavery concerns the history of Queen Anne’s Bounty, we have thought it helpful to include here a summary of the Bounty’s origins, organisation and investments in its earliest years. Before testing the claims being made by Drayton and Paul, it is necessary that readers are given as clear a summary as possible of the basic history.
Queen Anne’s Bounty was a corporation created in 1704 to manage a scheme for the redistribution of income from the more affluent to the least affluent clerics of the Church of England. In this scheme, the income from taxes levied on the clergy by Henry VIII was turned over every year to the corporation. The corporation bought land to increase the revenue of poorer parishes (“livings”).
The members of the corporation (called governors), who numbered 250 or so, were members ex-officio, i.e., by virtue of their office, as listed in the Act, and were a mix of clerics and laymen. In practice, only a dozen senior clerics attended meetings. To manage their affairs they hired a treasurer.
Each year a number of livings were selected to benefit from the scheme, but it took time to find suitable land for purchase in each parish, and, until it could be found and bought, the Bounty paid an income supplement to the beneficiaries. The Bounty therefore needed a safe, income-yielding investment in which to park its revenue for a number of years.
The Bounty had a treasurer who collected the income from the Exchequer and managed the cash and investments. From 1709, when income was first received, until 1724, the procedures were informal and it takes some effort to reconstruct the investments from the surviving ledgers. After 1724 all investment decisions (purchase or sale) were made by the treasurer at the direction of the governors.
Investing in the South Sea Company
When the Bounty started investing in 1709, there weren’t many good investment options: a liquid investment would have to be one frequently traded on the London market (“Exchange Alley”). Among these, stock in the chartered corporations (Bank of England and East India Company) was risky and the Bounty never bought any. Existing long-term government debt was at the time illiquid, so the Bounty bought what was available, so-called “tallies” (short-term bills). As new government securities appeared between 1714 and 1720, the Bounty moved to the safer and more liquid ones.
In February 1720 The South Sea Company was authorized by Parliament to offer holders of government debt the possibility of exchanging it for South Sea stock at a ratio set by the Company. The Bounty took advantage of this offer and converted part of its portfolio into South Sea stock, as did thousands of others during the so-called “South Sea Bubble.” Many came to regret it, and so did the Bounty, because the ratio proved very unfavourable when the price of South Sea stock crashed. In April 1723, the Bounty recorded a roughly 50% loss on its investment in South Sea stock. Fortunately, it had only converted part of its portfolio and not all. After that single investment, the Bounty never bought South Sea stock again.
As of April 1720 the Bounty had about £93,000 invested in government securities, a third of which (£28,700) was converted into South Sea stock with a face value of £10,400. In April 1720, £100 of stock was worth £350 on the market, and by August 1720 it was worth £800, but by December it was around £160 only. Compared to holding on to the securities, the Bounty lost 50%, whether at face value (as the treasurer computed it in the ledger) or at market value.
From October 1720 to March 1724 the Bounty also held some of its cash in the form of South Sea bonds, one-to-two-year bonds, bearing 4 or 5% interest. The highest amount it held was £25,800, about 30% of its portfolio.
South Sea Annuities
It’s important to realise that South Sea Annuities were not securities or liabilities of the South Sea Company, but government liabilities: the name is not what matters, but rather the legal and financial reality.
The South Sea Company, as originally created in 1711, had two assets: an annuity from the Exchequer and a commercial privilege (which included the right to sell enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas). The 1720 conversion described above didn’t change this, except that many creditors of the government became shareholders and the annuity owned by the Company grew much larger (what the government used to owe to its creditors, it now owed to the Company).
In 1723 many of these shareholders wanted to become bondholders again, so the Company was authorized by Parliament to carry out a split. Each shareholder with £100 stock now had £50 South Sea stock and £50 “South Sea Annuity”. Half of the Exchequer annuity was assigned to pay the income on those annuities, the other half (along with the commercial profits) stayed with the stock.
These annuities were called “South Sea” but their only relation with the Company was that the interest coupons were paid at South Sea House, just as other government annuities were paid at the Bank of England and were called Bank Annuities, but had nothing to do financially with the Bank.
Professor Richard Drayton has speculated that there could have been some behind-the-scenes mixing between South Sea Stock and South Sea Annuities. Why would there be? And how could there be?
The number of these annuities is exactly known, and it is easy to verify from government accounts that the coupons paid semi-annually to annuity holders were entirely financed by the government. There was no need for the South Sea Company to subsidize the annuities.
In any case (and secondly), the South Sea Company was hardly in a position to do so. As was well known at the time, the Asiento, allowing trading in slaves, was unprofitable, and if you look at the dividend payments made by the South Sea Company, they are all accounted for by the government annuity that it owned. It’s true that for a few years the Company paid slightly more in dividends than it was receiving on its annuity, but it financed that with bonds, “gambling for resurrection”. Eventually the bond debt piled up, the commercial profits never materialized, and it had to sell some of its annuity to pay off the debt and to reduce the dividend to match the annuity income. By 1740, when all hope of commercial activity evaporated, the South Sea Company was just a conduit for a government annuity, and it survived in that form until 1853.
The Bounty was invested in the South Sea Company for a relatively short time. When the 1723 split occurred the Bounty had both South Sea stock and South Sea annuities. It held on to the stock for a few years and then sold it off between 1728 and 1730.
The South Sea annuities, on the other hand, became the preferred investment of the Bounty. This is not surprising: it was long-term government debt, liquid, and most importantly there were absolutely no alternatives for many years. Until the 1740s, if one wanted to hold long-term, liquid government debt, one bought South Sea Annuities.
From the 1740s the government issued other annuities to the public, which eventually became known as “consols” and grew steadily as a share of the public debt; meanwhile the South Sea annuities became less liquid, and from 1779 the Bounty ceased to invest in them and invested in consols instead, slowly replacing the former by the latter.
Thus Queen Anne’s Bounty was only partially invested in South Sea stock – shares in a company that had been given the Asiento – for a decade. In that period, this shareholding lost money for the Bounty and the governors then sold off the holding. Much more important to the finances of the eighteenth-century Church of England were South Sea Annuities and these had nothing whatsoever to do with either the stock or the activities of the South Sea Company, which merely administered the bonds for the government.
Claims that the South Sea Company held the right to enslave people due to a contract called the Asiento granted by the Spanish Crown; however, the Asiento was loss-making, and therefore Queen Anne’s Bounty did not profit from enslavement; and that the real attraction of the South Sea Company was trade in merchandise with the Spanish colonies in the Americas
That the Asiento, and more generally the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans, were unprofitable, is a theme frequently cited by critics. This is a rhetorical manoeuvre to cast doubt on the proposition that the Church Commissioners has any slave trade derived wealth at all to answer for.
It has been asserted that the 29% of the proprietors of the South Sea Company (SSC) who in 1713 voted against it taking on the Asiento, did so because they judged the trade would be unprofitable. This is a misconstruction of pp.15-16 of Victoria Sorsby's 1975 UCL PhD dissertation2 , where she notes that some SSC investors feared that previous companies holding the Asiento had sustained losses. Having noted this, Sorsby, however, does not go on to propose that the 358 who voted against the acquisition of the Asiento did so because of this fear of losses. There were many other explanations for that minority's opposition, from a simple decision to stick to an existing business model, to those who thought that commercial access to Spanish ports could be acquired without taking on the more complex business of the slave trade, to those involved in the Royal African Company who initially feared that that company's privileges might be interfered with. We do not know; at the very least, B cannot be deduced from A, and what is clear is that over 70% of investors agreed with contemporary pamphlet opinion that there were vast profits to be made with trade with Spanish America, for which supplying enslaved Africans was at worst a necessary loss leader, where it was not an independent profit centre.3
Comment:
It is regrettable that the authors choose, uncharitably, to insinuate that their critics are acting in bad faith by indulging in a “rhetorical manoeuvre”. In taking the view they have, the critics have appealed to evidence. Professors Drayton and Paul have no good reason to suppose that their view—whether right or wrong--is motivated by anything else. Moreover, if we ’do not know’ enough to speak with authority about the reasons why 29% of the proprietors voted against acquiring the Asiento, how can it be asserted ‘that over 70% of investors agreed with contemporary pamphlet opinion that there were vast profits to be made with trade with Spanish America’. If we cannot be sure about the thinking of the minority, how can we be so certain about the rationale of the majority?
The whole question of the profitability of the Asiento is something of a diversion in a debate on the nature of South Sea Annuities.
Another reference that has been used out of context is a quote from Adam Anderson's four-volumed, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce (1764): "It was admitted on all sides that the Asiento Contract for the supplying of Spanish America with negroes was ... a great losing trade to this company". There Anderson was reporting on a moment of negotiation in 1733 in which the SSC was seeking to secure its interests in negotiation with the Spanish Crown. This plea of poverty and permanent losses was a standard part of the SSC's negotiating line with the Spanish Crown over the decades that it conducted its business.
Note that Anderson, in the same work, celebrates the return in 1730 of the SSC's ship the "Prince Frederick" from Vera Cruz in Mexico, where it had been seized during the 1727-9 war:
laden... with four hundred thousand dollars or Spanish pieces of eight in specie, one hundred and ninety thousand pounds weight of cochineal, forty-seven thousand pounds weight of indigo, and one hundred and sixty-seven ton weight of logwood, beside what came in private trade: supposed altogether to be worth three hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling.
The "Prince Frederick" was, rather deviously, accounted for as a loss, after its cargo had been confiscated during the duration of the conflict, on the basis of which it was marked down in value. But Anderson's own estimate here, in which admittedly he mixes the gains of private traders with those of the Company, tells a different story: £350,000 as a share of the value of the GDP of the British economy in 1730 is, according to Measuring Worth, equivalent to £11.1 billion in 2023.
Comment:
Throughout their paper Drayton and Paul use ‘the share of the value of GDP’ as a way of valuing 18th century monetary amounts in terms of the share of our Gross Domestic Product today. It must be recognised that all such exercises in the computation of value then and now are fraught with difficulty and historians tend to treat them with merited scepticism. The value of raw materials, finished goods, property, and services may alter considerably over time according to market conditions as well as inflation. What was once scarce may become plentiful and vice-versa. Between 1725 and 2025 the size of the state and of public expenditure have massively expanded. The 18th century fiscal-military British state was remarkably small and lean, devoted to raising taxes to fund the defence of the realm which consumed the largest share of state expenditure, not the 2.3% of today. There was no expenditure on welfare and on a health service, of course. In short, we are comparing apples and pears.
According to a reliable source that calculates CPI inflation using accurate data (which only begins in 1750):
‘£350,000 in 1750 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £99,171,920.82 today, an increase of £98,821,920.82 over 275 years. The pound had an average inflation rate of 2.07% per year between 1750 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 28,234.83%.This means that today's prices are 283.35 times as high as average prices since 1750, according to the Office for National Statistics composite price index. A pound today only buys 0.353% of what it could buy back then.’
https://www.officialdata.org/uk/inflation/1750?amount=350000
The difference between £99 million and £11.1 billion is considerable, we think. Whatever the value of that 1730 cargo in 2025 values, we would urge readers to treat all the calculations by Drayton and Paul made in terms of ‘share of the value of GDP’ with extreme caution.
If the Asiento was so unprofitable, it is puzzling that investors would have pursued a losing business over thirty years. Worse, why when Spain sought repeatedly to end the concession of the Asiento, which Britain had taken from it at gunpoint at Utrecht in 1713, did the SSC so vigorously refuse to surrender it? Sorsby (1975) notes that the Spanish government took numerous steps to impede the Company's trade, including the seizure of all Company property during the wars of 1718, 1727 and 1739, but were never able to convince the Company to relinquish the Asiento for an agreed compensation.
Comment:
Lest it be thought that Britain really negotiated by threat and menace in Utrecht in 1713, it should be pointed out that ‘The Treaty of Utrecht’ was, in fact, a series of treaties between 8 different European states over a period in excess of two years between 7 November 1712 and 6 February 1715. There were five separate treaties between France and Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Savoy, Prussia and Portugal signed on 11 April 1713. We don’t think anything is gained by phrases like ‘at gunpoint’. These were wholly legitimate treaties agreed by the dominant powers of western Europe. We all deprecate the Asiento but its passing from Spain to Britain was part of a lawful diplomatic settlement.
The myth of the unprofitability of the Asiento has its basis in how the South Sea Company, in its campaign to minimise its profits in its permanent tension with Spain, was notoriously dishonest in its accounting practices, evading its responsibility under the Asiento contract to provide five-year accounts, in order to conceal its highly lucrative contraband trade. Its practices were noted by contemporaries, as in An Address to the Proprietors of the South Sea Capital Containing a Discovery of Illicit trade (1732). Salvador Carmona, Rafael Donoso, and Stephen P. Walker (2010) note that “the cost of compliance was too high; the benefits of cheating substantial.”5 Sorsby noted that the company's official accounts from 1731-5, those which underpinned the 1733 negotiation, were explicitly dishonest in quoting prices for enslaved people that were lower than those we get from Spanish records of transactions on the coast of South America.
Colin Palmer (1981) offered estimates on the profitability of the Asiento slave trade based on Spanish colonial records.6 Palmer estimated that between 1714 and 1721, profit rates ran from 10% in Cartagena, to 25.7% in Buenos Aires and 57.1% in Porto Bello and Panama; for 1731 he put profits in Cuba at 38.9%, and for Havana between November 1730 and July 1731, 47.7%.
Price and Whately (2021), which is the most significant econometric study of the profitability of the Asiento dissents vigorously from the view that slave trading and the Asiento were unprofitable either to the SSC or to Britain.7 They argue that quite apart from the 'lucrative merchandise trade with the Spanish colonies', significant profits were derived directly from the enslavement business. They found, first, that the Asiento contract increased risk-adjusted excess returns on South Sea Co. stock by between 18% and 24% per year. Second, that the profit margins from the slave trade are strongly correlated with SSC share prices before and after the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and that slave trading made a direct and significant contribution to shareholder returns. Third, that the Asiento and Asiento-related slave trading increased central government fiscal surplus by 16%. So, while enslavement was a very complex business, with risks in Africa, on the notorious 'Middle Passage', and in New World markets, requiring exceptionally long financing, and in which there could be significant losses, it is true both that many voyages made huge profits, and most critically aggregately it was significantly profitable.
In one of the pieces critical of the Church Commissioners’ research findings, Richard Dale wrote: "in final recognition of the losses incurred, the South Sea Company was awarded £100,000 by Spain in 1750". This might lead an uninformed reader to assume that the SSC was compensated by Spain for the losses it had sustained over the years in carrying enslaved people to Spanish America. But the compensation (see:) was, rather, for the SSC giving up the significant profits, actual and potential, which it had enjoyed through its commercial privileges.
Comment:
This final point about ‘significant profits, actual and potential’ is flatly contradicted by the abstract of Dr. Victoria Sorsby’s thesis, entitled ‘British Trade with Spanish America under the Asiento’ where she wrote that ‘after a severe financial loss the directors [of the South Sea Company] concentrated on obtaining compensation. In 1750 the Asiento contract was terminated and the South Sea Company paid £100,000 to cover their losses in the trade’. This is further evidence that the Company’s notorious trade in slaves was consistently loss-making, a finding discussed by Professor Dale in his article in The Church Times last year. (‘Slavery did not benefit Bounty’, 22 March 2024).
Claims that Queen Anne’s Bounty did hold South Sea Company annuities, but these are separate from the trading arm (i.e., the enslavement activities) of the company, and that South Sea annuities are essentially government backed debt instruments
Comment:
This section forms the heart of the dispute. Here, Drayton and Paul try to correct the error made in the original report for the Church Commissioners that confused South Sea Annuities with South Sea Securities. They actually accept our point that (in their words) these were ‘two entirely distinct financial instruments’ (Richard Drayton, Letter in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 2025) but answer in two ways:
A)that the administration of the two different products – equities and bonds – was under the same roof and therefore there was some form of unspecified leakage (‘reciprocity’).
B) that in any case, irrespective of the differences, everyone in the eighteenth century was a beneficiary of slave profits and therefore everyone was guilty.
Critics have put heavy weight on the 1723 and 1733 splits between South Sea Annuities and South Sea Trading Company stock. The proposal is that these created a high firewall between enslavement and non-enslavement derived wealth. This matters if one wishes to argue that the Bounty's preference for investing in South Sea annuities meant it did not benefit from enslavement-derived wealth or that it avoided investing in the slave trade. We can examine when and why the Bounty's managers chose to divest themselves of their SS Trading Company shares. This happened very late: between 1727 and 1730. The context of this decision was not avoidance or abhorrence, but a purely commercial decision when war with Spain, and the temporary seizure by Spain of the SSC's assets in its colonies, made this simply a commonsense investment choice.
Slavery did not benefit Bounty (churchtimes.co.uk) 8 As for the Bounty managers' preference for buying annuities over trading stock between 1723 and 1727-8, that is explained by the very healthy 5% (4% from June 1727) annual yield which attached to the Annuities, and the regularity of its remittance.
The debt/equity relationship of South Sea Annuities to SSC Trading Stock (see ‘The origin of these annuities’ below) makes the idea of these being two wholly distinct kinds of investment unreasonable. The SSC's role as a manager of a category of National Debt stock in the eighteenth century was supported by the same administrative apparatus which stood under the Trading company. While the 1723 Act created two entirely distinct financial instruments, both were entangled in their management, and we simply have not yet done the research to account for what kinds of cross-subsidy occurred under the waterline. What is certain is that the architecture of the South Sea Company, with one steady income stream from the fees for managing public debt, £14,500 per annum (equivalent in 'economic share' today of £450 million), and another speculative high risk/high gain account, meant that at the level of the firm there was a reciprocity between these investment vehicles, South Sea annuities, well into the 1740s, were enmeshed in the Slaving business of the South Sea Trading Company.
Comment:
Reflect on this paragraph. Drayton and Paul admit that ‘we simply have not yet done the research to account for what kinds of cross-subsidy occurred under the waterline’, but they seem assured, nevertheless, that cross-subsidy occurred between the securities and annuities. It is not clear what is meant by ‘reciprocity’, a term that has been confected to lull us into believing something for which there is no proof. Drayton and Paul accept that the two forms of investment were different and separate but wish us to believe, without evidence, that people who bought into the debt were also buying into the proceeds of slavery.
We might elucidate this with a modern parallel. We all have bank accounts with large, multifaceted banks which, as well as providing us with ‘retail services’ play the money and stock markets, arrange and broker acquisitions and mergers, invest in and lend to businesses. There are strict rules that prevent retail deposits from being used and lost in these wholesale speculations and the deposit account holder has no control whatsoever over the wholesale operations of the bank. When banks lose money, as in the Great Financial Crash of 2008-9, or make unethical deals, the humble account holder is not held responsible either financially or morally. Yet in the argument being advanced by Drayton and Paul for the eighteenth century, they should be, even in the absence of evidence.
More importantly, the capacity of the state to service the annuity debt was assisted by revenue derived directly and indirectly from the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences. There were significant direct profits, as Price and Whately argue, and even larger trading revenues inseparable from carrying enslaved people. More generally, every excise tax charged on tobacco, sugar, rum, indigo which provided the state with the means of paying annuities via the South Sea Company, all the wealth derived from supplying the needs of plantations and trading and processing their products, the gold (from West Africa, Brazil and Colombia) and silver (from Peru and Mexico) in circulation, depended on African enslaved labour.
Here, it is important to see how Drayton and Paul shift the ground: this is about how the state pays its debts by taking tax revenue from products derived in some way from slavery. By this logic - entirely new to the argument at this point – everyone in the eighteenth century is guilty of complicity with slavery because everyone consumed something, at some time, related to slavery. Since in the case they are developing (and which will be dealt with later) everything ultimately derives from the profits of slavery, the humble village or town labourer, enjoying a pipe or sugaring his drink, is guilty of the exploitation of slaves. It is a desperate, catch-all argument. It has no relevance to the specific responsibility of the Church of England. It is also a callous way in which to think of the millions of the ordinary and the poor in eighteenth century Britain, in no way responsible for slavery and its ills, but caught in the strange moral universe of twenty-first century academics and held accountable for things over which they neither gave their consent nor could control.
We may haggle on what, when and how much, but we must begin with confronting the 'Merchant of Venice' problem: it is impossible to distinguish a pristine category of British national, or indeed European wealth, in the eighteenth century, innocent from any association with African enslavement and suffering.
Comment:
In this manner, Drayton and Paul seek to universalise guilt over slavery in the eighteenth century. But are they therefore including among the guilty the hundreds of thousands of Britons who signed anti-slavery petitions from 1791? They massively outnumbered the 45,000 who received compensation after slave emancipation in the 1830s.
Do they also include those Anglicans, notably the Clapham Sect, who contributed to the British anti-slavery movement?
Are they arguing that millions of agricultural and industrial labourers who used slave-grown products, but who were unenfranchised, and thus without any sort of control over slavery, were also responsible for it?
Research by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership at University College, London, tells us that ‘somewhere between 10-20% of Britain’s wealthy…had significant links to slavery’. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context This proportion is dwarfed by the rest of the population who did not have such links, but does everyone else get tarred by the same brush?
In any case, there is no such thing as ‘pristine’ wealth, anywhere. All wealth, everywhere, is ‘tainted’ by some association, direct or indirect, with some historic wrongdoing somewhere. Britain’s present wealth is ‘linked’ not only to slavery, but to the exploitation of overworked medieval serfs and underpaid industrial workers. And if British wealth suffers from the ‘taint’ of slavery, so does wealth all over the world—not least in West Africa and the Arab world--since slavery has been a universal institution, practised on every continent by people of every skin colour. All that we inherit was built by sinners—just like us.
We might extend this argument to the present, focusing perhaps, on each individual’s ‘carbon footprint’ and relationship to the burning of fossil fuels, arguably the (im)moral equivalent to slavery in our generation. Thirty years ago, when Professor Drayton held various fellowships in Oxford and Cambridge, it was routine for colleges in both universities to hold shares in petrochemical companies. Do those holdings make him complicit in environmental degradation? Having held visiting fellowships in Harvard, Paris, New York, Berlin, Beijing, Sydney, and Munich, it seems likely that Professor Drayton has flown many times more than the average person.
The origin of these annuities
An annuity is a financial instrument (i.e., a contract) which pays out an annual sum; hence the name. The state had incurred various debts over a long period. The South Sea Company was founded to help it to manage those debts, specifically with its naval contractors. The contractors provided goods and services to the Navy and the payments were often late (i.e., in arrears). Eventually, the contractors lost patience. The government set up the South Sea Company and offered the contractors shares in exchange for their debt claims. This is called a debt for equity swap. Later, the company carried out further debt for equity swaps, giving government creditors company shares in exchange for their claims on the government.
Comment:
A point of fact: The 1711 debt for equity swap was not ‘an offer’. All holders of the debt were required to surrender it and were issued shares in the new South Sea Company to the same value. It was ‘take it or leave it’. As a matter of interest, the upper echelons of King’s College, London (KCL), where Professor Drayton is employed, did not understand this in 2020 and set about boarding-up the statue of the great benefactor, Thomas Guy, whose wealth established the eponymous London hospital they govern, on the grounds that at the end of his life he’d become a shareholder in the South Sea Company. It was pointed out to the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of KCL that Guy had no choice in the debt-equity swap and, in any case, the swap occurred before the SSC began slave-trading. Nevertheless, Guy’s statue was encased. It is pleasing to note that the boards were removed at the end of 2022 and the statue can now be admired. It would be interesting to learn Professor Drayton’s views on this episode in the history of his university.
In simple terms:
Person A lends money to the government. The government gives an IOU marker to Person A. Person A is offered shares in exchange for this IOU by Company B. Person A accepts and now holds shares in Company B. Company B is now the holder of the 9 government’s marker. The company is a creditor, and the government is the debtor. It pays a sum to Company B as interest on the debt. 10
Usually when a government issues debt, this is called a ‘bond’. The state might pay an interest payment to the bondholder (a coupon payment). The South Sea Company was entitled to a fee from the state in recognition that it was holding government debt (acquired through debt for equity swaps). It could then issue a financial instrument (or contract) called an annuity to investors. The investors would be entitled to an annual payment (i.e., an annuity payment) from the South Sea Company. In very simple terms, we could think of this money coming from the payment from the government to the company. More realistically, the government’s fee was transferred to the company, but money is fungible. Money held in the company’s hands could be used for a variety of purposes. Other money (from the trade in goods or the enslaved) also flowed to the company. Then a sum of money would be paid out to the annuity-holders. However, this money was not neatly separated from other monies held by the company.
Critics have argued that the annuities functioned completely separately from the South Sea Company’s enslavement activities and that there is no cross-over. We refute this claim for the following reasons:
• The British state was receiving monies from enslavement, e.g., from taxes raised on imports generated by enslaved people. Therefore, monies coming from the state are not without linkages to enslavement.
• The South Sea Company was able to use some of the government fee to cover its administrative expenses. This portion of the fee was helping to maintain the administrative structure of the company. The company was then able to defray some of its bureaucratic costs which helped it to continue in its slaving business.
• The linkage to the government gave the South Sea Company some power. Its handling of the government debt was rewarded partly by the payment of the fee, but also by payment in kind including convoy protection by the Royal Navy and diplomatic support from the British government in its dealings with foreign powers.
• Companies such as the South Sea Company were not required to keep standardised accounts and were not subject to modern standards of audit or reporting. Therefore, once the government fee had been received by the company, it was able to use those funds (in the short run) as it saw fit. Money is fungible. Therefore, it is not possible to neatly delineate which sums were tainted by direct connection to enslavement (i.e., directly from the South Sea Company’s slaving activities) and which were connected to enslavement but at one remove (i.e., from the state’s connections to enslavement such as taxation revenues).
• The same personnel worked to ensure the running of the enslavement arm of the business and the handling of government debt. They were housed in South Sea House in London. The crossover between the practicalities of managing government fees and managing the trafficking of human beings concerns flows of money but also of personnel. Their continued employment was made possible partly through their debt management activities, but also required them to handle business activities related to enslavement.
Comment:
The five bullet points immediately above are entirely unsupported by evidence. There is not a date, name, amount, or figure among them. Drayton and Paul have already told us that the research to establish the so-called ‘reciprocity’ they believe occurred between annuities and securities has not been done. Without evidence these are unsupported assertions and can in no way whatsoever amount to a case against their critics. These are simply speculations and generalisations.
By the faulty logic of these and other arguments made by Drayton and Paul, whatever the Church did with its money in the eighteenth century, it would somehow have been responsible for, and mired by, the profits of slavery. It might have been scrupulous in its determination to invest in annuities only, but by the inevitability of ‘reciprocity’ or ‘crossover’ as divined (without evidence) by Drayton and Paul, it would be guilty. If its clergy smoked tobacco, sweetened their chocolate with sugar, drank a tot of rum, they too would be guilty. Theologians often debate whether there can be guilt in the absence of choice. If Drayton and Paul are correct and everything in the eighteenth century linked the Church and everybody else to slavery, then there was no choice. The implication of this argument is that no one can be held guilty for their actions, in which case the whole basis on which Project Spire was set up falls. The Church had no choice; it was therefore not guilty; therefore it has nothing to atone for; therefore it owes no one anything at all.
Claims the South Sea Company’s trading activities accounted for a small part of its business and were thus unlikely to have led QAB to acquire shares
It is not entirely clear what the South Sea Company’s trading activities actually produced for its investors as many of its account books are no longer extant. It was an enslaver whether it made a profit or not. The motivation of the investors was to make a return on their investment. However, the company was also clearly a human trafficking organisation, as was clearly understood at the time. Critics have quoted the financial historian François Velde as stating that ‘for all practical purposes, the annuities … were government debt’. Velde is an acknowledged expert in financial history, but these words should not taken out of context. Velde’s 2022 paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago entitled ‘Winners and Losers in Britain’s 1722 Debt Restructuring’ deals purely with the financial architecture of the company. Velde notes that the South Sea Company could claim management charges for handling government debt. In addition, Velde was not claiming that funds from the state had no linkage to enslavement in other ways (e.g. taxes) or seeking to downplay the importance of enslavement. For further information on this see: Full article: The South Sea Bubble and the Erasure of Slavery and Impressment (tandfonline.com).
Claims that ‘income derived from the South Sea Annuities came directly from the government and had no connection of trade with any kind’
The question arises from where did the government of the time obtain its funds? The British economy included slaving companies such as the Royal African Company and a number of slaving ports (firstly London, then Bristol, Liverpool and others). It also clearly had Caribbean colonies which were essentially island prisons for the enslaved.
The public revenue of the British state in the Eighteenth century, which allowed the government to pay a rent to the annuity holders, depended in significant part on excise taxation on sugar, tobacco, indigo, and other enslaved-produced commodities. The entire contemporary money supply – the 'guineas' and other gold and silver coins in circulation – was based on precious metals either acquired via the slave trade or produced by enslaved workers in Brazil and Spanish America.
Comment:
See the comments on ‘guilt’ immediately above. If the entire money supply was tainted by slavery then everything was tainted by slavery, in which case no one could escape moral taint, in which case the Church had no choice at all, in which case no guilt can attach, in which case no reparations are due. This is the remorseless logic of Drayton and Paul’s argument.
Claims Queen Anne’s Bounty’s connection with the South Sea Company was its only connection with enslavement. This is untrue as it clearly received money from Edward Colston and others. The database itself contains various names familiar to scholars of enslavement. For instance, there are surnames of individuals from the ‘planter class’ or families who were involved in the slaving ports of Bristol, Liverpool and Whitehaven.
Claims against the emerging historical consensus that enslavement, the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and plantation economies played a significant role in British economic development.
Comment:
At this point the tactical deviations adopted by Drayton and Paul should be evident to everyone. Grand questions about the relationship of slavery to British economic development have no place at all in establishing the difference between South Sea Annuities and South Sea Securities in the mid-eighteenth century. But because these questions have been raised and answered incorrectly by Drayton and Paul, it is necessary to address them lest readers believe them to be correct.
Critics have suggested authoritative historians have discredited Eric Williams’ 1944 Capitalism and Slavery thesis that wealth from enslavement provided the key funding for the industrial revolution, citing pre-1980s sources such as Roger Anstey and Stanley Engerman. They appear to depend on a very dated historiography. These critics ignore the large body of important work since the 1980s which has restored the prestige of Williams's interpretation. The tide of opinion among leading contemporary economic historians tends to the view that that the Atlantic slave trade and plantation business, in its wider economic implications was a critical component of British economic development and industrialisation. The most significant recent interventions include "Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution" (Heblich, Redding and Voth, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 30451, 2022) and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (2023). We discuss the development of this new work more below relative to Lawrence Goldman's "Dissent".
Leading twenty-first century economic historian Nuala Zahedieh, for example, has explored the colonial origins of Britain's copper industry via a sophisticated synthesis of Williams with the insights of Wrigley on coal, Mokyr et. al. on knowledge and technique etc.14 The development of Swansea’s copper industry depended not only on the Welsh coalfields but also on the demand for copper for the West African slave trade and for sugar and rum production. In 1660, England imported almost all its copper from Sweden. By 1720, under the impact of slave trade and colonial demand, the most important copper industry in Europe was in Bristol and its economic hinterland in Wales.
We now recognise that this impact of the Atlantic economy, to which African enslavement was central, on the making of modern Britain extended far beyond the direct profits from trading enslaved people or from the West Indian plantations. Copper and iron production, shipbuilding, maritime insurance and the financial services economy received important kinds of stimulus from Britain's offshore economy. We can critique the Williams thesis without downplaying the significant role which enslavement played in the origins of modern Britain.
Comment:
Drayton and Paul assert an “emerging historical consensus” that transatlantic slave-trading and slavery played a “significant” role in British economic development. This raises two questions, one about the nature of a consensus and another about the choice of the words ‘significant’, ‘critical’ and ‘central’.
It is an easy thing to assert a consensus, when what is meant is merely that there is a group of scholars who agree with you and who can be thought, in some vague sense, to be on the rise. So how can we tell a genuinely authoritative consensus from mere groupthink? One defining mark of groupthink is that it ignores inconvenient data, which is what Drayton and Paul do here. For example, they omit to mention that as recently as 2010, David Brion Davis, the distinguished historian of slavery and its abolition in the Western world, who taught for decades at Cornell and Yale Universities, confidently pronounced the last rites on Eric Williams’ thesis, declaring that it “has now been wholly discredited by other scholars”.[i] Nor do they take account of the most recent work of David Eltis, described in 2024 by Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University as “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade”,[ii] where Eltis contradicts the argument by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson that slavery was responsible for “triggering accelerating economic growth first in Britain”.[iii]
On the choice of words, we note, first, that the authors slide uncertainly between the modest ‘significant’ and the bolder ‘critical’ and ‘central’ in describing the contribution made by slavery to Britain’s economic development. Second, we observe that ‘significant’ clearly falls short of Eric Williams’ grander claim in his Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that the slave trade made an “enormous” contribution.[iv] From this we may infer either that the authors have not read Williams carefully or that—contrary to their overt claim—in fact they disagree with him. Third, inconsistently, they imply a stronger claim by deploying the words ‘critical’ and ‘central’, but in doing so they collide with David Eltis who, regarding the significance of the slave trade to the economy of the major slaving ports such as Liverpool, goes as far as to write of its “triviality”.[v]
What remains, then, of Drayton and Paul’s ‘emerging historical consensus’?
Lawrence Goldman's "Dissent" (12/9/2023)15 from Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (2023) does not explicitly address Project Spire, but it will be used by critics of the Church Commissioners’ response to its historic links to African chattel enslavement.
Comment:
The following long section is a gratuitous critique of a review of the book by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson,Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (2023) that, as Drayton and Paul acknowledge, has nothing whatsoever to do with Project Spire. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/slavery-capitalism-and-the-industrial-revolution-a-dissent/
That so much space is devoted to it suggests that its arguments have unsettled them. It largely consists in speculation about the learned academic articles they believe the author of the review, Professor Lawrence Goldman, has not read. How do they presume to know what he has read?
The review was published on the History Reclaimed website which is very different from a learned journal. History Reclaimed is read by a wide range of people, many of whom are enthusiasts for accurate history but not academics or specialists. As even a cursory inspection of the website will show, authors are not contributing scholarly articles but shorter pieces of interest to this audience. In addition, Goldman did not need to call in the scholarship of others when criticising Berg and Hudson: it was merely a question of reinterpreting the data they themselves provided.
Drayton and Paul enjoy displaying their command of the literature at this point, perhaps to avoid addressing Goldman’s main contention: that any argument in favour of the notion that slavery and its proceeds were centrally important to the economic transformation in 18th century Britain (aka ‘The Industrial Revolution’) must be made relatively and comparatively.
Drayton and Paul, like Berg and Hudson, pile up details of wealth accrued directly and indirectly from slavery. But even at its greatest, Berg and Hudson compute the contribution of British colonial slavery to 18th century British GDP at 11%. This is significant, but hardly on a scale capable of driving the unique transformation of the British economy. Sugar from the West Indies made many people wealthy, and some of that wealth was invested in domestic British manufacturing. But can it really be argued that sugar was more crucial than iron ore, coal, wool, ceramics, and consumer goods’ industries in general in stimulating economic activity? That it was more important than the wealth and production from the most efficient agriculture in Europe that was uniquely capable of feeding British cities and sustaining economic and social change? Is the labour of 750,000 slaves on British Caribbean islands in 1804 that significant, in a purely economic context, set beside the millions labouring by then in mines, mills, factories and on the land in Britain? And what of Britain’s other sources of supply for crucial goods (naval stores from the Baltic, for example) or other markets for her finished goods – continental Europe, the Mediterranean, India, and the North American colonies (from 1783 the United States)? Wedgwood made cheap and durable household-wares which he could sell by the tens of thousands to middling consumers in Britain and across Europe. There was no such market among the slaves of Jamaica, where whites numbered around 20,000 in 1800. In the interpretations of Drayton and Paul and of Berg and Hudson, too much is being asked of sugar and its profits. Set the product and profit of slavery in any comparative context and it cannot explain much about Britain’s growing wealth and technological transformation during this period.
Goldman begins with an acknowledgement that "there has never been any doubt about the importance of Slavery in the trading systems ... in this era" and then proposes, however, that the authors (Berg and Hudson) 'overplay their hand' and exaggerate its consequences, even undermining their own arguments with their data. He begins with their affiliation to the Williams's thesis, which he proposes was "comprehensively critiqued and undone by a generation of historians in the 1960s and 70s", whose criticisms, however, he does not catalogue, to which he vaguely adds "but in present times it has made a comeback". One realises then that Goldman is not in command of the development of the historiography over the last forty years. He seems unaware of Barbara Solow's seminal 1980s conferences, which converted Patrick O'Brien to Atlantic demand-side interpretations of Britain's eighteenth-century take-off, to Zahedieh's early articles on the West Indian economy's impact, to Joseph Inikori's Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 2002).
One cannot be confident that Goldman has really read Williams, or at least carefully; for he declares that Williams denied the role of anti-slavery humanitarianism in abolition. 14 See for example Nuala Zahedieh, 'Colonies, Copper, and the Market for Invention. The Economic History Review, 2013, 66: 805-825; and 'Eric Williams and William Forbes: copper, colonial markets, and commercial capitalism', The Economic History Review, 2021, 74: 784-808. 15 https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/slavery-capitalism-and-the-industrial-revolution-a-dissent/ 14 This is false: Chapter 11 of Capitalism and Slavery is actually an examination of the important part played by the "Saints", although Williams explores the contradictions in the movement, and explains why their ethical arguments would not have triumphed if the larger economic and political context was not right. Not apparently having read Christopher Brown's Moral Capital (2006), Goldman is unaware that Williams' arguments for the entanglements of humanitarian and capitalist interests in the making of anti-slavery are well supported. He mentions Zachary Macaulay admiringly, without noting that Macaulay's passion for abolishing African enslavement in the western hemisphere strangely lost its urgency when he addressed the East Indies.
In the next paragraph he gives his first example of how Berg and Hudson undermine Williams' argument. He proposes that their description that big profits in the sugar trade supports those critics who felt that 'economic decline cannot explain slave emancipation'. But he seems unaware that the 'decline argument' in Williams, following Lowell Ragatz's argument about the aftermath of the American Revolution, seeks to explain the timing of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade, not 'Slave Emancipation' in 1834-8. Goldman has misunderstood the time zone of Seymour Drescher's 'econocide' argument. Not having read David Ryden's West Indian Slavery and British Abolition (2010), he is also unaware that Drescher's analysis has been outflanked by later research, that profits did decline in the early nineteenth century for a significant body of West Indian planters.
Comment:
In his 2010 book, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Seymour Drescher argues that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for Britain but instead from the British public's mobilization against the slave trade, which forced the British government to commit ‘econocide’, damaging Britain's economic interests. In order to dislodge Drescher’s argument—rather than go around it—it needs to be shown that profits from slave-trading had been diminishing before 1807, and presumably for some decades before that in the late 1700s, and that this was what motivated MPs to vote for abolition. Research that shows that profits declined “in the early nineteenth century” (a large part of which fell after abolition) for a “significant” (how ‘significant’?) body of planters, does not go anywhere near achieving that.
Rather than tracing the grain of Berg and Hudson's argument and engaging with the wealth of recent historical writing which they bring into focus, Goldman searches for points of difference. As an example, he identifies the bool industry as one not influenced by the enslavement economy, ignorant of the fact that in the 1770s the majority of Yorkshire woolens and broadcloth was going to Atlantic markets. He refers to the demand for British textiles by the northern states of the future United States, without understanding how central to the economies of New England and the 'Bread colonies' were to the slave trade, the export markets of the plantation colonies and West Indian molasses and rum.
He misunderstands what Williams and Berg and Hudson mean by the 'capital' generated by the Atlantic enslavement-based economy. 'Capital' is neither simply money nor credit, for historians in the early 20th century; see Leland Jenks’ classic The Export of Capital from England to 1875 (1927). 'Capital' meant a productive apparatus (for Jenks, the entire assemblage of managerial and labour skills, supply chain, associated with the railway revolution). Berg and Hudson demonstrate in exquisite detail the many dimensions of the impact of enslavement and the plantation economy on the ordering of 'capital', in this broader sense, in iron, copper, wool, cotton production, shipping, banking and insurance.
It is telling that when, on his penultimate page, Goldman summarises Berg and Hudson’s argument, with a quotation from page 7 of their book, he mentions their paragraph's opening caveats, where they prudently explain what they do not claim to be doing, while omitting its last sentences where they declare their aim:
“What we do say is that the role of slavery in the process of industrialization and economic development has generally been underestimated by historians, and that it is time for a rounded examination in the light of accumulated research. The 15 slave and plantation trades were the hub around which many other dynamic and innovatory sectors of the economy pivoted. Slavery, directly and indirectly, set in motion innovations in manufacturing, agriculture, wholesaling, retailing, shipping, banking, international trade, finance and investment, insurance, as well as the organization and intensification of work, record keeping and the application of scientific and useful knowledge.”16
Comment:
It is not our intention to try the patience of readers over a matter that does not bear directly on the securities/annuities issue. However, it is not only Goldman who has questioned the grand claims made in favour of the importance of the slave economy. Similar points have been made in a most important book by David Eltis (mentioned above), the doyen of historians of the slave trade, published this year by Cambridge University Press: Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades. This is Eltis’s 13th book in addition to many learned articles on slavery and the slave trade. He taught for many years at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and is now based at the University of British Columbia.
In his new book, a summation of his research and that of others over two generations, he questions the insistent but erroneous idea that British industrialisation depended on the profits of the slave trade and Caribbean slavery. Arguing from new data that demonstrate that Portugal and Spain were always the dominant slave-trading nations, Eltis argues that this ‘inevitably undermines the argument that the economic development of Western Europe depended on the slave systems of the Americas’. Indeed, he reverses the argument entirely. It was the commercial and industrial development of Britain, France and the Netherlands that allowed them to break into the trade and ‘to establish their own slave systems in the face of Iberian competition.’ Britain’s superior economic development was the cause of its engagement in slavery in the eighteenth century and not the consequence of it. According to Eltis, ‘the evolution of…all European economies could have been little different if slave colonies had never existed.’
Eltis flatly contradicts the argument by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson that slavery was responsible for “triggering accelerating economic growth first in Britain”.[vi] Of their book, he comments that it:
“does not use TSTD [the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database] correctly and offers arguments that the slave voyages data do not support… The body of the text is a 216-page catalogue of what reads like all possible connections between individual slave traders and their businesses on the one hand, and the economy that lay beyond the slave trade on the other…. their book has a startling lack of analysis…. Even though Britain never had the largest slave empire and even though the Iberian powers clearly did, but never showed traces of industrialisation, the authors are certain that their long list of descriptive links between the slave sector and the rest of the economy is evidence of slavery triggering accelerating economic growth first in Britain.” [vii]
In this, Berg and Hudson are typical of “the new historians of capitalism, the authors of the 1619 project, most scholars of the slave trade, and all the media [who] frequently distort the history of slavery by greatly exaggerating its economic importance”.[viii] Richard Drayton and Helen Paul are surely among these. To them and others who “see slavery as the foundation of quickening growth in the metropole”, Eltis puts the Portuguese case:
“For more than three centuries Portugal was the leading Atlantic slave trader and, at least until 1825 when Brazil became independent, the possessor of the largest single source of plantation produce in the early modern Atlantic world… [Yet] ‘by the middle of the nineteenth century Portugal became one of the most backward economies of Europe’ …. Today, Portugal is the poorest country in the EU, despite Portuguese pre-eminence in the Atlantic slave trades.”[ix]
On the argument that slavery was the basis of British economic prosperity, Eltis comments, “How very odd that such a small proportion of slaves and their owners that were British (1.7 per cent of the enslaved global population …) should have triggered an Industrial Revolution”.[x] Then, setting irony aside, he speaks forthrightly: it is “beyond credulity that slavery or the slave trade that supported it could have kick-started economic growth. It is far more likely that the key to such development lay in conditions within Britain …”.[xi]
The significance of this conclusion cannot be overstated because so much current public discourse - and the arguments of Drayton and Paul - are premised on this exaggeration. Yet to anyone with experience of working on modern British history, Eltis’s conclusion has never been in doubt and confirms previous work published by History Reclaimed. (See also https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/empire-the-slave-trade-and-britains-wealth-a-reply-to-will-hutton-in-the-guardian/ )
Readers would be perfectly right to draw the conclusion that this is a highly contentious area of scholarship and public debate. In drawing that conclusion they will also see that so much that is written in this document by Drayton and Paul cannot be taken as fact. They have set out their views and opinions. But other historians see the history of slavery differently and the Church of England will open itself to criticism if it accepts only one side of these arguments.
Claims refuting that enslavement left behind an enduring legacy of disadvantage for people of African descent
Sir Michael Marmot has showed the Sewell Report of 2021 was based on the suppression of evidence of racialised inequality.17 We have abundant statistical evidence that racialised inequality in the UK has a profound and negative impact on British people of colour. In the UK, Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth compared to White women, with women from Asian backgrounds facing twice the risk of maternal mortality. The stillbirth rate for Black babies is twice that of White Babies. In 2019, the risk that a child would not live past the age of 1 was 6.4 for every 1000 Black babies, vs 5.5 for Asian babies, vs. 3 for White babies. To live in a body which is racialised as 'black' is to be born with poorer life chances, to be marked as dangerous, twice as likely to be unemployed18, if employed to earn on average only 87% of white men19, more likely to be stopped and searched by the police, more likely to be punished for any delinquency, more likely to be excluded from school, less likely to receive credit, more likely to be the object of violence. Black people are four times more likely than whites to be detained under the Mental Health Act, 25% more likely if arrested to be remanded in custody, four times more likely than their proportion of the population to be in prison, and once in custody two to three times as likely to die there.
Comment:
Issues of black disadvantage in Britain are not in doubt. Whether these questions need to be discussed in a paper ostensibly on 18th century finance most certainly is. The question to be briefly debated here is whether these disadvantages are the consequence of slavery, a system that ended nearly two centuries ago. Drayton and Paul assume a causative link between the two but no evidence of causation is provided. We note in passing that this type of approach to black communities denies them agency. They are perpetual victims of an institution that was ended (thanks to the campaigns of the British anti-slavery movement led by Anglicans, in many instances) long ago and apparently have no means to free themselves from its legacy.
Those who subscribe to this view – of black communities devoid of the capacity to take advantage of freedom and to improve their position – should familiarise themselves with a famous debate in the historiography of American slavery. After the 1965 black riots in many American cities, the Moynihan Report (entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action and published some months later) blamed the disorder on the breakdown of black family structures, a legacy (it was argued) from slavery when black slaves in the American South were not allowed to marry. Taking aim at what many contended were patronising attitudes, the historian Herbert Gutman in his magisterial work The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 (1976) showed how slaves made stable, loving, nuclear relationships in slavery and nurtured children for as long as they were allowed to. He directly refuted the claims made in the Moynihan Report, criticising attitudes that denied blacks agency and control of their own lives. The legacy of slavery in Gutman’s history of black families was not disorder and chaos but the very strong desire to build affective bonds between parents and children whatever the odds stacked against black communities.
We also ask how the fashionable term ‘racialised’ differs from ‘racist’? And what exactly does ‘living in a body racialised as “black”’ mean? Surely it can only mean someone who is subject to pejorative racial stereotyping. The implication here, then, is that relative disadvantages in health and other outcomes is caused by racist prejudice. But this is simply asserted, not demonstrated. As the Sewell Report, and others such as Rakib Ehsan have rightly pointed out, poorer outcomes for ethnic groups can have several causes other than racist prejudice.[xii]
Appendix
The Slave Trade, Plantation Slavery, the British Economy and the Church
Richard Drayton
Many of the points made already apply to Drayton’s short and rapid history of the role of slavery in the development of the British economy over the past three hundred years which he sets out here. No attempt is made to measure the impact of slavery against other factors that have shaped economic history over this period. The account is focused on the contributions of slavery to the generation of finance capital, and hence to the wealth it provided for merchants and bankers in London. The absence of any discussion of industrialisation is telling because that history is different. It depended on local kinship networks sharing capital; on provincial rather than metropolitan banks; on the economic dynamism of non-conformist communities outside Anglicanism and therefore without access to education in the universities, or professional and political careers; on the development of new technologies; on the rise of a consumer society here in Britain with small surpluses that could be used to purchase the durable goods – pots and pans - made by new industries.
These were not two hermetically sealed economies, of course. No one would gainsay evidence of slave wealth and compensation payments after emancipation being invested in the railways, for example. But Drayton presents a lopsided history of the British economy focused on those sectors where slavery obviously had major (though not overwhelming) impact rather than those sectors where it did not, thus on London rather than the industrial north. And Drayton’s account of the economic context of British slave emancipation needs correction.
Context
In January 2023, the Church Commissioners published its report into the role of wealth derived from enslavement in its historic assets, anchored in Grant Thornton's forensic accounting of the provenance of Queen Anne's Bounty, which demonstrated significant investments in the South Sea Company and private donations from individuals whose assets derived, in whole or part, from slavery-related business. In March 2024, the Oversight Group report put this proposition into a fuller context: The immense wealth accrued by the Church Commissioners has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement. The origins of Queen Anne’s Bounty are just one aspect of this. African enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter. Industries that benefited included iron and steel, shipbuilding, weapons, coal mines, woollen and cotton manufacture, farming, fishing, merchant banking and insurance. Many donors to the Church made their wealth through enslavement-based industries (page 4).
Slavery and the making of modern Britain
I seek here to make a concise summary of the impact of the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the enslavement-based colonial plantation economies for the making of modern Britain as a resource for the Church Commissioners. The Spanish in their partition of the world with Portugal in 1494, had agreed they had no interest in Africa. They depended for enslaved Africans, as a result, on buying them from other nations. English merchants entered the trade. Sir William Garrard, a cloth merchant, former Mayor and MP of London, funded a series of slave trading voyages from the 1550s, including the famous Hawkins expeditions.21 Garrard was also a generous donor to the Church of England, and is remembered in the Garrard Chapel of St James The Less, Dorney, Oxfordshire. In 1618, James I granted a charter to the Guinea Company to a group of aristocratic courtiers and London merchants. By 1619, they had delivered their first cargo of enslaved Africans to Virginia, although an English privateer, the 'White Lion' had beat them to it. From 1625, Sir Nicholas Crispe became the key figure, establishing trading posts on the coast of what is today Ghana. From these were taken not just enslaved people and dye woods but gold which was worth £10,000 then, but today might be valued at close to £600 million. The impact of the slave trade on British industry begins 21 Gary Paul Baker, Craig Lambert (2024),‘William Fowler’, Sir William Garrard, Sir John Hawkins and the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade, The English Historical Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead213 17 even then: archaeologists have found in Hammersmith the ruins of a bead factory build by Crispe to supply trade goods for Africa. Crispe was a devout Anglican, intimate of Archbishop Laud, and funded the construction of St Paul's Hammersmith.
By the 1620s, however, England began to claim its own Caribbean plantations. In the 1620s, English colonies begin in St Christopher and Barbados, founded from their outset on enslaved Amerindians, later supplemented by indentured whites, and when they could afford it, enslaved Africans. These were from their beginning capitalist enterprises, linked to speculative investment in the city of London, as Michael Bennett's excellent recent PhD dissertation shows.22 Sir William Courteen who financed the initial settlement of Barbados, maintained a trade in enslaved people which ran to Madagascar and the East Indies, as well as West Africa. He was deeply involved in royal finances: he was linked to Sir Peter Pindar’s loan of £200,000 to the crown, rewarded with the royal concessions of privileges in the West Indies, and in the East Indies, where for a while it seemed he would outrank the East India Company. Courteen's vessels maintained "standards of Anglican piety", with services, with sermons, twice a day.23
Vast fortunes were made in Barbados, Jamaica and other islands, both by individuals, within the businesses of London, and by the Crown on the basis of enslaved African labour. By 1690, Dalby Thomas could write that ‘Sugar has contribute more to England’s pleasure, glory, and grandeur than any other commodity we deal in or produce, wool not excepted’. Charles Davenant, a few years later, estimated that the plantation trade accounted for £720,000 of England’s £2 million external commerce, and much of the other £1.3 million of British trade consisted of re-exports of sugar, tobacco and tropical dyewoods to Europe. By 1687, the customs revenues on sugar and tobacco, produced by enslaved Britons in the Americas, amounted to a third of Crown revenue. This revenue contributed to the costs of the defense of the Protestant settlement in the Nine Years War which followed the 1688 'Glorious Revolution'.
The impact of this new Atlantic economy on London was profound, the historian Nuala Zahedieh argues, making that city the most important commercial centre in Europe. Ships were built, dockyards, warehouses, merchants' chambers up and down Mincing Lane, while new heavy coins minted from West African gold called the 'Guinea' filled the coffers of banks. This was big business, and the rich men of the City of London were in the thick of it. The shareholders of the Royal African Company, founded in 1672, included 15 Lord Mayors and 38 Aldermen.24 But it was also a dangerous enterprise, ships might be lost to enemies, fire, slave uprisings. The insurance business, which came to a kind of maturity around Lloyd's coffee house in London in the late Seventeenth century, began with heavy exposure to the enslavement and plantation trades. Lloyds's insurers agreed to underwrite slaves and slave ships, and to cover the risks of fire destroying property in the West Indies. As new research by Nick Draper shows, the plantations of the West Indies were essentially part of the British financial system, selling annuities in exchange for capital investments. Much as today we might buy a pension from Prudential or another insurance or finance house, so then planters might pledge future incomes on the basis of their lands and the enslaved people that worked them.
Slave trading, enslavement plantations and their commodities, were important objects of financial adventure, pulling in capital from across Europe, and releasing direct and indirect revenue streams. The special needs of the slave trade stimulated financial innovation, including bills payable after three years, which took stock of the time within which a successful adventure would be completed. The most important speculative event of the Eighteenth century, on which huge fortunes were made and lost, depending on the timing of investment, was the South Sea Bubble of 1720, at the basis of which were the imagined fortunes to be made from selling enslaved Africans, and other commodities, for Spanish American silver.
Three figures illustrate how central the slave-centred economy was to the City of London. The first is Alderman Edward Backwell (1681-83), of the Goldsmith's Company, a Goldsmith-Banker, in fact the most important banker in late Seventeenth-century England. He was personally a substantial investor in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, a key source of contemporary gold imports, but indirectly he had his finger in every pie, and can be found in contracts concerning the supply of so-called 'voyage iron' from Sweden for the African trade. The second is Sir Humphry Morice, Governor of the Bank of England from 1727-29, the most important London slave merchant of his age, responsible for 73 slave trading voyages between 1709 and 1730, that is to say for the transfer in chains of over 20,000 people across the Atlantic, of whom more than 1,000 died en route.25 The third is John Julius Angerstein (1735-1823), who had involvements in the plantation business in Grenada and St Kitts, but made his real fortune from insurance underwriting, where he was at the centre of Lloyds of London, which then, as at its origins, was heavily involved in underwriting the enslavement business. He is mostly remembered today as a philanthropist and art connoisseur, whose collections are at the core of the National Gallery. More enduring in importance that these, however, was the legacy of the Quaker brothers David and Alexander Barclay, who were involved in slave trading and a Jamaica plantation, who combined with the Gurney and Freame banking families to form the bank we know today as Barclays.
The impact of the enslavement and plantation business on the grittier bits of the economy in London and around the country was equally profound. The demand of goods with which to purchase enslaved people in Africa, and to supply the plantations, accelerated the growth of wool, cotton, iron, brass and copper manufacture across the nation, while the imported commodities underpinned new industries like sugar refining, tobacco curing, and cotton spinning. C.1650, England had imported most of its copper from Europe, but by the early 18th century it had Europe's most important copper and brass foundries, 40% of output going directly into the Atlantic trade. When British textile producers faced stiff competition in European markets, Africa and the Americas came to their rescue. In 1772, Williams notes, 72% of Yorkshire woolens and 90% of 25 M.D. Mitchell, The Prince of Slavers: Humphry Morice and the Transformation of Britain's Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1698-1732 (London, 2020) 19 broadcloth, and about 40% of all English copper and brass was going abroad chiefly to Africa and the New World. The volumes of trade handled by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to this exchange. The knock-on effects can be seen in the over three million new non-agricultural jobs created between 1700 and 1801.
In a forthcoming essay in Slavery and Abolition, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson argue for the critical role of the West Indies in the structure of British wealth, and in the greater British economy. In 1774, Jamaica alone had 10% of the private wealth of England and Wales and plantation assets as a whole accounted for £104 million. Plantation America, at the same date, they write, may be estimated have been almost three times as economically valuable to the British Empire as Scotland, twice as valuable as Ireland and perhaps equivalent to Lancashire and Yorkshire combined.
It is not widely known that the East India Company, so central to London's economic life, depended also on the Atlantic trades, in particular indirectly on the slave trade. When Europeans went to Calcutta and Canton to buy silks, cottons, spices, and tea, they were compelled in large part to pay for these luxuries in silver. This trade would not have been sustainable without the flow of silver from Peru and Mexico, which the English acquired a share of through selling the Spanish colonies enslaved Africans, which they purchased in part through exporting Indian cotton cloth and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, to Africa. Enslaved African people were thus not just a source of labour in the Americas, or a profitable commodity to be traded, but were in practice a kind of currency, through which the West and East Indian spheres of Europe's economies were in exchange.
Throughout this Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century span, Britain's economic connections to Europe were tightened around its colonial economy. Britain depended on commodities from Europe, in particular timber, pitch, tar and hemp for its shipping, and the sugar, tobacco, rum and textiles from the colonies needed European markets. These trades, as well as Britain's public and private debt offered speculative opportunities for foreigners. As the English merchants had once gone to Antwerp, so two centuries later, traders and bankers from around Europe came to London, bringing money to invest with them.
So began a pattern of flow of capital which made London into the central city of capitalism, until in the 20th century it was eclipsed in New York. We trade money like any other good, and bankers these days talk about something called the 'carry trade', where someone borrows money where interest rates are low, and invests it where there are higher yields. We might see the British Empire and the British economy in the 18th and 19th century as based on a giant version of the 'Carry trade', as European investors were willing to accept the low interest rates of safe and abundant short-term London investment opportunities, allowing Britain to fight its wars cheaply, and allowing British capitalists to make higher yield long-term investments in plantations, colonial land and infrastructure, and later mines and railways.
Around trades in slave-grown commodities and these investments emerged such key institutions of the modern City of London as banks such as Schroder's (founded by 1804 by the Schröder brothers from the Hanseatic city of Hamburg) which with Baring (which grew out of Bremen wool merchant banker) speculated on cotton plantations in British 20 Guiana, and Kleinwort's (founded in 1786 by Heinrich Kleinwort and Otto Muller of Holstein) which was heavily involved in Cuban tobacco, and Hambros (founded by Carl Hambro of Copenhagen in 1839). The other side of this was that a whole range of business activity which had nothing to do with the territory of Britain, such as cotton going from New Orleans to Bremen, was run through London. It was only a small exaggeration when Nathan Rothschild remarked in 1832 that London was 'the bank for the whole world ... all transactions, in India, in China, in Germany, in the whole world, are guided and settled here through this country'.
That London was the centre of what today we would call a global capital market was essential to the way in which Slave Emancipation took place in Britain between 1834 and 1838. For British emancipation turned on the compensation of slave-owners by what was projected to be £20 million. We might see this as the largest slave purchase in history, with the Crown as buyer, made possible by what was effectively the largest consolidated slave mortgage. It was underwritten by Rothschild, Montefiore and others, who were able to arrange this vast amount of credit through London.
Comment:
This is one way to see the economics of emancipation. Another would emphasise that the loans made to the British state in order to provide the compensation were equivalent to 40% of annual government expenditure in 1833 and were paid off over many decades by the British taxpayer. The cost of emancipation was borne by the people, in short.
Emancipation was an event of the highest importance in the history of the City and in the British economy as the findings of the UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project, and the research of Nick Draper, Catherine Hall and others have shown. Vast amounts of capital which British people had held overseas in the form of enslaved people was liberated into the liquid form of National Debt stock, and now released into the domestic British economy. Its impact on growth rates, consumption, investment, and returns in the London stock were profound. It might be argued that capital from slave compensation broke the long recession which the British economy had faced since the 1825 Latin American debt crisis had burst the City's bubble, and set the basis for the mid-Victorian boom. Former slave-owners' investments in mines, railways, factories, and other real assets at home and abroad created a whole structure of wealth ignorant of its provenance in African enslavement.
Comment:
Actually, this would be very difficult to argue. The slaves were emancipated on 1st August 1834 and within four years Britain began to endure the deepest economic depression of the 19th century which lasted until 1844 and which, it is argued, brought us closer to a revolution than at any time in our modern history. These were years of mass unemployment, Chartist protest, and the Plug Plot to sabotage the furnaces in the summer of 1842. There is no direct line to be drawn from emancipation to mid-Victorian prosperity.
Compensated emancipation also benefitted the City in another way, for it created a a large new supply of Crown-guaranteed fixed-interest securities, with a 3.5% coupon, a figure marginally above the normal premium from government debt, which meant that the initial £15 million borrowing, provided a not inconsiderable £500,000 per annum of rent to bond holders. The owners of these securities were effectively benefitting from slave mortgages, even if the enslaved people underlying it were now subjects of the Crown.
Those who wish to diminish modern Britain's debts to enslaved people like to make much of the fact that Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, emancipated its enslaved Africans by 1838, and that the Royal Navy suppressed the slave trade. But the Royal Navy only suppressed the slave trade south of the Equator after 1850. In the process, it protected major British investments in enslaved-labour businesses in the south Atlantic. It is often forgotten that British involvement in, and profit from, African enslavement continued long after British emancipation was complete in 1838.26 For enslavement persisted in the United States, Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean until the 1860s and 1880s, providing highly profitable opportunities for the City of London. London was the close partner of the expansion of the cotton south in the United States, 26 Marika Sherwood, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (London, 2007). 21 creating complex mortgage-backed securities which provided a paper veil for a new kind of slave-ownership.
Comments:
There is much wrong with this paragraph. It fails to mention the 1843 Slave Trade Act, ‘The Act for the More Effectual Suppression of the Slave Trade’, the last of the six great Acts of Parliament in the period after 1807 designed to abolish slavery. It extended the reach of previous anti-slavery laws to British subjects residing in foreign countries, making it illegal for them to participate in the slave trade, such as by trading and transporting slaves, or financing the trade. Such extra-territorial legislation was controversial then (as now) and illustrates the lengths to which the British state would go in the fight against slavery. Though it proved difficult to enforce, it undoubtedly deterred Britons from participating in the slave trade overseas.
After the then independent republic of Texas defaulted on some of its bonds in 1839, British and other investors were, in fact, very unwilling to lend to the American slaveholding South to which Texas was annexed in 1845. This helps explains why during the American Civil War, all attempts to market Confederate bonds in London failed: no one would buy them. That Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, had been a vocal supporter of Texas debt repudiation in 1839 also explains British banks’ hesitancy.[xiii]
More generally, once again Drayton and Paul are not providing the full comparative context required. Far more British capital went to the American north than to the south at every stage of the nineteenth century. Investments in the northern states were so extensive that it was this, more than any other factor, that prevented British intervention in the American Civil War. Such an action would have been met with massive public and private debt repudiation in the Union. Britain’s investments in American industries and cities in the North were always greater than in the agricultural cotton economy of the South. ‘London [may have been] ‘the close partner of the expansion of the cotton south in the United States’ but it was always an even closerpartner to enterprises in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago. More capital flowed from Britain to the American North than to any other region of the world – including any single region of the British empire - in the 19th century.[xiv]
Schroder opened overseas branches in Rio de Janeiro (from 1840), New Orleans (1848), while in the 1860s it had 53 clients in Cuba and 19 in Puerto Rico. The explosion of sugar production and with it African enslavement in Cuba in the 1840s and 50s made that island a magnet for London merchant banks. In 1849 Alphonse de Rothschild wrote from Cuba, 'The sugar business here is a monopoly of the exporters Drake, Burnham, Picard and Albert, but they are not doing the most important or weighty business, this is being done by Baring, Coutts, Fruhling and Goschen in London, who are making all the profits from commission, credit and assignments'. A decade later Kleinwort and Cohen were the big players in the Cuban sugar trade, while on the eve of the American Civil War, their Liverpool subsidiary was central to the financial side of trade in American slave-grown cotton. Even a century after British slavery ended, Lever brothers in the 1920s and 30s was working its 2-million-acre concession in the Belgian Congo with forced labour.
Comment:
One advantage of not naming those being criticised is that it exempts Drayton and Paul from having to engage thoughtfully and in honest detail with what they actually say. Nigel Biggar is one who has retrieved from politically wilful oblivion the sustained and costly commitment of British imperial authorities to suppressing slave-trading and slavery worldwide after the abolition of the trade in its own territories in 1807. He has made his views known widely in the British press over several years and most fully in Chapter 2 of his book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which was published in 2023.[xv] Biggar is certainly known to Drayton, who, in 2019, devoted a whole book-chapter to criticising him, often in the form of misrepresentation, sometimes of unpleasantly personal insinuation.[xvi]
Among the things that Biggar says, and Drayton ignores, is the following. After the abolition of the slave-trade in 1807, the British government adopted a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide. One sign of this enduring commitment was the emergence in the Foreign Office of a separate Slave Trade Department from 1819, which was in fact the Office’s largest department in the 1820s and 1830s.[xvii] During the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 Britain used its diplomatic clout to try to secure support for a general abolition treaty between all the major European powers, but in vain. Before and after the congress, however, it did succeed in getting nearly all the states still involved in the Atlantic slave trade to agree in principle to end it – including Portugal, Spain, France, Brazil and the United States. However, none would consent to a reciprocal right of search of suspect shipping, which was required to give practical bite to the principle. Nevertheless, the British government persisted to such an extent that in 1842 the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, saw fit to describe anti-slavery diplomacy as a ‘new and vast branch of international relations’.[xviii]
In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. Up to ten ships of the Royal Navy were stationed off the coast of West Africa to disrupt the transatlantic export of slaves until 1833. At its mid-century height, the West Africa Squadron employed 36 ships and 13.1 per cent of the Royal Navy’s total manpower.[xix] From 1839 naval patrols extended south of the Equator, and in 1845 the Slave Trade Act authorised the Navy to treat as pirates Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, to arrest those responsible and to have them tried in British admiralty courts. In 1850 Navy ships began trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships, sometimes even entering its harbours and on one occasion exchanging fire with a fort. In September of that year Brazil yielded to the pressure, enacted legislation comprehensively outlawing the slave trade and began to enforce it rigorously. Shortly before his death in 1865 Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’.[xx]
Meanwhile, back in West Africa, the British employed a variety of means to achieve the same end. The thesis of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton – proposed in his 1839 book The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy[xxi] – that the key to ending the slave trade and slavery in Africa was to promote alternative, ‘legitimate’ commerce had found wide acceptance. This led to the setting up of trading posts, and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land.[xxii] The year after strong-arming Brazil, the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves. In 1861, when an attempt was made to revive the trade, they annexed Lagos as a colony.
On the other side of the continent the British brought persistent diplomatic pressure to bear upon the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which was the main port for the Great Lakes slave trade, but which also depended on the Royal Navy to protect its shipping from pirates in the Indian Ocean. Treaties were signed banning trade in slaves to the Americas in 1822 and to the more important Persian Gulf in 1845. In 1873 the sultan gave way when Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay and a resolute opponent of the East African slave trade, threatened a naval blockade unless the export of slaves from the African mainland ceased altogether and the slave market was shut down once and for all. Bit by bit the trade in slaves was throttled. The institution of domestic slavery, however, was tolerated until Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890. Between then and 1909 a series of measures gradually emancipated slaves, first of all granting them rights against maltreatment and of self-redemption, then adding a right to obtain freedom on application to the courts. Here, too, slave-owners were compensated for their loss, partly in recognition that domestic slavery was sanctioned by Islamic law, but also to minimise the economic disturbance and political opposition.[xxiii]
The humanitarian motive to suppress the slave trade and slavery remained a common reason for imperial endeavour in Africa from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. It caused the British government to lean upon the khedive of Egypt to sign the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention in 1877. It propelled General Charles Gordon into the Sudan in the same year. It found expression in the principles of the Imperial British East Africa Company, when it was founded in 1888. It featured among the reasons for establishing a British protectorate in Nyasaland in 1891. And it was one reason for the invasion of the Sokoto Caliphate (now northern Nigeria) by Frederick Lugard in 1903.
According to David Eltis, transatlantic suppression alone cost British taxpayers a minimum of £250,000 per annum – which equates to £1.367–1.74 billion, or 9.1–11.5 per cent of the UK’s expenditure on development aid, in 2019 – for half a century.[xxiv] The nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.[xxv]
Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape took a broader view. In addition to the costs of naval suppression, they considered the loss of business caused by abolition to British manufacturers, shippers, merchants and bankers who dealt with the West Indies. They also factored in the higher prices paid by British consumers for sugar, since duties were imposed to protect free-grown British sugar from competition by foreign producers who continued to benefit from unpaid slave labour. Overall, they ‘estimate the economic cost to British metropolitan society of the anti-slave trade effort at roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over sixty years from 1808 to 1867’.[xxvi] Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: in 2021 the UK spent 0.5 per cent of GDP on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807–67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.[xxvii]
It is, of course, lamentable that British businesses in the private sector should have continued to profit indirectly from persistent slavery in the Americas. But that should not be made to obscure—as Drayton makes it—the sustained and costly commitment of the British imperial state to slavery suppression worldwide for the second century-and-a-half of its life.
The history of the Anglican Church is entangled directly and indirectly with this national history across its span from the era of Archbishop Matthew Parker. Some of the entanglements such as the Codrington bequest and the provenance of Queen Anne's Bounty are well known. Nick Draper's The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (2010), and UCL's Legacies of British Slaveownership Project have much detail on clergy and laity who benefitted from wealth produced by enslaved labour and received compensation after 1838. There is much more to be uncovered, in particular in the history of dioceses such as Bristol and Bath and Wells, which had particularly strong connections to West Indian interests, but also, especially, in London. I conclude with a document which illustrates this complicity: Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London's Two Letters of the Lord Bishop of London: The First To the Masters and Mistresses in the English Plantations abroad, exhorting them to Encourage and Promote the Instruction of their Negroes in the Christian Faith (London, 1727). Gibson there pronounces, to the comfort of West Indian planters, and the merchants and slave traders who sat in his pews, that:
Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel, does not make the least alteration in Civil Property... but in all these Respects, it continues persons just in the same State as it found them (p. 27).
In 1660, the English in Barbados, in the first important Slave Law of the British Empire, were compelled to appeal to the idea that 'Negroes' were heathens. This is because one of the legacies of the extirpation of enslavement within Christendom in the late medieval period had been the idea that Christians could not enslave other Christians. But in 1727, Gibson is offering a theological negotiation around this problem in order to justify property in people.
It is difficult not to share the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury's view that this represented a most profound kind of blasphemy. Given that the Bishops in the House of Lords voted uniformly against the Emancipation Bill in 1833, it is unfortunately not possible to say that it was not typical of the conduct of the Church. It is against this background that Project Spire has its mission, and its necessity.
Comment:
When judging the behaviour of our ancestors, it behoves those privileged to live in the early 21st century to remember, with due humility, that the moral norms that we take for granted as common sense are in fact a legacy bequeathed us by previous generations that had to learn them for the first time. Activists can, perhaps, be forgiven for neglecting this by failing to exercise their historical imaginations; professional historians have no excuse.
It may perplex us to know that slavery was a universal institution, practised by every culture from the Pacific North-West, across Africa and India, to New Zealand, but it was so. So common was it that even the ‘maroons’ – runaway slaves who hid out in the forested interiors of Jamaica and elsewhere – kept slaves of their own in the 1700s. Mavis Campbell comments:
Now what is to be said of a people who fought their way successfully out of slavery, just to turn around and to commence slaving others? Without attempting a moralistic reply, we can only remind ourselves that in almost all known slave societies, from antiquity to modern, slaves have been known to keep slaves. Furthermore, in most slave revolts – Spartacus’s being the most outstanding – the rebels’ aim was invariably to reverse the system and not to overthrow slavery as such.[xxviii]
Four years after his own manumission at the age of 35, Toussaint Louverture, later the famous black leader of Haiti’s successful slave revolt, owned at least one slave and rented a coffee plantation with thirteen slaves for two years in 1779–81.[xxix]
Given this historical environment, it is not at all surprising that members of the Church of England were associated with slavery, even while it remains lamentable that some condoned its more brutal forms. What is remarkable is that, starting around the middle of the 1700s, a growing body of evangelical Anglicans—not least John Wesley and William Wilberforce—became convinced that the hitherto universal practices of slave-trading and slavery were abominable. They then went on to spearhead the movement that resulted in Britain becoming one of the first states in the history of the world to abolish both. In the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade Anglican clergy comprised the largest group of supporters after the Quakers.[xxx] Moreover, according to Roger Anstey, “[t]he record of the [Anglican] episcopal bench [in the House of Lords] … was in fact good”:[xxxi] “the bench of bishops voted virtually en bloc for abolition when the motion came on [on 23 March 1807]”.[xxxii]
Drayton and Paul contend in a final error that ‘the Bishops in the House of Lords voted uniformly against the Emancipation Bill in 1833’. In fact, the second and third readings in the Lords of that famous Bill on 12th and 20th August 1833 respectively, were not put to the vote at all: no bishop cast a vote against emancipation at the climax of the struggle for the freedom of the slaves because the Lords agreed the legislation without divisions.[xxxiii]
CONCLUSIONS
We have shown that the original advice to the Church of England about its investments in slavery was incorrect, confusing South Sea Annuities with South Sea Securities. The Church did not invest in 18th century slavery.
We have shown that attempts by Drayton and Paul to defend their research have ‘muddied the water’ by introducing irrelevant issues and crucially, by shifting the ground of the argument.
They have attempted to argue more recently that there was ‘reciprocity’ or leakage across the South Sea Company between annuities and securities, but cannot supply any proof of this. It is merely assertion.
In desperation they have resorted to an argument in which everyone in the 18th century was inevitably and inadvertently tainted by slavery. We have answered that if this is the case, no one is guilty and with a moral case to answer.
In a long detour Drayton and Paul have tried to argue that the profits of slavery underpinned the economic transformation of 18th century Britain. We have asked them to justify this with reference to the proceeds of wealth creation at home and trade with other regions of the world. If placed in this wider context we doubt that slavery was as important as they argue. Our case has been supported very recently by the authoritative new work of Professor David Eltis, the acknowledged academic leader in the field, who argues that European industrialisation would have occurred with or without the existence of slavery.
We end with a different point concerning the absence at any point in the work of Drayton and Paul of the mention of ordinary working people in 18th and 19th century Britain, except to hold them guilty of complicity with slavery in their consumption of sugar, tobacco and rum. In 1833 compensation payments were offered to 45,000 people who owned or profited from slaves. Many times more than this number – it runs to hundreds and hundreds of thousands - signed anti-slavery petitions from 1791 until 1833. Then hundreds of thousands more Britons signed petitions against slavery in the United States. Opposition to slavery was the first and greatest popular campaign in the nineteenth century, the model agitation for all the many different extra-parliamentary campaigns to come, and it swept up very many ordinary Britons. It was on their backs, and from their work, that Britain industrialised after the 1770s. They are counted in millions and they were the true progenitors of British economic transformation.
If the Church proceeds with Project Spire on the basis of research that has not only confused the primary investments made in the eighteenth century but which only mentions working people to make them fellow-travellers with slavery, it will have done a grave disservice to ordinary Britons both then and now. It will undoubtedly attract widespread public contempt for overlooking the remarkable contributions of the British working class in the building of modern Britain and in the ending of slavery, both - and it will have deserved it.
COMMENTATORS
Jonathan Baird
Nigel Biggar
Alka Cuthbert-Seghal
Richard Dale
Lawrence Goldman
Ian Paul
Tony Sewell
Robert Tombs
NOTES
[i] David Brion Davis, ‘Foreword’, in Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. xiv.
[ii] See “Reviews and endorsements” in https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/atlantic-history/atlantic-cataclysm-rethinking-atlantic-slave-trades?format=HB&isbn=9781009518970
[iii] David Eltis, Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), p.147.
[iv] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin, 2022), p. 99.
[v] Eltis, Atlantic Cataclysm, 147.
[vi] David Eltis, Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), p.147.
[vii] Ibid., pp. 145-7.
[viii] Ibid., p. 360.
[ix] Ibid., p. 150.
[x] Ibid., p. 360.
[xi] Ibid., p. 361.
[xii] Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: what the left gets wrong about ethnic minorities (London: Forum Press, 2023).
[xiii] Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy. Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005), 117-121.
[xiv] On the attractiveness of American securities to British bankers, see ibid., 23.
[xv] Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (London: William Collins, 2023, 2024).
[xvi] R.H. Drayton, “Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-first century
Conservative ideology”, in S. Ward, & A. Rasch, eds, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). For Biggar’sresponse, see “The Drayton Icon and Intellectual Vice”, Quillette, 27 August 2019: https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-drayton-icon-and-intellectual-vice/
[xvii] Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Slavery in Diplomacy: The Foreign Office and the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, History Note No. 17 (London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2007), Chapter 2, esp. pp. v, 29 and 46: https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_notes_cover_hphn_17
[xviii] Cited by Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III, ed. Porter, p. 211.
[xix] David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Table 2, pp. 92–3.
[xx] Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 360.
[xxi] Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (London: John Murray, 1839).
[xxii] Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 181, 185.
[xxiii] Basil S. Cave, ‘The End of Slavery in Zanzibar and British East Africa’, Journal of the Royal African Society, 9/33 (October 1909), pp. 20–33. Cave served as a British consul in British East Africa and Zanzibar, at rising grades, from 1891 to 1909. John Lonsdale appears to imply that, since the abolition of the legal status of slavery still left the freed slaves economically dependent on Arab landlords, it was of little account (‘East Africa’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols, Vol. IV: ‘The Twentieth Century’, eds Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, p. 533). That would be so, however, only if the granting of legal rights against maltreatment counted for nothing.
[xxiv] The lower figure of £1.367 billion was reached by the following method: (1) take an estimate of the average peacetime defence spending by Britain in the nineteenth century of 2.5 per cent of GDP (B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], p. 587); (2) assume that half of this (1.25 per cent) was directed at the Royal Navy (as both Professor Andrew Lambert of King’s College London and Dr Stephen Prince, head of the Naval Historical Branch at the Ministry of Defence, have recommended to me in personal correspondence); (3) apply 1.25 per cent to the UK’s 2019 GDP of £2,214 billion to reach a figure of £27,675,000,000, the equivalent total naval expenditure in 2019 values; (4) take the average percentage of naval manpower assigned to West Africa in the fifty-year period 1816–65 (4.94 per cent) as a proxy for the proportion of the Royal Navy’s resources committed to anti-slave-trade operations in the Atlantic (following Eltis in Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 91); (5) apply (4) to (3) to reach a figure of £1,367,145,000 for the expenditure on anti-slave-trade operations in the Atlantic in 2019 values.
The higher figure of £1.742 billion was reached by this method: (1) take the average annual expenditure of £7,512,000 on the Royal Navy during the fifty-year period of 1816–65 (Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, pp. 587–8); (2) take the average percentage of naval manpower assigned to West Africa in the same period (4.94 per cent) as a proxy for the proportion of the Royal Navy’s resources committed to anti-slave-trade operations in the Atlantic; (3) apply (2) to (1) to reach a figure of £371,093 as the average annual expenditure by the Royal Navy on suppressing the Atlantic slave trade; (4) enter the years 1816, 1826, 1836, 1846, 1856 and 1866 into the calculator on the MeasuringWorth.com website (https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/), and select the ‘project’ (for example, item of government expenditure) and ‘economic cost’ (per cent of GDP as an indicator of ‘the importance of the item to society as a whole’) options, to reach an average figure across those five years of £1,741,680,000 in 2019 values.
[xxv] Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, pp. 96, 97.
[xxvi] Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, ‘Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade’, International Organization, 53/4 (Autumn 1999), pp. 634–7, esp. 636.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 631.
[xxviii] Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796 (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvin, 1988), pp 198–9.
[xxix] Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (London: Allen Lane, 2020), pp 9, 30–1.
[xxx] Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 261-62.
[xxxi] Ibid., p. 393.n10.
[xxxii] Ibid., p. 393.
[xxxiii] Ministerial Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, House of Lords Debates, 12 Aug. 1833, 20 Aug. 1833, Hansard vol. 20, cc. 527, 784. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1833/aug/12/ministerial-plan-for-the-abolition-of; https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1833/aug/20/ministerial-plan-for-the-abolition-of
No mention of the contribution of Hannah More. She was a very passionate anti slavery advocate and campaigner and suffered at the hands of the Church of England.
This is the same argument that Australian activists in my country seem determined to keep aborigines as victims. We spend vast amounts of money on them but it never enough.
As people today we are not responsible for the sins of our ancestors. Different time,different circumstances.
The church if England would be better served if it cleaned up its own house and stopped worrying about the past. Preach the gospel, pray and teach the Bible. Just like the Clapham group would have advocated. Especially Hannah More.
There is still slavery going on in Arab countries to this day.
Thank you for letting us read these very persuasive arguments against reparations for past sins.