[ad_1]
Though slavery ended in the 1800s in the UK, tens of thousands of slave owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves and plantations.
By Sarah Taaffe-Maguire, Business reporter @taaffems
The monarchy is just the latest UK institution to start the process of reckoning with the slavery in its past.
While it may be the highest profile body to do so it’s not the first and it won’t be the last to examine how it may have benefited from or facilitated the capture and holding of humans as property.
Across the UK organisations in numerous sectors and industries have begun the journey of examining their links to slavery. Some are trying to atone for how their present day institution has benefitted from the transatlantic slave trade.
Charles’ ‘personal sorrow’ at slavery
Media
It was in the pages of The Guardian that we learned of the King‘s signals of support for research into the British monarchy’s historical links with transatlantic slavery.
That same paper just last month apologised tor the role its founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced plans to invest more than £10m in the communities descended from slaves.
The trust which owns The Guardian commissioned a report into historical connections between the newspaper and the slave trade. It found the paper’s founder and numerous backers were linked to slavery through partnerships with companies that imported cotton from produced by slaves in the Americas.
Finance and banking
Large-scale research projects have made it easier for organisations and individuals to connect themselves to the slave trade that ran from the 16th to 19th centuries.
A scan of the lists of names, organisations and locations published by UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery throws up few household names.
A notable exception is Lloyd’s Bank.
A claimant of the organisation set up in 1834 to compensate slave owners for their slaves being freed, the Slave Compensation Commission, was involved in the history of the lender. Charles Haden Adams was one of the 66 people who formed the committee to set up the bank when it changed from a private to a public company in 1865.
The Lloyd’s Bank website also details the banks and businesses Lloyd’s acquired through its more than 250-year history which were connected to and benefited from the slave trade.
Another Lloyd’s, this one Lloyds’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market place, went one further.
Along with detailing how the firm insured the shipping industry that transported captured people and the goods they were forced to create, Lloyd’s of London acknowledged the modern day impact of slavery.
Slavery “continues to have a negative impact on black and minority ethnic communities today”, it said. It went so far as to apologise for its role but has not paid compensation or reparations to those they say are currently impacted by the wrongs.
Lloyd’s weren’t the only City of London situated institution to have apologised.
Read more:
King backs review into Royal Family’s historical links to slavery
Regulators
While the Bank of England was only nationalised in 1946 and didn’t gain operational dependence over monetary policy until in 1998, it was alive and kicking in the 1700s when it began issuing bank notes.
And as with many organisations operating in the City of London from the 1500s to 1800s the central bank is linked with slavery.
It was the Bank of England itself that administered the payment of slavery compensation on behalf of the British government.
Through looking at transaction data from the period when slavery compensation payments were made, staff at the Bank found “further evidence for the strong links between financial institutions in the City of London, the capital generated through the transatlantic slavery economy, and the compensation process during the 1830s”.
It has already apologised in the summer of 2020 as protests took place across the world following the police murder of George Floyd in the US.
Conservation
The legacy of slavery is felt outside the City and across the UK.
Some of the wealth that created many stately homes and beautiful sites in the National Trust’s charge came from the spoils of owning other humans.
That legacy is being examined by the body of protected sites. But despite the National Trust having published an interim report into colonialism and historic slavery and having said it would “uncover, research and tell the histories of slavery and colonialism”, and “open up debates that further our collective understanding”, no apology has been made. Nor has compensation been paid.
Hospitality
Another of the 47,000 people to have been paid for the loss of his slaves was Benjamin Greene, founder in the 1800s of Greene King, the modern day brewery and pub chain. Mr Greene received nearly £500,000 in today’s money when he surrendered rights to three plantations in the West Indies and argued against abolition.
The chain apologised in 2020 and in 2021 said it would rename pubs that had potentially offensive titles.
In February last year The Black Boy in Bury St Edmunds was renamed the Westgate, and the Blacks Head in Derbyshire was renamed The Quarryman.
[ad_2]
Source link