Whenever my late wife Nancy would give a talk on her 2023 book Defeating Slavery<\/a>, someone in the audience would invariably ask a question such as: \u201cWell, weren\u2019t the British ahead of the United States in abolishing slavery?\u201d or \u201cWeren\u2019t the British more progressive than us when it came to opposing slavery?\u201d<\/p>\n Those type of questions were, unwittingly, the product of a carefully cultivated image \u2013 especially by promoters and publicists of the Royal Family \u2014 that the Monarchy and the British in general were almost mere bystanders in the slave trade, abolitionists at heart, who got rid of that horrid institution as soon as they could possibly do so.<\/p>\n This myth of the benign, passive British monarchy is blown to pieces by a new book, The Crown\u2019s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas,<\/em> written by Dr. Brooke Newman, a Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London.[i]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The liner notes for the book\u2019s cover set the stage very succinctly:<\/p>\n For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist nation, one that, unlike the United States, rejected human bondage and dismantled its Atlantic slave empire without tearing itself apart in violence.\u00a0 An abolitionist nation headed by a just, humane monarch who liberated enslaved Africans and recognized their descendants as free and equal subjects of the British Crown. As Prince Willam put it recently, \u201cWe\u2019re very much not a racist family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This is the myth that Dr. Newman dismantles, receipt by receipt, royal charter by royal charter. While then-Prince Charles claimed in 2023 to have opened the Royal Archives to make slavery records more accessible, Newman points out that this did not involve any new release of records.\u00a0 The record of the Crown\u2019s sponsorship and investment in the slave trade is not to be found in one set of archives, but is widely dispersed, fragmented, and deliberately designed to obscure the truth by \u201ccommodifying\u201d enslaved human beings.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Ellizabeth I: The Beginnings<\/strong><\/p>\n Newman takes this sordid story back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the mid-16th century, when British traders attempted to break into the Spanish and Portuguese near monopoly of the slave trade. In 1563, John Hawkins, a Plymouth-based merchant-adventurer, had kidnapped Africans from Portuguese slaving ships, and taken them across the Atlantic to be sold in the Spanish Caribbean. When Hawkins returned to England with his ships\u2019 holds bursting with gold, jewelry, sugar, and other commodities, cash-strapped Elizabeth immediately understood the potential, and eagerly provided one of her largest warships in return for a share of the profits of his next slaving venture.\u00a0 His second trip was wildly successful, with Elizabeth and other investors reaping an estimated 60% return on their investment.\u00a0 As Newman puts it, Queen Elizabeth thus secured her legacy as the first English monarch \u2013 but certainly not the last \u2013 to profit directly from the transatlantic slave trade.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Stuarts Expand the Slave Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n The next significant expansion of transatlantic trade, and with it, the slave trade, is under the Stuarts. The English established a series of plantation colonies in the Caribbean in the early 17th century, and the planters, facing a shortage of indentured servants, quickly realized that enslaved Africans could be the solution to their labor shortage.<\/p>\n King James I, who had granted a monopoly to the Guinea Company is 1618, died in 1625, leaving a substantial Crown indebtedness to his successor, Charles I.\u00a0 Charles tried to handle this debt with revenue from Virginia tobacco and other crops which were raised in the Caribbean. Despite complaints from traders and merchants, Charles granted a 31-year monopoly to the Guinea Company in 1631.\u00a0 The first English colony to engage in the widespread use of slave labor was, ironically, the Puritan-founded colony of Providence off the coast of Nicaragua.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Cromwell\u2019s \u201cWestern Design\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The Commonwealth period did not represent any pulling-back from England\u2019s imperial aspirations. On the contrary, Oliver Cromwell played a critical role in the expanded use of England\u2019s naval power to undergird an enlarged slave-labor empire in the Americas; this was known as Cromwell\u2019s \u201cWestern Design\u201d to challenge Spain\u2019s colonial empire. The royal-chartered Guinea Company was re-oriented toward the slave trade from its previous concentration on gold and precious commodities.\u00a0 One of the Commonwealth\u2019s \u201ccrowning\u201d achievements was bringing Jamaica under English control.\u00a0 Jamaica\u2019s eventual success in sugar production, along with the rise of Barbados, says Dr. Newman, \u201ctransformed the English Crown\u2019s Atlantic Empire into a slave empire.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Stuart Restoration Invests in the Slave Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n When Charles II succeeded to the throne in 1660 in the Stuart Restoration, he inherited enormous Crown debts accumulated by his late father, Charles I, and he embraced the imperial expansionism undertaken by Cromwell and the Commonwealth.\u00a0 Newman says the Restoration marked a decisive, aggressive shift into the monarchy\u2019s direct financial and institutional investment into the slave trade and slave labor.<\/p>\n The restored King almost immediately granted exclusive trading rights on the West African coast to the aptly named Company of Royal Adventurers, a joint-stock company whose investors included a virtual \u201cWho\u2019s Who\u201d of the Royal Family and its courtiers. Although the company\u2019s charter was silent on the subject, secret instructions to the company from the King\u2019s brother James (the Duke of York, and the Lord High Admiral) included trafficking in enslaved Africans; the slaves were to be sold to Spanish and Portuguese planters in Africa or Europe. But the slave trafficking quickly became trans-Atlantic, with the Royal Adventurers transporting large numbers of slaves to Jamaica and Barbados.<\/p>\n When the Royal Adventurers company was rechartered in 1663, its charter was explicit in giving the company exclusive rights \u2013 a royal monopoly \u2014 over the \u201cbuying and selling bartering and exchanging of for and with any Negro Slaves Goods wares and Merchandize whatsoever.\u201d\u00a0 The monopoly was to be enforced by the Royal Navy.\u00a0 Half of the proceeds of any seizures \u2013 including slaves \u2013 was to go to the King, and the other half to the company\u2019s subscribers or shareholders. James was appointed Governor of the Company.<\/p>\n The Company provided enslaved Africans to both English colonies in the Caribbean, and, by contract, 3000 Africans a year to the Spanish colonies.<\/p>\n The Royal African Company Takes over the Slave Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1671, the Company of Royal Adventurers was reorganized, and the next year it was chartered as the Royal African Company (RAC).\u00a0 The RAC was granted exclusive control of all trade in African commodities (including \u201cNegro Slaves\u201d) for the modest term of one thousand years. The RAC was given state-like powers and privileges, including the power to declare war against any of the \u201cheathen nations\u201d along the African coast, and the power to erect Admiralty courts.<\/p>\n For a time, the Royal African Company dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade.\u00a0 In the first decade of its existence, its share of the trade jumped from 33 percent to 74 percent. In fact, during the entire period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to an historian quoted by Dr. Newman, the RAC \u201cshipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution.\u201d<\/p>\n During the reigns of Charles II and James II (1672 to 1688), the RAC is estimated to have shipped 100,000 slaves to the Americas, the vast majority to the English Caribbean colonies. Approximately 76,000 survived the passage. By the early 1720s, the RAC had transported more than 150,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n The proceeds and profits flowed directly to the Royal Family, especially to James, first as the Duke of York, and then as James II. To emphasize the point, the Duke\u2019s initials, \u201cDY\u201d were branded onto the bodies of hundreds of slaves, including children, who were owned directly by the RAC and held at the company\u2019s headquarters as \u201cCastle Slaves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201cGlorious Revolution:\u201d A Glorious Expansion of Slave Labor <\/strong><\/p>\n When James took the throne in 1685, he was immediately made Governor of the RAC, and he intensified enforcement of the royal monopoly, including through the royal colonial Governors and the Royal Navy.\u00a0 But, ostensibly for religious reasons (James had converted to Roman Catholicism), he was deposed in 1688 and forced into exile, and the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange, was invited to assume the English Crown. But within two weeks of James\u2019 flight \u2013 even before William was offered the throne \u2013 the RAC made William Governor and gave him \u00a31000 of RAC stock.<\/p>\n As Dr. Newman puts it: \u00a0weeks before Parliament declared William and his wife Mary joint sovereigns, \u201cWilliam became the public face of the monopoly slave-trading company the Stuarts had long championed.\u201d<\/p>\n Within a short time of Wiliam and Mary assuming the throne, the long-simmering dispute over the RAC\u2019s slave-trade monopoly came to a head \u2013 one of the early \u201cfree trade\u201d battles.\u00a0 The Chesapeake planters (i.e., Virginia and Maryland) had been complaining for years that the RAC monopoly was hindering the growth of the slave economy, by unduly increasing the price of enslaved labor.\u00a0 Free trade, they argued, would be much more efficient in lowering their costs by cheapening the cost of enslaved labor.\u00a0 And by increasing their plantations\u2019 productivity, free trade would increase the flow of revenue into the royal coffers.<\/p>\n Slave owners in the Caribbean agreed with the Chesapeake enslavers, that free trade in Africans would solve their pressing labor shortages.<\/p>\n In 1698, after investigations and hearings by the House of Commons and the Board of Trade, Parliament ended the RAC monopoly by allowing others of the King\u2019s subjects to traffick and trade in slaves.<\/p>\n But by this time, there had already been a huge increase in the slave economy in the Caribbean as well as the Chesapeake, along with a corresponding increase in customs revenue to the Crown.<\/p>\n And, it is worth noting, by the year 1700 the number of enslaved laborers in the Chesapeake regions had quadrupled from its level 20 years earlier. However, this was dwarfed by the increase that took place in the Caribbean colonies, where there were six times as many Africans in bondage as in all of mainland North America.<\/p>\n No matter who the monarch was \u2013 Tudor, Stuart, Dutch, Danish, or German \u2014 the slave trade continued to enrich the institution of the monarchy. In 1702, William had died without heirs, and under the 1701 Act of Settlement, the crown passed to Princess Anne of Denmark.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Queen Anne: The Asiento and the South Sea Company<\/strong><\/p>\n William\u2019s RAC shares passed to now-Queen Anne, and the RAC immediately invited Anne\u2019s consort, Prince Frederick of Denmark (also Lord High Admiral) to become RAC Governor. At the RAC\u2019s request, Anne and Frederick repeatedly provided Royal Navy forces to protect RAC slave ships along the African coast and in the Caribbean.\u00a0 Despite their support, the RAC could not meet the demand for enslaved labor, again calling its role into question.\u00a0\u00a0 The RAC petitioned Anne for an end to open trade; she referred the petition to the Board of Trade.\u00a0 The Board\u2019s inquiry found that free trade had dramatically increased the supply of slaves to the colonies, which the monopoly had failed to do.\u00a0 In 1712, the 1698 act was allowed to expire, and the RAC lost most of its share of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.<\/p>\n Queen Anne\u2019s priority, in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession, was to restore the international balance of trade, and to gain access to the slave market in Spain\u2019s colonies in the Americas. In treaty negotiations, Britain won the asiento de negros<\/em> \u2013 the contract to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies. Anne and British negotiators also argued that this would assist Britain in paying its war debts.\u00a0 The asiento contract obligated the British to supply 4,800 healthy adult male Africans per year to Spanish America.<\/p>\n Queen Anne assigned the asiento contract to the South Sea Company (SSC), recently created by Parliament to deal with Britain\u2019s huge national debt; owners of government debt were encouraged to swap their debt holdings for SSC shares, which could be traded on the London Stock Exchange.\u00a0 The fact that the SSC had the monopoly on the slave trade with Spanish America was a big boost to public subscription to SSC stock. The SSC\u2019s success was premised on the assumption that the SSC\u2019s right to supply slave labor to the Spanish colonies would itself bring great riches to the SSC and Britain.<\/p>\n Queen Anne, one of the SSC\u2019s largest shareholders, touted her relationship to the company to bring in public support.\u00a0 With the SSC directors lacking experience in Caribbean and African commerce and in the slave trade, they turned to what was left of the Royal Africa Company to help meet the requirements for delivery of the 4,800 enslaved Africans. But delays and internal disputes within the SSC over the allocation of profits jeopardized fulfillment of the contract.\u00a0 When Anne died in 1714, the whole enterprise seemed in danger. The SSC directors appealed to the Lord Justices for a reallocation of profits so that more was retained by the company.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n George I and the South Sea Company<\/strong><\/p>\n The new Hanoverian King, George I, immediately proved to be an enthusiastic backer of the SSC, including providing naval support, and displayed great optimism for the future of the slave trade to Spanish America. His eldest son George, now the Prince of Wales, requested SSC shares, and became its Governor.\u00a0 Documents survive to this day which demonstrate the extensive links between George I, George II, and the slave-trading South Sea Company.<\/p>\n Despite their efforts, the SSC fell short of meeting its quota under the asiento. Between 1714 and 1718, the SSC shipped 13,102 enslaved African to Spanish America \u2013 of which only 10,521 survived the trans-Atlantic journey. This fell well short of the 19,200 healthy enslaved Africans the SSC was obliged to supply.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the contraband slave trade flourished, among Jamaican smugglers and others, and this cut into the SSC\u2019s efforts. To attempt to stem this \u201cillegal\u201d trade, SSC directors ordered their agents to brand African men, women, and children with the SSC company mark (see illustration). These royal symbols encouraged people to buy shares, i.e. \u201cinvest,\u201d in the South Sea Company.<\/p>\n A Bubble Floating on the Slave Trade\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n With the King and the Prince of Wales ostentatiously pouring investments into the SSC, the public eagerly snapped up SSC shares, driving up their price.\u00a0 But in August 1720, share prices began to drop sharply; between August 17 and Sept. 28, SSC shares fell from \u00a31000 to \u00a3190, bankrupting many who had borrowed money to buy SSC stock.<\/p>\n In her recent talk at the Library of Virginia, Dr. Newman emphasized that the SSC \u201cwas not just a Ponzi scheme, even though that\u2019s typically how we think about it now.\u201d<\/p>\n She reported that the company had transported a total of about 43,000 Africans to the Americas. In her book, she notes the importance of the monarchy-sponsored slave trade in providing revenues used to increase the government\u2019s surplus, and for building up the military capacity undergirding the rise of the British Empire.<\/p>\n George II and the \u201cKing\u2019s Negroes\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n When the Prince of Wales succeeded to the throne in 1727, he was already deeply immersed in the SSC and the slave trade, and it was a simple matter for him to continue as Governor of the SSC. George II became the first British monarch to directly buy and own slaves, when his Royal Navy began to purchase \u201cseasoned Negroes, boys and men,\u201d to labor in the naval shipyards in Jamaica. These men and boys, and later women and girls, became known as the \u201cKing\u2019s Negroes.\u201d<\/p>\n It was during the reign of George II that Britain came to dominate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, surpassing Portugal.<\/p>\n As Dr. Newman puts it, \u201cBritain\u2019s eighteenth-century empire was a slave empire and the Caribbean colonies its linchpin.\u201d\u00a0 Slave-produced sugar became the most important commodity in Britain\u2019s world trade, and taxes on sugar imports grew into the largest single source of revenue to the Crown.<\/p>\n In the first half of the 18th century alone, British ships took 975,000 captives from African shores, of which 167,000 died during the Atlantic crossing. Most of the survivors landed in the Caribbean slave colonies, primarily Jamaica and Barbados; others were taken to Britain\u2019s North American colonies and sold there.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n French expansion in the Caribbean and North America threatened all this, and the British public favored an aggressive policy toward France, leading to the outbreak of war in 1756 (known as the Seven Years War in Europe, and as the French and Indian War in North America).<\/p>\n George III: The Empire fractures<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1760, George III inherited the British slave empire as well as the global war that was launched to defend it.<\/p>\n As a teenaged Prince of Wales, George had expressed reservations about slavery, but as King, he cast whatever compunctions he had aside, and quickly came to regard slavery as a necessary evil.\u00a0 Newman says he went further, utilizing enslaved people for his benefit. He attempted to consolidate the British territorial gains during the war, by using slave labor to transform these new colonial territories into profitable agricultural colonies using the model of Jamaica.<\/p>\n An example of how aggressively King George III pursued this policy is Cuba. In 1762, Spanish Havana fell to the British. At the end of the war, Cuba was returned to Spain as part of a deal in which Spain ceded all of Spanish Florida east of the Mississippi to Britain.<\/p>\n But meanwhile, in the just ten months during which Britain occupied Cuba, its enslaved population increased by 80 percent!\u00a0 This was accompanied by a rapid growth of Cuba\u2019s emerging sugar industry, based on slave labor. The legacy, historians have noted, was a lasting one.<\/p>\n Dr. Newman points to something that Nancy Spannaus stressed in her Defeating Slavery<\/em> book \u2013- that the Crown repeatedly rejected, and vetoed, efforts by Virginia and other colonies to regulate and curtail the slave trade. This was one of the major grievances cited by American patriots during the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence.\u00a0 And what angered the colonists even more, was that the same monarch who had perpetuated the slave trade was now encouraging those slaves to rise up against the Americans in support of the King \u2013 Virginia\u2019s weakened and desperate Governor Dunmore being a prime example of this.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n British \u201cAbolition:\u201d Slavery by Another Name<\/strong><\/p>\n After the Revolutionary War in America, a strong and articulate movement for the abolition of slavery took hold in England, led in part by two former enslaved men. But the monarchy dug in its heels in opposition, with one of the royals, William, the Duke of Clarence, being particularly outspoken in the House of Lords against abolition and in support of enslavers. The sole exception to the Royal Family\u2019s rock-solid unanimity on the subject of slavery and the slave trade was cousin Frederick William, the Duke of Gloucester, who sided with the abolitionists. King George III privately saw his own priority as defending and expanding the British Empire, which he saw as threatened by an end to slavery. In public, he of course stayed above the fray, as required by his position.<\/p>\n In 1807, over Royal opposition, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.\u00a0 While prohibiting British ships from carrying out the slave trade as of January 1, 1808, Brooke Newman points out, \u201cthis made little impact on the lives of the seven hundred thousand individuals who remained enslaved in the Caribbean.\u201d<\/p>\n The pro-abolition Duke of Gloucester was quickly recruited to the \u201cAfrican Institution,\u201d a group formed by William Wilberforce and other abolitionists to bring \u201ccivilization and improvement\u201d to Africa. But this actually meant (in Dr. Newman\u2019s words), \u201cthe imposition of British norms and economic ambitions\u201d upon Africa, which the Institution regarded as \u201csunk in ignorance and barbarism.\u201d\u00a0 They also held the view that if Africans rejected the Institution\u2019s civilizing mission, this would itself prove the necessity and worthiness of British intervention.<\/p>\n The Africa Institution saw as one of its highest priorities, ensuring the enforcement of the Abolition Act.\u00a0 What did this mean?<\/p>\n The Abolition Act declared slave ships and their cargo contraband, eligible for capture and seizure.\u00a0 To reduce its own expenses and to enforce the law, the Crown \u201cincentivized\u201d anti-slave-trade activities, by demanding the conscription of Africans freed from slave ships into indentured servitude, involuntary apprenticeships, or military service. \u201cLiberation\u201d was no such thing.<\/p>\n African men, women, and children who were seized from slave ships by the Royal Navy were, in legal terms, \u201ccondemned as prize of war, or as forfeited, to the sole use of his Majesty, his heirs, and successors\u201d \u2014 as stated in official Colonial Office documents.<\/p>\n And, to further \u201cincentivize\u201d such practices, British military officers were awarded financial rewards for each man (\u00a340), woman (\u00a330), and child under age 14 (\u00a310), who were captured and handed over to colonial authorities.<\/p>\n In other words, Africans \u201cliberated\u201d from slavery lost any freedom of choice and action, for the rest of their lives. As Dr. Newman puts it, \u201cthis was essentially slavery by another name.\u201d<\/p>\n The same practice was enshrined in the 1833 Emancipation Act, to which King William IV gave his assent, after Parliament passed the bill under enormous public pressure.<\/p>\n The Emancipation Act supposedly abolished slavery in the British Empire. But, as with the earlier Abolition Act, the bill simply established a new form of bondage in the Caribbean colonies, in order to preserve the plantation system.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a320 million in compensation was paid to slave owners out of the public treasury \u2013 what one might call \u201creparations for the enslavers\u201d \u2014 while \u201cfreed\u201d slaves got nothing.\u00a0 And worse, they were apprenticed to their former enslavers for four to six years; the apprenticeship system meant working up to 45 hours per week without pay.\u00a0 Infractions by \u201cformer\u201d slaves would result in floggings, whipping, and hard labor in workhouses or penal gangs.\u00a0 They remained destitute and propertyless. (There were obvious parallels to what happened with emancipated blacks in the defeated Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction.)<\/p>\n (British taxpayers \u2013 not the monarchy \u2013 remained on the hook for at least 175 years for the loans that the British government took out to fund the \u00a320 million compensation paid to enslavers. Taxpayers didn\u2019t finish paying off these loans \u2013 worth billions in today\u2019s money \u2014 until 2015.)<\/p>\n Victorian \u201cSpin Doctors\u201d Reinvent the Monarchy<\/strong><\/p>\n William IV died in 1837, and was succeeded by the 18-year -old Queen Victoria.\u00a0 Believing Victoria to be more sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause, hundreds of thousands of women signed petitions to the new Queen calling for an end to the apprentice system and full emancipation. And colonial legislatures, hoping to avoid further Parliamentary intervention in their affairs, resolved to terminate all apprenticeship programs on August 1, 1838 \u2014 the date when a partial end to the system had been mandated under the 1833 legislation.<\/p>\n Once, again, the supposed end of slavery simply gave rise to slavery by another name. As Dr. Newman portrays it, to meet the Empire\u2019s labor needs in its overseas colonies, the British government shifted to other schemes for immigration to the colonies, such as importing convict labor and indentured laborers from India and China.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n The cultivation of the image of Great Britain as an enlightened liberal power, leading the charge against slavery world-wide while bringing civilization to the darker races, had been promoted by the abolitionists for many years, but in 1840 the monarchy stepped forward to lead this reframing effort.<\/p>\n That was when Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who had just recently married Queen Victoria, addressed a cheering throng at a public meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa \u2013- otherwise known as the \u201cAfrica Civilization Society.\u201d\u00a0 Prince Albert had just been appointed as its president.<\/p>\n As has been the Royal Family\u2019s \u201cparty line\u201d ever since, Albert presented the world\u2019s biggest slave trader as in fact leading the campaign to abolish slavery.\u00a0 Albert told the enraptured crowd that \u201cI deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings \u2026 have not yet led to any satisfactory conclusion.\u201d\u00a0 He promised that Britain would not rest until abolition was accomplished, under the leadership of Queen Victoria and her government.<\/p>\n Dr. Newman, in her book and in public appearances, emphasized that neither the Royal Family, nor its various governments, despite all the statements of \u201cregret\u201d and \u201csorrow,\u201d have ever actually apologized for their role, nor have they taken responsibility for their centuries of sponsorship and financing of the slave trade. Instead, they have deliberately twisted and erased true history, to portray themselves as the leaders in overthrowing that which, in reality, they sponsored and perpetuated.<\/p>\n As valuable as Dr. Newman\u2019s research is, there is another aspect which she does not discuss in the book \u2014 the extent to which the Royal Family\u2019s enormous fortune today is a product of its investment and protection of slave labor and the slave trade. In a 2023 series entitled \u201cCost of the Crown,\u201d the London Guardian<\/em> published the results of an extensive investigation into the Royal Family\u2019s wealth, which apparently did explore this question, with Dr. Newman\u2019s help.\u00a0 We will report on the Guardian\u2019s<\/em> findings in a future posting on this blog.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, I can say with confidence, that my wife Nancy would have been delighted with Dr. Newman\u2019s exposure and destruction of the myth of the progressive, \u201cabolitionist\u201d British monarchy. While Nancy had summarized some of this history, including the Royal Africa Company, in her Defeating Slavery<\/em> book,[iv]<\/a> \u00a0Dr. Newman\u2019s extensive research and documentation of the Royal Family\u2019s direct role would have been of great interest to her.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (Updated July 11, 2026)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Brooke M. Newman, The Crown\u2019s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas<\/em> (New York and Boston: Mariner Books, 2026). 441 pages.<\/p>\n In this review, I have also utilized videos of two book talks given by Dr. Newman:\u00a0 One at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture<\/a> on April 28, 2026, and a second at the Library of Virginia<\/a>, presented on June 4, 2026.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> Less than 5% of the total of 12.5 million slaves estimated to have been transported across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1867 came to North America, according to John W. Franklin of the Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 Quoted in Nancy Spannaus, Defeating Slavery<\/em>, p. 13.<\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> The 1833 law officially banning slavery in the British Empire provided an exemption for British East India Company territories. \u00a0Although officially, slavery in India was to end ten years later, in 1843, holding a slave did not become a criminal offense until 1861.\u00a0 Cited in Spannaus, Defeating Slavery<\/em>, p. 19.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> See Chapter 1 of Defeating Slavery<\/em>, pp. 13-21.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Tags:<\/strong> abolition<\/a>, Africa<\/a>, British Empire<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whenever my late wife Nancy would give a talk on her 2023 book Defeating Slavery, someone in the audience would invariably ask a question such as: \u201cWell, weren\u2019t the British ahead of the United States in abolishing slavery?\u201d or \u201cWeren\u2019t the British more progressive than us when it came to opposing slavery?\u201d Those type of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":363928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[73454,18865,4373,1840,44509,29229,46210,18562],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-363927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-abolition","tag-abolitionist","tag-africa","tag-british","tag-british-empire","tag-busting","tag-monarchy","tag-myth"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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