Nearly 250 years after the abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano made the Christian case for reparative justice, the archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, visited the Ghanaian shore where he was enslaved as a boy. After witnessing the dungeons beneath the chapel at Cape Coast Castle, once run by the Royal African Company (RAC), Mullally recommitted the Church of England to its “journey of repentance” for its role in slavery. Back in Britain, historians working on the newly digitised Register of British Slave Traders were uncovering evidence that C of E clergy financed the RAC, which trafficked more African men, women and children than any other single organisation in the history of the slave trade.
The register, which documents investors in Britain’s nearly 250-year transatlantic slave trade, includes 45 C of E clergymen, whose investments helped fund hundreds of slaving voyages and a 1720 relaunch of the RAC. Among them was Henry Brydges, later a canon at St Paul’s Cathedral, who bought half of his £10,000 shareholding on the day he became the Archdeacon of Rochester. Prof William Pettigrew, who led the project, said the register showed a “truly national picture”.
Profits from enslavement filtered down to communities “from Cumbria to the Cotswolds” through bequests to parishes – evidence of a history of the C of E “giving slavery its blessing” and raising fresh questions about whether the church is doing enough to atone. In 2023, church commissioners – the C of E’s asset managers – launched Project Spire, a £100m impact investment fund for communities affected by slavery’s legacies, which has caused division within the church. It is not a reparations fund, but is central to the church’s determination to be a force for justice and healing in the world.
It was launched nearly 20 years after Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, rejected the idea that today’s church bears no responsibility for the past. However, Spire mainly responds to historic investments in the South Sea Company, which trafficked close to 45,000 enslaved Africans. That represents a “sliver of church complicity”, said Prof Alan Lester, a historical geographer at the University of Sussex.
That complicity helped shape modern Britain, Lester said. Plantation profits helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, railways, public health, welfare, universities, schools, church building and the public finances. For the Rev Natasha Beckles, the dean of racial justice for Willesden, reckoning with this past goes to the heart of Christian faith.
There has to be an understanding of the impact on the world.” Dr Leona Vaughn of the University of Liverpool, a co-organiser of a 2025 Anglican “truth-telling” event, said: “The public and people within the church don’t even know the extent of the church’s involvement. The history of the United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), the C of E’s 325-year-old missionary partner, shows how powerful Anglicans practised and perpetuated transatlantic chattel slavery – a uniquely racialised, violent system of human commodification and forced mass migration. Today, members of USPG – of which Mullally is president – have committed to “the gospel’s call to break every chain of injustice”.
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