There is a British culture of celebrating the abolition of slavery without acknowledging that the country enslaved and trafficked millions of African people for centuries. The newly published Register of British Slave Traders, which documents the thousands of investors in Britain’s near 250-year trafficking of more than 3 million enslaved African people, shows that it was a state-backed operation, fully supported by both major political parties at the time, the Tories and Whigs – the forerunners of today’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively. Many Tory and Whig MPs were investors in the slave trade, the register shows, and many also owned plantations.
But when the movement to abolish the slave trade and enslavement grew in the late 18th century, the Whigs generally moved towards supporting abolition, while Tory governments opposed and delayed it for decades. The Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, said in response to the Guardian’s reporting of this history that he supported “full transparency” and it was “vital that we face up to the full truth of Britain’s history”. The Conservative party referred the Guardian to a post on X by its leader, Kemi Badenoch, in March, in response to a UN declaration that the historic enslavement and trafficking of African people was “the gravest crime against humanity” and reparations should be discussed.
Most invested in Britain’s state-backed Royal African Company (RAC) and its predecessors, and some were involved in the South Sea Company. The involvement of Tories in the RAC was rooted in the foundation of the party. The original Tory faction formed during the 1679 exclusion crisis, in support of the then Duke of York being crowned King James II.
Their opponents, the Whigs, sought to prevent James’s succession. James became king and led the RAC, which trafficked more enslaved people – at least 150,000 African men, women and children – than any other organisation in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Many Tories who supported James also invested in the RAC.
Prof William Pettigrew, the lead historian of the register, said: “This platform of support for the Duke of York became the Tory party. Support for the duke’s slave-trading project, the Royal African Company, provided a further rallying point for these early Tories, while early Whigs were opposed to it. Disagreements about the best way to expand the nation’s slave trade were present at the birth of our political parties.” The Whigs’ opposition was not to enslaving African people, but to the RAC’s royal monopoly.
Many Whigs lobbied to expand the slave trade by opening the trafficking to independent “separate traders”. Sir Benjamin Bathurst, one of many prominent Tories in the register, illustrates the elite status of the RAC investors. He was a friend of King James and Queen Anne, and the Tory MP for New Romney, Kent.
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