Register of British Slave Traders shows clergymen financed company that trafficked enslaved Africans on hundreds of voyages 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. Continue reading...

Study finds earlier numbers were underestimated, suggesting impact of diseases and massacres were much greater than previously thought Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia before colonisation was dramatically underestimated, according to new research that suggests many more of them were killed. Modelling by a national research group puts the population levels before the 1788 first fleet arrived at 2.2 million, compared with early estimates of 250,000 people. Continue reading...

Tory and Whig MPs were central to funding trafficking of enslaved people and many opposed abolition of the slave trade 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. Continue reading...

Barts is one of many UK institutions whose benefactors were involved in the trafficking of enslaved Africans Inside the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s North Wing, alongside stately portraits of the apostle from whom London’s oldest hospital takes its name and King Henry VIII, extravagant commemorative boards adorn the walls. The Great Hall was a grand, formal space where governors weighed their philanthropic donations and drafted their wills, many while investing in the stock of companies built on the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Today, many of those donors are commemorated in acrylic gold paint on the boards. Continue reading...

Exclusive: New research identifies thousands who profited from trafficking enslaved Africans and traces some financial links to institutions still operating today Continue reading...