How enslavement became state-backed operation supported by Conservative and Lib Dem forerunners
Credit: David Conn Investigations correspondent; Illustration by Palesa Monareng
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...