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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. 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 William put it recently, “We’re very much not a racist family.” When slaveholding nations write their collective history, the enslavers hold the pen.

Now, acclaimed historian Brooke Newman reveals the true story: the enslavers were supported by members of the royal family. From the 1560s to 1838, the British monarchy invested in the transatlantic slave trade and built a slave empire in colonial America and the Caribbean, with the labor of millions of enslaved Africans who would see none of its riches. It profited from African slave trading and hereditary bondage, setting the stage for other colonial powers, including the United States, to develop brutal slave systems that remained legal long after emancipation in the British Empire. The scars of this history remain visible the world over, from economic inequality and educational and health disparities to racial discrimination and prejudice. Still, Crown officials continue to insist they “belong to the past.” 

Newman focuses not on portraits of British monarchs but on their actions and investments that led to the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, and on some of the people whose lives it took, placing the struggles and sacrifices of innumerable individuals of African origin and ancestry at the center of Britain’s story.  

About the Speaker

Brooke Newman, Ph.D is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with current special interest in the history of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family. She’s the author of "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale University Press, 2018), which received the Gold Medal for World History in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, and was named a 2019 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. She is also the co-editor of "Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas" (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Her research has been extensively supported by distinguished institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including, most recently, MacDowell, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and the Omohundro Institute and Georgian Papers Programme for research in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Dr. Newman’s current book project, “The Queen’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery” (under contract with Mariner), chronicles the evolving policies and attitudes of the British Crown and prominent members of the royal family toward slavery, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and the abolition movement, from Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria.