Ahead of a meeting with Commonwealth leaders, Andy Burnham wrote that Britain needed to ‘acknowledge its complicated history’
The Guardian has done extensive reporting on Britain’s centuries-long trafficking of enslaved African people, a policy that was supported by parliament and the monarchy from the 1560s-1807.
Britain’s trafficking operations – which included royal companies led by kings and, later, entrepreneurs in Bristol, Liverpool and other port cities, violently transported more than 3 million enslaved African men, women and children to colonial plantations in the Americas and Caribbean.
A series of British kings and queens were leaders and investors in the trafficking of enslaved African people;
More than 100 MPs were investors in slave-trading companies, including scores in the Tory and Whig parties – the forerunners of today’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats;
Dozens of directors and original financiers of the Bank of England were investors in the slave trade;
More than 1,000 women invested in slave-trading companies;
Forty-five Church of England clergymen were investors in the slave-trading Royal African Company.
When will the demands stop? What about if they ask for it next year? How many apologies are needed? Everyone knows the transatlantic slave trade was wrong. Britain played a huge role in stopping it.
The problem with this endless talk about apologies is that it is a distraction. It then means that people start focusing on things that happen hundreds of years ago, instead of solving today’s problems.
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