The Crown's SilenceThe Crown's Silence

Historian Brooke Newman reveals that from the 1560s to 1807, 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 to develop slave systems that remained legal long after full emancipation in the British Empire in 1838.