BBC's David Olusoga series traces 10,500 British slave trade investors

The BBC is showing a two-part documentary built around a new historical record of Britain's transatlantic slave trade.

The series is titled Finding Britain's Slave Traders with David Olusoga and is presented by the historian David Olusoga, according to the BBC Media Centre. It draws on the Register of British Slave Traders, a three-year project by specialist historians led by Prof William Pettigrew of King's College London.

The Register documents investors in Britain's transatlantic slave trade from the 1560s to abolition in 1807, as reported by The Guardian. Its definition is narrow. A slave trader here means an individual who helped pay directly for a ship to transport enslaved African people, in expectation of a share of the profit.

The list is long. Historians identified about 13,000 people as investors, with biographical detail published for as many as 10,500 of them. Britain's trafficking operations transported more than 3 million enslaved African men, women and children to colonial plantations in the Americas and Caribbean. Research on European trafficking as a whole estimates 12 million enslaved African people were trafficked.

The names cut across public life. More than 100 MPs put money into slave-trading companies. Dozens of directors and original financiers of the Bank of England did the same. More than 1,000 women invested. Forty-five Church of England clergymen invested in the Royal African Company.

The early entries reach the Tudor court. John Hawkins's voyages in the 1560s were backed by Queen Elizabeth I, William Cecil, Robert Dudley and Sir Thomas Lodge, who was lord mayor of London. The monarchy's involvement became more institutional from 1660.

Three chartered companies anchor that later period. The Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa was founded in 1660, followed by the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa in 1663 and the Royal African Company in 1672. The Royal African Company trafficked about 150,000 enslaved African people. The South Sea Company, founded in 1711, trafficked close to 45,000. For the South Sea Company, the Register records directors rather than all investors.

The Royal African Company's monopoly was removed in stages from 1689 after lobbying by individual "separate traders" who wanted to take part in trafficking. The Register traces investors beyond London to Bristol, Liverpool and other port towns and cities.

The researchers started with the Slave Voyages database, an international university collaboration launched in 2008 that records enslaving ships, numbers of people trafficked and who died, and owners and investors. The Register report itself was commissioned by the City of London Corporation in December 2024.

What makes this stand out for viewers is the paperwork. Wills, share lists, court records and port books put ordinary addresses beside large institutions. For anyone watching, that means familiar streets and familiar bodies carry unfamiliar entries in the ledger.