David Olusoga names the financiers of slavery in new BBC series
David Olusoga is putting names to the money behind Britain's slave trade in a new BBC series.
'Finding Britain's Slave Traders with David Olusoga' explores the transatlantic slave trade and its part in the making of modern Britain. The BBC lists series 1 as releasing on 21 September 2026 BBC. In the programmes, Olusoga meets the historians who built the Register of British Slave Traders.
The Register is the paperwork at the centre of the series. It documents thousands of investors in Britain's near 250-year trafficking of more than 3 million enslaved African people Guardian. It covers all known British investors in the trafficking of captive Africans from 1563 to 1807. The database records who financed voyages, where traders lived, what businesses they ran and what organisations they joined.
The lead historian is Prof William Pettigrew. His team pieced the Register together from company lists, wills, port books and other commercial records.
The names include kings, MPs and City merchants. The original Tory faction formed during the 1679 exclusion crisis in support of the then Duke of York being crowned King James II. James II later led the Royal African Company, a state-backed company chartered to trade in Africa. It trafficked at least 150,000 African men, women and children, more than any other organisation in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.
One entry is Sir Benjamin Bathurst, Tory MP for New Romney in Kent. He served as an assistant and leader of the Royal African Company at various points between 1677 and 1700. The company made 222 transatlantic voyages in that period.
The Register identifies more than 50 Tory MPs and about 50 Whig MPs as historic slave traders. The Tories and Whigs were the forerunners of today's Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively. Most of those MPs invested in the Royal African Company and its predecessors. Some were involved in the South Sea Company.
Party lines shifted later. When the abolition movement grew in the late 18th century, the Whigs generally moved towards supporting abolition. Tory governments opposed and delayed it for decades.
The findings have drawn political responses. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said he supported "full transparency" and that it was "vital that we face up to the full truth of Britain's history". Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch posted in March that "Britain led the fight to end slavery" and "We shouldn't be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight today."
What makes this stand out for viewers is the address-level detail. Streets, wills, country houses and company minutes replace abstraction. The trade becomes a set of investments that can be checked.
The series does not ask viewers to take the Register on trust. It shows how the entries were found. That is its strength. The documents stay on screen long enough to read.
