1,100 women invested in Britain's slave trade, register finds
More than 1,100 women bought, sold and brokered shares in the companies behind Britain's trafficking of enslaved Africans.
That total comes from the Register of British Slave Traders, a three-year research project revealed exclusively in the Guardian on 15 September 2026 The Guardian. The full register names 13,000 investors in total The Guardian. Women appear across the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company and other separate ventures.
The Royal African Company was the London-chartered company that held a monopoly on English trade with West Africa. It trafficked about 150,000 enslaved people. By its dissolution in 1752, women made up about 10% of its shareholders.
They were not bystanders. The ledgers record women trading stock, arranging transfers and financing voyages.
The work on women investors was carried out by Lila O’Leary Chambers, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, for the register project. Of 457 women investors whose marital status could be identified, almost half were widows. Just over 42% were unmarried. Seven per cent were married, most of them aristocrats.
The entries put names to the money. Lady Elizabeth Craven made a £1,000 loan financing a voyage to the Gambia through the Guinea Company, an earlier venture. Sarah Longrich accepted a £100 transfer from George Mordaunt on 7 April 1720 involving shares in the Royal African Company.
One request is stark. Investor Helen Gladman asked the Royal African Company to transport a young African girl from Sherbro Island, off Sierra Leone, to England to serve in her household.
The wider register widens the picture beyond women investors. It lists 45 Church of England clergymen as investors in the Royal company, and dozens of directors and original financiers of the Bank of England among the 13,000 names.
What makes this stand out is the paperwork. Share books, loan notes and transfer receipts carry signatures and dates. A reader can follow a sum from a household to a ship.
The South Sea Company, best known for its 1720 financial collapse, also shipped enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies in the Americas in partnership with the Royal African Company. The School of Advanced Study had listed the underlying research in advance as ‘Women Investors, Racial Capitalism, and the Growth of Britain's Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1754’ School of Advanced Study.
