Slave-Trade Wealth and the Bank of England: What New Research Found
Research compiling the Register of British Slave Traders has found that the British financial system's involvement in enslavement was greater than previously known or acknowledged, with wealth generated from the slave trade forming part of the Bank of England's initial capital.
What the new research found
Dr Michael Bennett of the University of Sheffield identified 24 Bank of England directors as investors in the trafficking of enslaved African people, according to research published on 16 September 2026 The Guardian. Four of the 24 were founding directors of the Bank in 1694. Nine also served as governors of the Bank. At least 30 founding subscribers, the early investors who supplied the Bank's starting funds, invested in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.
How the researchers define a slave trader
The Register defines slave traders as individuals who invested in directly financing a ship's transportation of enslaved African people The Guardian. That definition separates direct voyage finance from the wider universe of ownership and plantation profit. It is narrow in scope, while the researchers describe the pattern it captures as systemic.
Links that continued over time
The Bank's early client base and leadership overlapped with slave-trading enterprise. The Bank's clients included the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company. King William III and Queen Mary II held shares in the Royal African Company. John Rudge served as a Bank director between 1699 and 1740 and as governor in 1713-15, while also a shareholder and assistant in the Royal African Company and deputy governor of the South Sea Company.
Later careers carried the pattern beyond the founding generation. Christopher Puller was a Bank director for 11 years before his death in 1789 and co-owned a 1786 voyage trafficking enslaved people from the Gambia to Jamaica. The dates show direct investment in human trafficking during the tenure of a sitting central-bank director in the late 18th century, not only in the Bank's chartering era.
What happened after abolition
A separate strand concerns ownership rather than voyage finance. UCL's Legacies of British Slavery archive found 16 past Bank governors and 26 directors had a financial interest in ownership of enslaved people and plantations before abolition in 1833. The Bank and the Treasury were centrally involved in paying £20 million in compensation to enslavers under abolition legislation, equivalent to £23 billion today by one calculation, with nothing paid to enslaved people. The Bank was nationalised by Clement Attlee's Labour administration in 1946.
Other institutions facing questions
The Register compiles information on all known slave-traders in Britain who invested in trafficking captive Africans Register. It covers the period from 1563 to 1807. Those it profiles sought to profit from the enslavement of over 3 million African men, women and children.
Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds are among UK banks that had links to slavery. Mostly private UK schools were given the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds in donations by British slavers, according to research reported in May 2023. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain's slave owners. Britain's Slave Compensation Act providing compensation to enslavers was passed in 1837. An investigation commissioned by the University of Cambridge found no evidence that the university itself ever owned slaves or plantations directly. Research into the monarchy's slave links backed by King Charles was expected to conclude in September 2026.
The broader context here is institutional continuity. A central bank chartered to stabilize public credit drew founding capital and leadership from an economy in which trafficking was a licit investment class, much as a start-up draws on the wealth of its first backers. Compensation after abolition then converted claims on enslaved people into state-backed financial obligations administered through the same fiscal nexus.
Looking at what this means for current accountability debates, the distinction between trafficking finance, slave ownership and post-abolition compensation matters. Each implies different archival trails, legal doctrines and policy responses. Voyage investors, shareholders in chartered companies, plantation mortgagees and recipients of compensation stock did not occupy identical positions.
