The Bank of England slavery history documented by a new wave of researchers is more extensive than either the institution’s 2022 exhibition or its subsequent apology fully conveyed. The Register of British Slave Traders, compiled by historians including Dr Michael Bennett of the University of Sheffield, has found that 24 of the Bank’s directors were personally invested in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans, with nine of those 24 also serving as governor.
Bank of England Slavery History: The Financiers Behind the Trade
Four of the 24 were among the Bank’s founding directors when it was established in 1694. The remaining 20 held office at Threadneedle Street over the following century. The last of them, Christopher Puller, co-owned a 1786 voyage that trafficked enslaved people from the Gambia to Jamaica and shipped weapons for the slave trade. He served as a director for 11 years before his death in 1789.
Beyond the directors, Bennett found that at least 30 of the Bank’s founding subscribers invested in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. At their head were William III and Mary II, who held shares in the Royal African Company. It is, in Bennett’s words, clear that wealth generated from the slave trade formed part of the Bank’s initial capital.
‘Slave traders and their wealth were firmly embedded within Britain’s, especially London’s, private banks and financial corporations during the 17th and 18th centuries. They shaped the development of the financial system,’ Bennett said. ‘Banks and other institutions, like insurers, provided the financial services that supported, and made great wealth from, the transatlantic slave economy. The Bank of England supported this system throughout, and directly provided financial services to the slave trade. Its clients included the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company.’
These findings sit alongside the earlier work of the Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) archive at University College London, which identified 16 past Bank governors and 26 directors with a financial interest in plantation ownership before abolition in 1833. The Bank and the Treasury were also centrally involved in disbursing the £20 million paid in ‘compensation’ to enslavers under the abolition legislation, equivalent to roughly £23 billion today by one method of calculation. Nothing was paid to those who had been enslaved.
The Fraud That City Memory Chose to Preserve
The figure who best illustrates the institutional depth of this entanglement is Humphry Morice, a governor from 1727 to 1729. Professor Matthew David Mitchell, writing on the Bank’s own website, described Morice as ‘the biggest London-based trafficker of enslaved human beings from Africa to the British colonies in America,’ responsible for equipping around 110 ship voyages between 1704 and 1732 and transporting more than 30,000 enslaved men, women and children to Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia and elsewhere.
Morice served as a director on four separate occasions, and according to the Bank of England’s slavery exhibition guide, his business papers, including ships’ logs and correspondence with captains regarding the treatment of enslaved people, are lodged in the Bank’s own archive. That those records survived at all says something about whose commercial activity was considered worth preserving.
What the City long remembered about Morice, however, was not his trafficking but his fraud. The Bank of England’s anniversary exhibition records show that Morice embezzled more than £29,000 from the Bank while in office and concealed colossal debts elsewhere. Until recently, it was this fraud, not his slave-trading operations, that ensured his notoriety in the City. The hierarchy of scandal tells you something about what Georgian and Victorian financial culture thought worth condemning.
An archetypal example of a director fully absorbed into both the Bank and the slave economy is John Rudge, the MP for Evesham, who served as a director from 1699 to 1740 and as governor from 1713 to 1715. Rudge was simultaneously a shareholder and assistant director of the Royal African Company and deputy governor of the South Sea Company.
The Bank of England has acknowledged and apologised for this history, including mounting its 2022 exhibition. A Bank spokesperson said it had explored its connections to enslavement in depth in that exhibition and added: ‘We are grateful for Dr Bennett’s collaboration on that work.’ The Treasury has issued no comparable acknowledgement and the government continues to resist any discussion of reparations.
Bennett’s expanded findings will add to the pressure already building from Caribbean and African governments. The register’s evidence is now sufficiently detailed that ‘we are still learning’ can no longer serve as a reason for official silence. The question is whether the Treasury intends to match the Bank’s apology before that pressure becomes a formal demand at an international forum where Britain will have fewer options to deflect it.
