Reuters World News - The Crown, the cabinet and the UK's legacy of slavery

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

At the start of the 19th century, a British politician named George Smith grew rich from slavery. Two centuries later, one of his descendants is Britain's newly anointed king. Another holds the keys to the nation’s Treasury and would oversee any future reparations. In this special podcast we look at how these links were investigated, we visit Jamaica to the site of a former plantation and speak to experts about why calls for a formal apology and reparations over slavery continue. Hear our previous podcast about America's slavery legacy in which we follow two Reuters journalists on their personal journeys to confront family connections with slavery. Plus, the investigation into more than 100 lawmakers with slaveholding ancestors. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, the UK slavery links that go all the way from the 18th century to the current holder of the crown. It is mindful of the legacy of service and devotion to this country set by my beloved mother, the late queen. And to the heart of UK politics. An autumn statement for growth, which I commend to the House. King Charles III, the UK's head of state, and Jeremy Thurham. Hunt, its finance minister, one of the government's most experienced politicians. On this special episode, we look at UK connections to the slave trade, and we hear from those calling for official recognition of this and for Britain to pay for its role.

I'm Kim Vinald in London. And I'm Tom Bergen in London. It is time for Africa. 20 million of whose sons and daughters have their freedoms contend. and sold into slavery, also to receive reparations. Ghana's president Nana Akufu Ado, speaking earlier this month at a conference about financial reparations for Africans, his compensation for centuries of enslavement. From the 15th to the 19th century, at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and

forcibly transported by European ships and merchants and sold into slavery. slavery. Those who survived the brutal voyage ended up in plantations under inhumane conditions in the Americas and also in the Caribbean. Many were under the control of Great Britain. Tom Bergen has been investigating the links between the slave trade and modern day politics for nearly a year. So Tom, tell us where this started. We were interested in exploring British deep connections to slavery as part of a broader project that also examined slavery in the United States and its legacies. We were interested to better understand the way in which a large number of people were required to be involved to allow the slavery economy to operate.

How do you do that? In the United States, we examined how the legacy of slavery could be seen through the linkages between political leaders today and their former family members who had been enslavers. We decided to look at the UK and to follow a somewhat similar process. So where do you even begin? We started by examining the family histories of many different politicians, some ordinary backbenchers to senior members of the cabinet. And we looked at the different connections that those family members had to the slave economy as potentially slave owners, but really also looking at all the different kinds of roles, administrators, importers of cotton or manufacturers,

and looking at these people to understand these connections. We reasonably quickly actually noticed that there was one person that seemed to appear in many of the different pockets of activity that were important to the slave economy. And this individual wasn't indeed an ancestor of both Jeremy Hunt, the finance minister, and King Charles III. This person was in many ways a microcosm of Britain's connections to slavery. He was someone who was a merchant, so he was involved in facilitating the flow of goods, which were produced by the enslaved. He was a banker who extended credit, which was, of course, was the lifeblood of the plantation economy. and he was an investor in assets like West India docks and a variety of other areas and indeed involved in politics.

All areas that were critical to supporting this whole system of slavery. One of the particular plantations that we soon became aware of was a plantation called the Holland Estate. And as we looked into this, this took us to examine some of the records which were contained in the National Arts. archives in Britain. Here on the banks of the Thames, the concrete, brutalist structure built in the 1970s. This is the repository of UK government records, also known as the Public Record Office. It's where Britain's secrets, when they're declassified or are stored. It's also a favourite of history buffs who like to come and peruse the detailed military records

that exist here. It sits under the flight path, not far from Heathrow. We're going to go inside and have a look at some documents that pertain to our research. Have you given to the documents before? After almost 200 years, the paper in these old files has faded somewhat. It's attained a yellow-y colour, brown indeed even at the edges. The writing on the page is still quite vibrant. It's a beautiful cursive script in a dark ink. At their centre of the page or towards the lower half is a name, George Smith. It sounds like a pretty ordinary and common name. But this George Smith wasn't just in another ordinary Britain in the 1830s.

He was a member of a well-established banking family. He was very wealthy. He was also influential in that he was a parliamentarian of long. longstanding. George Smith is also connected to influential people today. His direct descendants currently include the monarch, King Charles, and Britain's Minister of Finance, Jeremy Hunt. What Tom discovered when looking at these records was that George Smith is the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of Jeremy Hunt and King Charles. That makes the king and Jeremy Hunt distant cousins. But establishing this connection was just the first step. To ensure these

connections were 100% accurate, Tom consulted experts. I'm Rachel Lang. I'm a genealogist and a researcher. I worked with Reuters on verifying the links between key public figures now and enslavers in the Caribbean in the past. This is very similar work to the research I did at University College London. So I worked there for 12 years researching Caribbean and slavery. There's a huge variety of different records that you can use. And the key is to find out everything you can and put it together to make sure that it's consistent so that you haven't made mistakes, basically.

So most of the family trees, the family histories I see online, have mistakes in them because names are duplicated and relationships are complicated. The idea is to nail down the links very carefully. Wealthier people leave more records. They have business records. They're more likely to write wills. They're more likely to write letters to each other because they're more scattered than they can afford to. They can afford paper and postage.

They're more likely to have surviving diaries. Working with the records of enslavement is specifically problematic because the records are of subjugation. They're never produced by the enslaved people, almost never produced by the enslaved people themselves. They're more likely to be records of punishment, dehumanisation. So working a lot with records of enslaved people is a particularly strange experience.

Tom's reporting took him to Jamaica, a former British colony and a centre of the slave trade. He visited the Holland estate near the centre of the capital, Kingston. There's quite a bit of wildlife around the property, blackbirds, nightingales, swarms of dragonflies. It's late afternoon, so that the punishing sun of the middle of the day has eased. and there's actually quite a nice breeze. 200 years ago, all of this area would have been covered by sugar cane. The flat layout of the land and the apparently fertile soil was perfect for it. At any one time, over 300 enslaved workers could be here cultivating the sugar cane.

George Smith's firm was among a consortium that lent tens of thousands of pounds to the owner of this property. The main entry point for the around 1 million Africans who were trafficked into Jamaica was the waterfront of Kingston, the capital city, where we spoke to the mayor of the city, Delroy Williams, about the legacies of slavery.

It would have shaped it in many ways in terms of just the thinking. Or we think as a people, that would have been hundreds of years of a particular system. The mayor told me that there's a lasting impact on Jamaica and its people from slavery. He says hundreds of years of taking resources away from the economy

and investing little had had a deep impact. But I would say there's also lasting impact in terms of the mindset that system would have inculcated and that Jamaicans now as a society we have to be doing a lot in order to move our people. from a particular mindset that would have been influenced by the system of slavery into a new era

where the era of self-respect, honour. He says if fingers are going to be pointed, then it has to be done in a positive way. The issue of reparation is one such issue that keeps the issue of slavery in centre stage for many governments. Rachel Lang says that extractive economy that benefits the slaveholder

and takes advantage of the enslaved is still evident in the way we talk about this issue. For example, whenever you see a popular documentary on enslavement, the enslavers are named as people with interesting hobbies and strange habits and all sorts of things like that. But enslaved people themselves are represented by numbers or by inanimate objects like shackles

or some sort of sort of. stocks or something like that. You don't recognise the humanity of enslaved people as individuals. The reparation movement is growing. The movement itself isn't going away. How could it? encompasses whole national identities. Tom, how have King Charles and Jeremy Hunt responded to our findings about their connections to George Smith? Jeremy Hunt declined to comment. Buckingham Palace would not comment on the King's links to George Smith and instead direct us to comments the King had made last year, in which he described his profound regret for Britain's role in slavery. Those comments came after Caribbean leaders and campaigners had called on Britain for a full

apology for its role in transatlantic slavery. Another British leader who rebuffed calls for an apology was David Cameron when he was Prime Minister. As it happens, Cameron is another political leader whose ancestral links to slavery were something we discovered as we did the this research. Cameron, who has recently rejoined the cabinet as foreign minister, had a great, great, great, great, great, grandmother, that is to say, six great's grandmother, owned a plantation in Antigua with over 200 enslaved workers on it. Cameron also did not comment. During last year's royal tour of the Caribbean, there were protests about this issue. We had reparations. Charles's son, Prince William, expressed

profound sorrow over slavery. But we haven't had an official apology from the sovereign, from Charles, right? There's still quite a distance between Britain and its former colonies on how the legacy of slavery should be acknowledged. Britain has declined to give an apology or to consider the issue of some form of recompense, amends or reparations. But one of the things we found from our extensive of research was that if Britain were to decide to do that today, of course, the two very people we've been talking about in this story, King Charles and Jeremy Hunt, are among the people who might be making an apology as the head of state and signing the check as finance minister. Tom Bergen, concluding this episode of Reuters World News. Our thanks to Tom and to his team

for their extensive research on the story. You can read more about it on our website. The link is in the description for this episode. Our podcasts are produced by myself, David Spencer, Tara Oaks, Jonah Green and Christopher Waljasper. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons and the show is edited by Lila de Kretzer. Our sound designer is Josh Sommer. We'll be back on Monday with our regular daily news show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.