British Crown Symbol Branded on Enslaved Africans, Research Finds
BBC News
Malu Cursino
Enslaved African people were branded with an identifying mark that included an emblem of the British Crown, according to new research by a project documenting British involvement in the slave trade.
Prof William Pettigrew, who led the Register of British Slave Traders research, described the imprinting as a "dramatic and harrowing" symbol of the monarchy's relationship to slavery.
The register, which lists 13,000 individuals and hundreds of institutions known to have invested in Britain's role in slavery between 1563 and 1807, when the trade was abolished across the British Empire, is the most comprehensive examination of a national community of slave traders ever undertaken.
Dr Nicholas Radburn, historian at Lancaster University and co-investigator in the project, told the BBC he discovered the identifying mark—an image of the Crown, with the South Sea Company logo below it—while looking through the company's archives at the British Library in 2022.
Founded in 1711, the South Sea Company trafficked thousands of enslaved Africans. Radburn found letters from the company's director to their "factors" (slave traders) in the Spanish Americas, detailing instructions on conducting the slave trade.
One letter from February 1714 instructed slave traders to use irons made in England to mark enslaved Africans on their left shoulder with the emblem. The purpose was to distinguish the company's slaves from others.
Pettigrew emphasized that there were all sorts of connections between the monarchy and slavery, not just this "brutal imprint".
"If you think about the history of the monarchy when it was at its absolute lowest ebb, when King Charles I was executed, members of the royal family relaunched the monarchy, its finances, and its reputation by investing in the transatlantic slave trade," he said.
Buckingham Palace responded, stating that King Charles "has on many occasions expressed his personal and wholehearted commitment to promoting greater understanding around the issue of slavery and finding ways to address historic wrongs for the benefit of communities today."