Bristol and Liverpool sent the ships. London licensed, financed and insured them, and kept much of the money. Where to see that story today.
Bristol and Liverpool sent out the ships, so they usually carry the blame. London is rarely named in the same breath. Yet the capital was where the slave trade was licensed, financed, insured and defended in Parliament, and where much of its profit ended up: in banks, country estates, town houses and charitable foundations that still carry their founders' names.
London also sent out ships of its own, thousands of them. Its first great slave-trading company, the Royal African Company, was run from the City under the protection of the King's brother. And when the trade was finally abolished, it was in London that slave owners collected their compensation.
This page follows that money from the City to the docks, shows you where to see it today, and introduces the Africans who lived in Georgian London and fought the trade from inside the capital.
Those voyage counts tell only part of the story. Many ships that sailed from Bristol and Liverpool were insured, financed or supplied through London, and much of the sugar the trade produced was landed, refined and sold in the capital.
Every slaving voyage needed capital, credit and insurance. London had all three. Merchants pooled money in voyages; banks lent against cargoes of sugar and the people who grew it; marine insurers, many of them meeting in the coffee houses that grew into today's insurance market, wrote cover on ships whose cargo was human beings. Enslaved Africans were insured like any other goods, and when a captain threw people overboard, owners could try to claim for them as lost cargo.
At the centre sat the Royal African Company. Chartered by Charles II in 1672 and governed by his brother James, Duke of York, it held the legal monopoly on English trade with Africa. Its offices were in the City; its African headquarters was Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast. Many of the people it shipped were branded with the letters RAC, or DY for the Duke of York. Historians now say it shipped more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution in the whole history of the trade.
After its monopoly ended in 1698, London's merchants carried on trading independently, but their real strength moved into the West India trade: owning and financing Caribbean plantations, importing their sugar, rum and coffee, and lobbying Parliament on their behalf. The West India planters and merchants were among the most powerful interest groups in Georgian Britain, and they fought abolition every step of the way.
The West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs opened in 1802. They were built by the West India merchants and planters to land the sugar, rum and coffee from their plantations, and they were given a monopoly on cargoes from the Caribbean. The driving force behind them was Robert Milligan, a Scottish-born merchant, ship-owner and slave owner with plantations in Jamaica.
The dock company put up a statue of Milligan in 1813. It was moved to West India Quay in 1997, opposite the old warehouse that now houses the museum. On 9 June 2020, two days after Colston went into the harbour in Bristol, the landowners, the Canal & River Trust, took Milligan down, with local campaigners and politicians watching. The statue has since entered the museum's own collection.
The docks themselves are now Canary Wharf. Glass towers of banks and law firms stand where the sugar ships once tied up, and very little on the quayside tells you why the docks were built.
The best place in Britain to understand London's part in the trade is a sugar warehouse. London Museum Docklands sits in No. 1 Warehouse at West India Quay, built in 1802 to store sugar, rum and tea. Its London, Sugar & Slavery gallery has been a permanent display for more than 16 years, and when it opened it was one of only two permanent galleries on the subject in the UK.
The gallery follows the trade from London's counting houses to the African coast and the plantations, and it does not spare its own building: you stand inside the very warehouse that profited from what the exhibits describe. Recent additions include new captions written with Caribbean community partners, and a quiet space for the anger and grief that many visitors feel afterwards.
By the late eighteenth century London had a sizeable Black population: servants, sailors, musicians, shopkeepers and runaways, some free and some still enslaved. It was also where Africans took on the trade in print and in public.
Equiano, Cugoano and the Sons of Africa.
From the Gold Coast to the pamphlets of London.
London's experiment in Sierra Leone, and what went wrong.
Start in the City of London and finish at West India Quay. Walk the City part, then take the Elizabeth line or DLR to Canary Wharf or West India Quay.
London's company ran the forts of the Gold Coast, and those forts still stand. To understand what was decided in the City, go to where it was carried out.
London Museum Docklands is a few minutes' walk from West India Quay DLR station and from Canary Wharf on the Jubilee line and Elizabeth line. From central London the Elizabeth line gets you there in minutes. You can also take the river bus to Canary Wharf Pier. Arriving from Africa? See flights from Africa to the UK and our guide to your first time in London.
London has guided walks on its hidden history, river cruises past the old docks and day tours further afield. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Colston, the docks and the story of Pero.
The port that took the trade over from London and Bristol.
How Britain paid slave owners when slavery ended.
Where the profits were spent.
Our honest guide to the rest of the capital.
Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:
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