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Banks and banking

The thriving British economy after 1660 was made possible mainly because of Britain's financial institutions. Trading houses, insurance companies and banks emerged to underpin Britain's overseas trade and empire. The expansion of overseas trade, especially in the Atlantic, relied on credit, and bills of credit (like modern travellers cheques), which were at the heart of the slave trade. Similarly, the maritime insurance, which was focused at Lloyds of London, thrived on the Atlantic slave trade.

There were no banks in the City until the mid-17th century, and even a century later, banking was under-developed outside London. But slave traders and planters badly needed credit. A slave voyage from Liverpool to Africa then on to the Caribbean, before heading home, could take 18 months. And each point of the trade - buying and selling Africans, buying and importing produce (mainly sugar) cultivated using the labour of enslaved people - involved credit arrangements. Merchants and traders in London, Bristol and Liverpool, bought the planters' produce, so in effect, British merchants became the bankers of the slave trade.

Provincial banking emerged in the 18th century because of the need for credit in the long-distance Atlantic slave trade. For example, Liverpool merchants involved in slave trading later formed Heywoods Bank, which eventually became part of Barclays Bank. Other modern banking names, such as Lloyds, emerged in this way and inevitably had links to the Atlantic slave trade. The Bank of England was also involved. When it was set up in 1694, it underpinned the whole system of commercial credit, and its wealthy City members, from the governor down, were often men whose fortunes had been made wholly or partly in the slave trade. The Bank of England stabilised the national finances, and enabled the state to wage its major wars of the 18th century. These wars were aimed at securing and safeguarding overseas possessions, including the slave colonies, and to finance the military and naval means that protected the Atlantic slave routes and the plantation economies.

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Harewood House

Harewood House is one of the grandest of English stately homes and appears to be far removed from the world of enslavement. Work began on the house in 1759, and the house was inhabitable by 1771. Landscape gardener Lancelot 'Capability' Brown planned the magnificent gardens, and furniture maker Thomas Chippendale crafted the furniture for the house. It was soon filled with a treasury of paintings. Today it is home to Lord Harewood and his family, whose family name is Lascelles. The Lascelles emerged from minor gentry origins in North Yorkshire in the 17th century, but a century later their investment in sugar and enslaving Africans had made them extremely wealthy.

When the head of the family, Henry Lascelles, died in 1753 he left a fortune, which would be worth £28 million in today's money. The Lascelles had been merchants trading from London and Bristol to Barbados. They were also customs collectors in Barbados and suppliers to the Royal Navy across the Americas. They lent money to the planters, and when the planters could not repay, they took over their plantations and slaves, which had been used as collateral. The Lascelles became major slave owners, mainly in Barbados and Jamaica, but also other Caribbean islands. At emancipation in 1838, the family received £26,000 compensation for the freedom of their 1,277 slaves.

By this time, the Harewoods had entered the upper reaches of British aristocracy. The Lascelles/Harewoods offer a remarkable example of the personal wealth that was acquired with luck and good management through the Atlantic slave trade. They demonstrated their wealth in the form of a grand stately home in England.

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Penrhyn Castle

The mock-medieval castle at Penrhyn is another reminder of the ubiquity of Britain's links with slavery. The castle belonged to the Pennant family, famous for its slate quarries in North Wales, but whose major fortunes came from the Caribbean. The Pennants turned to Caribbean sugar and trade in the 17th century.

The family acquired plantations in Jamaica and held high office on that island, before a new generation returned to Britain and started trading from Liverpool. With the money the family made from these varied slavery-based enterprises, the Pennants acquired substantial holdings in Wales and also developed slate quarries. Penrhyn Castle was developed on the site of an ancient property, but it is a 19th-century version of a Norman castle. Alongside Harewood House, it provides an example of the levels of material wealth that was accumulated by those engaged in the slave trade, which was then invested into British property and land.

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Cultural institutions

The links between national cultural institutions and slavery are sometimes harder to see, because they are more indirect. The British Museum opened in 1759 with a core collection that had been built up over many years by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). A collector from childhood, he studied medicine in Britain and Europe before travelling to Jamaica where he continued his botanical interests. He married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter who brought substantial income from her plantations to the marriage. With this money, Sloane was able to indulge his passion for collecting artefacts of all sorts. His collection (71,000 items when he died) was bequeathed to the nation and became the basis for the original British Museum and its offspring, the Natural History Museum.

The National Gallery was set up with a collection of 38 pictures in the Pall Mall home of John Julius Angerstein. Born in St Petersburg, Angerstein made his wealth as an underwriter with Lloyds, and much of that business was concentrated in the insurance of slave ships in the Atlantic. Angerstein also owned plantations in the Caribbean. Like many others, he invested his money into property and luxuries - a grand home in Pall Mall and a collection of the finest private art.

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Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford

All Souls College, Oxford, houses one of the city's finest libraries, which is named after a former fellow who had strong Caribbean connections. Christopher Codrington was born in Barbados in 1668. His father was captain-general of the Leeward Islands and one of the wealthiest planters in Barbados. At the time, Barbados was the centre of Britain's slave islands, its sugar plantations disgorging unprecedented wealth based on the labour of enslaved Africans.

Codrington was educated at Christ Church College Oxford before becoming a Fellow of All Souls. He was a great book collector, but embarked on a military career in Europe before returning to replace his father in the Caribbean as governor-general. In the last years of his life he devoted himself to his plantation. When he died in 1710, he bequeathed his books (12,000 volumes) to All Souls. They consisted of a wide range of mainly 17th-century French and Italian books. He also left a huge legacy of £10,000 to All Souls, £6,000 of which was to be spent on building a library, and the rest on buying books. Although not formally completed until 1751, the library has been used by scholars ever since. Like so many of the buildings from this period, the library is rooted in the slave trade.

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Bristol and sugar

Bristol dominated the English slave trade in the first half of the 18th century. It quickly became home to a booming sugar import trade, which was not overtaken (by Liverpool) until 1799. Sugar was the most lucrative of Bristol's industries. The city's quaysides and warehouses were joined by sugar refineries (to process the crude sugars shipped across the Atlantic from the slave plantations). With a booming British market for sugar to sweeten foodstuffs, but most of all for tea, Bristol grew in prominence and civic stature.

The city was home to groups of prosperous sugar merchants, and West Indian planters who returned 'home' to retire to grand houses in the West Country. Inevitably, the city contains important architectural monuments to those links. Pero's Bridge was named after a slave brought to Bristol from St Kitts by the famous planters, the Pinneys; Guinea Street; Queens Square (home to prominent sugar merchants) and the Merchants Hall (site of local Merchants Adventurers who profited from the boom in slave trading in the 18th century). Most famous perhaps is No 7 Great George St, home of the Pinneys, who were planters in Nevis, and founders of a trading house involved in the West India trade.

The Sugar House, in Lewins Mead - now a fashionable hotel and restaurant - was once a refinery and sugar house. It was here, and in similar buildings in other ports, where sugar was imported and then refined. The barrels of wet molasses and sugar were refined further locally before being cast into sugar loaves for distribution to shops. These were then sold to the armies of Britons who came to depend on regular supplies of sugar for their drink and food.

Like the tobacco warehouses in Glasgow, Bristol's sugar buildings are a reminder of the importance of imported tropical staples. They also remind us of the ways in which British life - particularly the nation's sweet tooth - is linked to the slave trade.

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Industry

The British iron industries boomed on the back of slavery - chains, padlocks, fetters, the metal used in ship construction (slave ships were sheathed with copper), and hundreds of thousands of firearms that were shipped to West Africa to exchange for African slaves. In addition, all the tools used on the slave plantations were manufactured in Britain. Matthew Boulton developed extensive business dealings with the plantations from his factory at Soho in Birmingham. The mill above was used by Boulton for making buttons and metal rolling.

Along with James Watt, Boulton developed new steam engines that were sold to the sugar plantations, which used steam power to replace the traditional wind, water or horse power - and so needed fewer slaves. Although Boulton was an abolitionist, there were many iron manufacturers in the Midlands who objected to the abolition campaign, who argued that their business depended on the trade to and from Africa (for slaves) and with the slave plantations. In the end, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not undermine local iron industries. Soho Museum is an impressive link between Atlantic slavery and the early English metal industry, which supplied the equipment for the slave ships, and exports to Africa and the plantations.

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Glasgow and tobacco

When settlers in North America started cultivating tobacco using slave labour, the economies of Virginia and Maryland were transformed. A small group of Glaswegian merchants dominated the booming transatlantic tobacco trade. Scottish merchants created tobacco trading networks in Virginia, and by 1760 Glasgow had overtaken London as the main importer of tobacco. The influence of the powerful Glaswegian merchants spread throughout the Americas (often buying into estates in the Caribbean). Their most lasting influence can be seen in some of the major roads and buildings in Glasgow. Many of the old streets of Glasgow (Buchanan, Glassford, Ingram and Dunlop) testify to the success of the tobacco barons.

One of the city's most impressive buildings was built in 1778 by William Cunninghame, a prominent Glaswegian tobacco baron. Cunninghame headed one of three major syndicates that controlled the flow of tobacco into Scotland. He developed a string of outlets and representatives in the tobacco colonies, which bought tobacco from the planters and stored it until Cunninghame's ships arrived. Cunninghame's trading system was one of the most efficient and swift in the North Atlantic and it yielded enormous profits.

He invested some of these profits in Cunninghame Mansion. This townhouse cost a staggering £10,000 to build and is thought to be one of the finest houses in Scotland. After his death it became part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, later an exchange for local merchants, then part of the telephone exchange. In 1996 it became the Gallery of Modern Art. It stands today as a reminder of Glasgow's links to tobacco cultivated by enslaved people, and the profits tobacco yielded to the major Scottish merchants who dominated the trade.

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If you don’t know you better get to know, I rock to the rhythm and I go with the flow, 1,2,3 and away we go, let me hear the horns and the whistles then blow, psg’s on the microphone, I listen to the rhythm and I rock it to the bone, all you have to do is move so get up and move and jump to the groove.

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already said that everything that made this country 'Great' or rich is 1000% attributed to the slave trade. nothing else

the same is evident all across western Europe and the USA.

some Local d*ckhead claims its not so, that his people were already rich and great.

thats also why i can only KMT at the black and Indian coons that go and shmingle with the queen receiving some MBE/OBE of an empire that enslaved them

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already said that everything that made this country 'Great' or rich is 1000% attributed to the slave trade. nothing else

the same is evident all across western Europe and the USA.

some Local d*ckhead claims its not so, that his people were already rich and great.

thats also why i can only KMT at the black and Indian coons that go and shmingle with the queen receiving some MBE/OBE of an empire that enslaved them

sh*t-JUST-GOT-REAL-GIF.gif

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already said that everything that made this country 'Great' or rich is 1000% attributed to the slave trade. nothing else

the same is evident all across western Europe and the USA.

some Local d*ckhead claims its not so, that his people were already rich and great.

thats also why i can only KMT at the black and Indian coons that go and shmingle with the queen receiving some MBE/OBE of an empire that enslaved them

I see what you're saying.

It's hard to be on friendly terms with whites when you know they're still benefiting from the blood, sweat and tears your ancestors dropped on soil across the world.

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tbf we could say f*ck the ancestor man dem for not being warriors and allowing themselves to be shipped

That's like saying anyone who allows themselves to be jailed is a p*ssy.

If you've seen Amistad you will notice when man is being escorted to the ship he clocks Africans checking out their brand new shiny guns they acquired in the deal.

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