The crown, the cabinet and the UK’s legacy of slavery

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plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi. The properties had hundreds of enslaved workers when they were sold by the firm almost 20 years later.

Clifton-Brown declined to comment for this story. George Smith also owned bonds from banks that lent money to American plantation owners, including the Planters Bank of Tennessee and the Planters Bank of Mississippi. The bonds were valued at more than 10,000 pounds – 12.8 million pounds in today’s money, by one calculation. Leather-bound ledger books from the time illustrate that the purchase of bonds from planters’ banks was widespread in Britain, including among the middle class.

Financial historians say slavery-linked financing, from Baring’s funding of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to retail bond sales and the development of tools for hedging cross-border cotton sales, helped build London into the global fulcrum of finance that it is today.

“The financial system that was built in the course of the 18th century was significantly shaped by the needs of this slave economy – credit, instruments of exchange and trade – so that the acceleration of the financial revolution was, in part, a function of the slave economy,” said Draper, who was a senior investment banker at JP Morgan Chase & Co before becoming a historian.

ABSENTEE OWNERS

Here in Jamaica, the Smith family owned three plantations west of Kingston with a total of 237 enslaved people in 1798, records show. The largest of the plantations, Farm Pen, evolved from producing sugar to rearing cattle and growing crops for the local market. It sat on land alongside the Rio Cobre between Kingston and Spanish Town, an early capital of colonial Jamaica.

Two British travel writers visited Farm Pen in 1837, when the land was still in Smith family hands. Slavery had been abolished on paper, but workers were still forced to labor there. The writers, Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, noted that the plantation was “furnished with that relic of former times, the stocks.”

Such business helped make George Smith wealthy. He acquired a country estate, Selsdon, south of London, where he built a neo-gothic mansion with turrets and archways. The estate, with gardens and parkland, was featured in books and periodicals that were the 19th-century equivalent of modern celebrity lifestyle magazines. Like many British plantation owners,the Smiths were absentee landlords. The day-to-day running of the plantations in Jamaica was left to a manager, who kept the family informed of developments. But that didn’t mean they and other owners were uninvolved.

Owners, generally, would often be “spurring on” the managers, said Radburn, the historian at Lancaster University: “‘OK, we need more, we need to increase production, or we need to buy more people to increase my income.’” The money enabled lives of “frivolous, conspicuous consumption,” he said. “It’s often so they