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9:37 19.09.2026 •
South Sea Company paperwork from 1714. This logo was used to brand enslaved people who were trafficked by the South Sea Company. The copy above it reads: ‘Mark for Negroes at Barbados’
Pic.: The Guardian
Enslaved African people were seared with hot metal brands bearing the royal crown, according to research by historians who have documented the monarchy’s centuries-long involvement in Britain’s slave trade, The Guardian reveals.
The Register of British Slave Traders identifies thousands of people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans, including kings and queens.
Dr Nicholas Radburn, a historian at Lancaster University, discovered evidence of the branding in the archives of the South Sea Company, a British crown-backed enterprise that trafficked thousands of enslaved African people to plantations in the 1700s.
Radburn found a letter sent by the company’s board to its agents in Buenos Aires, instructing them to brand enslaved people with hot metal. The brand bore a crown, a symbol of the British monarchy’s role in the trade. A doctor had warned against the branding, but the board, whose members included figures from England’s establishment elite including MPs and Bank of England directors, instructed the agents to proceed.
Radburn said the letter illustrated how detailed the company’s dehumanising cruelty was – and its awareness of it.
“These people were members of the London elite, in a boardroom, thinking in fine grain terms about the violence that needs to be done to enslaved people across the ocean,” he said. “And that will have happened as a result of that letter. People will have had their flesh seared with that brand.”
The Register of British Slave Traders, the new historical record for which Radburn was a lead investigator, documents how Britain’s enslaving and trafficking of more than 3 million African people for nearly 250 years was perpetrated as an official national enterprise, led by its monarchs.
The kings and queens who powered the trafficking most ferociously were those after the monarchy was restored in 1660. James, Duke of York, who became King James II, was the governor and a substantial shareholder in the Royal African Company (RAC), founded in 1672, which trafficked more African men, women and children than any other single organisation in the history of the slave trade.
Prof William Pettigrew, the register’s lead historian and investigator, said these royal enslaving companies were crucial to the kings of the Stuart dynasty striving to solidify the restored monarchy as an institution.
“I view James II as the most important English slave trader of the 17th century,” Pettigrew said. “The African companies were central to the monarchy’s rehabilitation plan within the British constitution.”
James ran the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people with his cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, described in the register as “the visionary for England’s fully fledged, state-backed slave trade”. Other royals, including Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine of Braganza, were also investors in these companies.
An official delegation from Jamaica delivered a petition to Charles last week, seeking a legal ruling from the privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries. It asks whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, whether it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain is obliged to provide restitution to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
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