The Ledger of Threadneedle Street

Central banking has rarely been an exercise in moral philosophy. When the Bank of England was established in 1694, its architects were interested in capital accumulation, yield, and sovereign credit. Recent historical research from the Register of British Slave Traders, led by Dr Michael Bennett of the University of Sheffield, offers a cold accounting of where that early capital originated: the transatlantic slave trade.

The numbers revealed by Bennett's archival work disrupt any cozy illusions about early modern high finance. At least 30 founding subscribers to Threadneedle Street were investors in human trafficking, led by none other than King William III and Queen Mary II through their holdings in the Royal African Company. Beyond the rank-and-file subscribers, 24 Bank directors held direct financial stakes in slave-trafficking operations between the late 17th and late 18th centuries. Four were among the original founding directors, while later figures like Christopher Puller, a director who shipped weapons for the trade and co-owned a 1786 slaving voyage from the Gambia to Jamaica, maintained the connection until his death in 1789.

London’s early financial ecosystem operated as a tightly integrated cartel. Men like John Rudge, an MP for Evesham who served as Bank governor from 1713 to 1715, simultaneously held seats on the boards of the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company. Threadneedle Street provided direct banking services to these state-chartered trading monopolies. In the case of Humphry Morice, governor in the late 1720s, the line between central banking and human trafficking blurred into outright crime: Morice defrauded the Bank itself to finance roughly 110 voyages that forcibly transported over 30,000 Africans across the Atlantic.

Nor was the institution merely an arms-length lender. Research stemming from the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 established that the Bank of England directly owned 599 enslaved people across two plantations. When Parliament finally passed abolition in 1833, the state demonstrated where its priorities lay. The Treasury and the Bank orchestrated a £20 million payout—equivalent to roughly £23 billion in present-day terms—to compensate former owners for their loss of property. The people who endured the plantations received nothing.

While high-street commercial banks and media institutions like the Scott Trust have moved to launch restorative justice programs, government reaction remains predictably calculated. The Bank staged an exhibition in 2022 displaying historical names and issued an official apology. Responding to the research, a Bank spokesperson stated: We are grateful for Dr Bennett’s collaboration on that work. Whitehall, however, stubbornly refuses to express formal regret or entertain discussion of reparations. Political power changes its slogans over three centuries, but its instinctive resistance to writing checks remains remarkably consistent.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com