Britain's slave trade

slaves

A series that told the untold story of Britain's role in the slave trade – and its legacy.

This series revealed the British in denial of a key fact in their history – the contribution made by slavery to British civilisation. It also challenged the view that the arrival of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain began with the docking of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948.

Three hundred years of trading in African slaves allowed Britain to become a world economic power and financed the Industrial Revolution. In fact, many high street ban–- grew out of slave labour and slave dealing.

A great deal of British heritage and culture was actually built on the back of slave labour. Many stately homes were the glittering rewards of nouveau riche plantation 'millionaires'. Art collecting and ostentatious philanthropy both became ways in which slave dealers and exploiters of slave labour could buy their way into the aristocracy.

Twenty thousand black slaves, brought to England from the 1640s onwards, have disappeared from the historical records and sometimes even from their families' memories. Britain's Slave Trade traced their descendants.

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