A newly published register of British slave traders shows that the transatlantic trafficking of more than three million African people was not a rogue enterprise but a state‑backed project supported by the forerunners of today’s Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. The document lists over fifty Tory MPs and a similar number of Whig MPs who invested in the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company or other slaving ventures, proving that slavery was woven into the fabric of early British politics.
Party Origins and the Royal African Company
The roots of the Tory party can be traced to the 1679 exclusion crisis, when a faction rallied behind the Duke of York, later King James II, in opposition to parliamentary attempts to block his succession. James II took control of the Royal African Company, which under his leadership transported at least 150 000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic – the highest total of any single organisation in the history of the slave trade.
Prof William Pettigrew, the lead historian behind the register, notes that “this platform of support for the Duke of York became the Tory party. Support for the duke’s slave‑trading project, the Royal African Company, provided a further rallying point for these early Tories, while early Whigs were opposed to it. Disagreements about the best way to expand the nation’s slave trade were present at the birth of our political parties.”
Among those early Tories was Sir Benjamin Bathurst, MP for New Romney, who served as an assistant and later leader of the Royal African Company between 1677 and 1700. During that period the company mounted 222 transatlantic voyages, moving tens of thousands of African people to the colonies.
The Whigs, although critical of the Royal African Company’s monopoly, were not opposed to slavery itself. Sir Robert Clayton, a Whig MP for London and managing director of the company, directed its operations and later donated funds to St Thomas’ Hospital, where a statue now commemorates him. Edward Colston, a Tory MP for Bristol from 1710 to 1713, was a dedicated shareholder in the Royal African Company; his statue was toppled by activists in 2020 after years of protest.
Expansion through the South Sea Company
When the South Sea Company was formed in 1711 under the direction of Robert Harley – then Chancellor of the Exchequer and a rising Tory leader – it quickly entered the slave‑trading business. In 1713 Queen Anne secured an asiento from Spain’s King Philip V, granting the company the right to supply 4 800 enslaved Africans each year to Spain’s American colonies. The asiento was transferred to the South Sea Company, which subcontracted the Royal African Company to fulfil the obligation.
Several MPs from both parties took seats on the South Sea Company’s board. Sir Richard Hoare, Tory MP for London and a former lord mayor, founded the private bank Hoares, which remains family‑run today. Other directors included Whig parliamentarians who saw the independent trader model as a way to bypass the royal monopoly and increase profits.
By the mid‑18th century, while the Whigs held power for extended periods, they actively encouraged the growth of a decentralised slave‑trade network centred first in Bristol and later in Liverpool. This shift helped Britain become the world’s foremost enslaving nation, even as moral opposition began to stir among Quakers, freed Africans and progressive parliamentarians.
The Protracted Fight Against Abolition
Organised resistance to the slave trade emerged in the 1780s, spearheaded by the Quakers and voices such as Olaudah Equiano, whose memoir shocked readers with its brutality. William Wilberforce, an independent MP, introduced his first motion to abolish the trade in 1791. It was defeated, and the following year the Tory Home Secretary Henry Dundas amended Wilberforce’s bill by inserting the word “gradually”. Prof David Richardson, author of a 2022 study on the abolition struggle, writes that Dundas “played a leading role in killing the abolition bill”, adding that other Tory ministers – notably the “deeply conservative, even reactionary” lord chancellor Edward Thurlow – were “powerful Tory opponents … to slave trade abolition”. Some Whig grandees also resisted change.
It took a Whig‑led “ministry of all the talents” coalition to finally pass the Slave Trade Act in 1807. During the sixteen years of delay since 1791, British traders trafficked an additional 648 000 African men, women and children into bondage.
When the campaign shifted from ending the trade to abolishing slavery itself in 1823, the Tory government resisted, claiming enslaved peoples were not ready for freedom. Foreign Secretary George Canning – later a Tory prime minister – insisted that emancipation could only follow a “progressive improvement in the character of the slave population”. In a notorious 1824 Commons debate, Canning declared, according to historian Michael Taylor, that he had delivered “arguably the most racist speech in the history of the British parliament”:
> “In dealing with the negro, sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child.”
Sir Robert Peel, who would later become