Two obstacles have prevented us from appreciating the significance of the slave trade in British history. The first arose from the abolition campaign, which finally overcame opposition in parliament in 1807. The abolitionists promoted the idea that opposition to the slave trade flowed naturally from British values: justice, freedom and Christian benevolence. The success of this strategy obscured the role those same British values had played in supporting the trafficking. Today, Britain’s leaders place abolition in the pantheon of great and definitive national moments.

The second obstacle has been the ingrained tendency of the British to offshore the causes and effects of African chattel slavery to the Americas. According to this view, slavery, and the racial thinking it engendered, was an American, not European concern. But Europeans transported the great majority of enslaved African people to the Americas and reaped huge advantages from doing so. These advantages reshaped European societies.

The Register of British Slave Traders, published today, is another significant step towards removing these obstacles and reinscribing the slave trade at the centre of the nation’s history.

Compiled by a team of historians across three UK universities over four years, the Register identifies some of the roughly 13,000 men and women, based in Britain, who financed the violent transportation of 3.2 million enslaved African men, women, and children for almost two and half centuries. It is the first to gather biographical information on all known investors in the trafficking.

These were pivotal centuries for Britain: establishing the British state and its borders, defining its national religion and constitution, enlarging its status in the world, building its empire, launching its core institutions, characterising its culture, forging its progressive values and underpinning unprecedented phases of economic growth.

Although slave traders were a tiny minority of the British population, the register shows them exerting an outsized influence on this golden age of British development. The trade in enslaved African people was a formative influence during perhaps........

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