Photo credit: The Guardian
While the UK government is considering a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, Lloyds of London said it was “deeply sorry” six years ago. The historic insurance marketplace said it was deeply sorry for the “significant role” it played in the trafficking of enslaved people and for the enormous suffering caused. It has since installed a commemorative plaque at its London headquarters.
The Guardian reports that through an independent collaboration woth Johns Hopkins University in the US, researchers Alexandre White and Pyar Seth examined Lloyd’s archives.
the resulting Underwriting Souls project laid bare how merchant insurers – some linked through predecessor bsinesses to major insureres operating today – underwrote ships carrying enslaved people across the Atlantic and, in some cases, the enslaved people themselves as “human cargo”. But historians interviewed for a podcast by specialiist news title InsuranceERM say thwefull extent of the insurance industry’s involvement is still far from understood.
White, no an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, said part of te problem was the fragments srviving evidence. Risk Books, the ledgers in which individual underwriters recorded their business, are particularly rare and provide only a snapshot of an uunderwrriter’sactivity.
“There could be tons,” White said when asked how much more evidence remains to be uncovered. “It’s possible we’ll find more. It’s possible much has been destroyed … or lost to time.”
White said researchers were nevertheless getting “a much clearer sense of the scale and importance of insurance to slavery”, with work in London, Liverpool and Bristol helping to piece together the financial networks that supported it.
One place where researchers are breaking new ground is Liverpool, through the Connector Project, a 1 million pounds initiative funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation – an independent charity that is sep arate from Lloyd’s of London but has historical links to enslavement – and facilitated by National Museums Liverpool. Its first pilot study, Overwiting Underwriting, is already piecing together fresh evidence about the role of insurers.
Lucy Moynihan, a PhD student and research associate on the project, has been examining the 1797 risk book of John Gladstone, the enslaver and merchant who later became the first chair of Liverpool Underwriters’ Association.
Moynihan said previous histories had overlooks Gladstone’s role as an underwriter in the trafficking of enslaved people. Her research has identidied votages in his risk book connected to enslavement, adding underwriting information missing from existing datasets.
Central to the research is reconstructing the networks behind this business. Malik Al Nasir, an academic, author and Connector Project manager, said Liverpool’s merchants, shipownes, bankers and underwriters were often connected through their families and commercial interests. Because the merchants acted as underwriters, evidence can also sit in private family and business collections. Moynihan said private archives had a responsibility to “do a review of what they have” and give the public access to their records.
Al Nasir’s own research, which has involved sourcing materials from disparate depositries and even eBay bacuse of gaps in established archives, led him to a letter referring to insurance for the sloop Speedwell, which ha sys does not appear in the widely used Slave Voyage database.
“If I can just find randomly from one letter one slave ship that’s not mentioned on the Slave Voyages database, then there must be manyy others as well,” he said.
Historians also believe more remains to be uncovered about what happened after Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. “British insurers are pretty openly still involved with the insurance of foreign slave voyages after 1807,” said Hannah Farber, an associate professor at Columbia University iin New York City.
