Historians Uncover Hidden Financial Networks Behind Slavery
While the British government weighs a formal apology for its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the insurance industry is facing a renewed call to account for its past.
Six years ago, Lloyd’s of London issued a public apology, describing itself as “deeply sorry” for the “significant role” it held in the trafficking of enslaved people and the immense suffering that followed.
The organization subsequently installed a commemorative plaque at its London headquarters and committed £52m to various initiatives, including £12m for Inclusive Futures and £40m for investments in the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Despite these gestures, historians argue that the full scope of the industry’s complicity remains poorly understood. Collaborating with Johns Hopkins University, researchers Alexandre White and Pyar Seth launched the Underwriting Souls project, which investigated archives to reveal how merchant insurers covered ships transporting enslaved people—often treating the individuals themselves as “human cargo.” The resulting Underwriting Souls project laid bare how merchant insurers – some linked through predecessor businesses to major insurers operating today – underwrote ships carrying enslaved people across the Atlantic and, in some cases, the enslaved people themselves as “human cargo”.
White, now an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, emphasizes that the primary obstacle to a complete historical record is the fragmented nature of the evidence. Risk books, which served as the primary ledgers for individual underwriters, remain exceedingly rare and offer only a partial look at historical commercial activities. According to White, it is possible that vast amounts of evidence have either been lost to time or deliberately destroyed, though researchers are gaining a clearer perspective on the financial networks connecting London, Liverpool, and Bristol. According to “There could be tons,” White, When asked how much more evidence remains to be uncovered. “It’s possible we’ll find more. Central to the research is reconstructing the networks behind this business.
Liverpool has become a focal point for new research through the £1m Connector Project, an initiative supported by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and managed by National Museums Liverpool. As part of a pilot study titled Overwriting Underwriting, PhD student Lucy Moynihan has been analyzing the 1797 risk book belonging to John Gladstone, a prominent merchant and enslaver who served as the first chair of the Liverpool Underwriters’ Association. Her findings demonstrate that previous historical accounts significantly overlooked Gladstone’s active role as an underwriter in the trafficking of human beings.
Malik Al Nasir, an academic and manager of the Connector Project, points out that the tight-knit nature of 18th-century commercial circles means that vital evidence is often buried in private family collections rather than public archives. Al Nasir noted that his own research has required sourcing documents from disparate locations—and occasionally from private online listings—to uncover information not found in the standard Slave Voyages database. One such discovery included a letter detailing insurance for a ship called the Speedwell, suggesting that many other undocumented voyages likely exist. According to al Nasir’s own research, which has involved sourcing material from disparate repositories and even eBay because of gaps in established archives, led him to a letter referring to insurance for the sloop Speedwell, which he, Does not appear in the widely used Slave Voyages database.
Beyond the 18th century, experts are also investigating the illicit practices that continued after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. Hannah Farber, an associate professor at Columbia University, suggests that British insurers often found covert ways to continue covering foreign slave voyages. As regulatory enforcement intensified, financiers simply adopted more sophisticated methods to obscure their involvement, making the trade difficult to track.
Farber believes that further investigation is essential to map the connections between financial hubs like New York, London, and Liverpool and the economies of Brazil and Cuba, where slavery remained legal for decades after the British ban. Within these insurance records, White notes a grim reality: enslaved people were consistently quantified as financial assets. “African lives at this time could still provide value not just from their bodies, not just from their labour, but also in their death,” he explained.
The industry’s efforts to address this legacy have met with mixed reactions. Academic Kehinde Andrews previously dismissed Lloyd’s financial commitments as “completely inadequate,” while the Runnymede Trust acknowledged the importance of the apology but urged the institution to tackle contemporary systemic issues, such as its ethnic pay gap. Detailed analysis of these ongoing investigations and their implications for the modern insurance sector is featured in the latest episode of the InsuranceERM podcast. A deeper examination of the research and what it means for insurers can be found in the InsuranceERM podcast episode, Why insurance’s reckoning with the transatlantic slave trade is far from over, released on 10 November. Joshua Geer is news editor at InsuranceERM.
