Quiet complicity

A clear-eyed exposé of British royal involvement with the slave trade is long overdue, says HANNAH CUSWORTH

- HANNAH CUSWORTH

In 1961, the Rastafari Brethren of Jamaica wrote to Queen Elizabeth II, reminding her of "your ancestor Queen Elizabeth I, who gave John Hawkins a Royal Charter to develop his West India Trading Company through slavery". The Rastafari have long been wise to the British monarchy's deep entanglement with enslavement. Brooke N Newman's new book exposes just how consistent and multifaceted royal involvement in the system was over many centuries.

It opens by deftly connecting Elizabeth I's motto, Video et taceo ('I see and keep silent'), with Elizabeth II's ethos of 'never complain, never explain'. Newman shows that, far from being passive observers, the British monarchy was an active participant in the brutal system of slavery. The book explores the various ways in which the royal family has perpetrated slavery's harms - financing the trafficking of enslaved people, supporting groups that promoted racist ideas about black people and has failed to fully acknowledge and repair these harms today.