Bank of England owned 599 slaves in 1770s, new exhibition reveals

theguardian.com:

In the late 18th century Britain’s Caribbean island colony of Grenada was a place of boom and bust. A hurricane, a plague of ants, and Britain’s wars against France and American revolutionaries made for volatile trade in its main commodities – sugar, coffee and slaves.

Amid the turmoil, property changed hands regularly among Britain’s financial elite, but in the early 1770s the ownership of two plantations and 599 people passed to an unusual new owner: the Bank of England.

The Bank has already apologised for its role in the slave trade, but revelations of the institution’s direct ownership of the people have been uncovered in new research commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

The research has been presented in a new exhibition that opened this week at the Bank’s museum in its headquarters on London’s Threadneedle Street. The names of the 599 slaves, acquired by the Bank in the 1770s, take a central position in the free exhibition.

During the protests the Bank apologised for the 25 governors and directors who had owned slaves. It removed eight paintings and two busts of the slave owners from public display, although the exhibition includes some reproductions.

It has been part of a reassessment of historical links to slavery and imperialism by institutions ranging from many of the UK’s big high street banks – Barclays, HSBC, NatWest Group and Lloyds Banking Group – to the insurance market Lloyd’s of London and the brewer Greene King, as well as the National Trust and English Heritage, the custodians of British country houses that were in many cases built using colonial or slave wealth.

Despite the key role that slavery played in the British imperial economy, that reassessment has become a sensitive